- Another step for dot-kids
The idea of a safe Web playground for children
got unanimous approval by a "powerful House panel" this week, the Washington
Post reports. With the US House Energy and Commerce Committee's unanimous
vote for the "Dot-Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002," the
legislation now goes to the full House of Representatives for vote. The
act would establish a kids' area under the US's "sovereign '.us' Internet
domain." Quick action on the measure is expected because of the strong
backing it received this week, the Post reports, adding this description
of the law's implications: Going by the bill's latest wording, "no Web
site with a kids.us address would be permitted to post hyperlinks to locations
outside of the kids.us domain. The legislation also now prohibits chat
and instant messaging features, except in cases where a site operator
can guarantee the features adhere to kid-friendly standards developed
for the domain."
- 'Generation IM'
For a large and rapidly growing number of teenagers,
giving out one's phone number is *so* old-school. Now a boy will ask a
girl for her "SN" (screen name) so he can IM (chat via instant-messaging)
with her after school, Yahoo
Internet Life points out. The report cites estimates of 150 million
IM users worldwide, "about one-third of all people who use the Net in
any capacity," and the two biggest user groups are teens and business
users. The article gives examples of how IM is changing the way people
interact in both social and business arenas, the way email did before
it. One memorable anecdote is that of a first-generation Asian-American
girl who, at 18, did not own a computer and was not allowed to receive
phone calls after 7 pm. But she persuaded her "traditionally minded" parents
to buy her a computer "for schoolwork." Soon she was IM-ing from arrival
home from school till 2:30 am. Check out the article to see what happened
when this teenager's parents caught on. The article is the most thorough
we've seen on the instant-messaging phenomenon (our thanks to Corante.com
for pointing it out).
- 'Legal child porn'?
Web sites featuring "preteen models" operating
in "the gray area between innocent imagery and child pornography" have
caught the attention of the US Justice Department and "prompted a congressman
to declare war on the 'reckless endangerment' of such kids by their parents
and Web site operators," MSNBC
reports. Representative Mark Foley (R) of Florida refers to sites
showing pictures of girls as young as six wearing revealing clothes and
striking sexually suggestive poses but which don't display nudity or overt
sexual material. The article includes comments by parents who are encouraging
or allowing their children to create or to "star" in these "fan sites"
that may be targeting audiences other than kids. Our thanks to the National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing
this story out.
- Wire-free classrooms
Beyond the lack of spaghetti-style jumbles of
computer wires and cables, eSchool
News offers a view of what wireless looks like in Maine classrooms
and schools. For example, look at the difference in cost alone between
wired and wireless in one school: "In Guilford, which received laptop
computers two years ago,... it would have taken 25 ethernet jacks in each
of the 23 classrooms to achieve the same [effect] as wireless technology.
That could have cost upward of $50,000, if electricians did the work.
With 239 middle schools statewide, that could have added $10 million or
so to the overall laptop price tag." Wireless does involve the cost of
wireless connection cards and hubs (not given in the Guilford case), but
at least electricians' labor costs aren't an issue. And, eSchool News
reports, the costs of wireless are coming down.
- Warning: Pop-up downloads
Not a pleasant prospect: If you thought pop-up
ads annoying, get ready for worse. Here's how pop-up downloads work, according
to CNET: "When
visiting a site a person may receive a pop-up box that appears as a security
warning with the message: 'Do you accept this download?' If the consumer
clicks 'Yes,' an application is automatically installed" on her PC's hard
drive. The creators of these ads are banking on the fact that most people
automatically click on "Yes" when they get computer prompts. Parents and
kids might want to be on the alert because, CNET reports, "Some Net users
have complained of receiving downloads containing a virus that automatically
redirects them to adult-related sites. Such downloads also have been known
to install new dial-up programs replacing the existing accounts. The Federal
Trade Commission recently brought a case against people who were using
such tactics to install a dial-up account for expensive 1-900 numbers."
- E-citizenship
The latest study by the Pew
Internet & American Life Project looked at how many and how people
use government agencies' Web sites and services. Use is certainly on the
rise. The survey found that "fully 68 million American adults have used
government agency Web sites," up from the 40 million figure of Pew's March
2000 survey on this subject. These cyber-citizens use the Web to "find
information to further their civic, professional, and personal lives,"
Pew says, adding: "Some also use government Web sites to apply for benefits,
engage public officials, and complete transactions such as filing taxes."
Pew found that personal needs are the focus, typically, but "there is
abundant evidence that a new "e-citizenship" is taking hold." Here are
some examples Pew offers:
- 42 million Americans have used government Web
sites to research public policy issues.
- 23 million have used the Net to send comments
to public officials about policy choices.
- 14 million have used government Web sites to
gather information to help them decide how to cast their votes.
- 13 million have participated in online lobbying
campaigns.
Here's CyberAtlas's
coverage of the Pew report.
- Nigeria's new tech youth ambassador
Gbenga Sesan, a Web designer and Nigeria's first
technology youth ambassador, doesn't have a computer, the BBC
reports. But he's not alone in this country of few fixed phone lines
and very low personal computer ownership, and he's undaunted by such conditions,
the BBC reports. Mr. Sesan was asked to take on the two-year assignment
after winning a contest designed "to identify young Nigerians who, in
spite of the country's poor infrastructure, possess the potential to develop
computer skills." He hopes to train 4,000 young Nigerians in info tech
by 2003, the BBC adds.
- Is the Net color-blind?
Yes and no, suggests the writer of "Cyberspace
and Race" at MIT's
Technology Review. Yes, given the superficial anonymity of Net communications,
but no to many ethnic-minority members of online forums, reportedly. "Often,
they'd found that people simply assumed all participants in an online
discussion were white unless they identified themselves otherwise," says
the writer. "One Asian American talked of having a white online acquaintance
email him a racist joke, which he would never have sent if he had known
the recipient's race."
- Senior surfers
They're the fastest-growing group of Internet
users in the United Kingdom, the BBC
reports. The number of UK Netizens aged 55+ has increased by nearly
90% just in the past year, representing 13% of the total UK online population.
"Only tech-savvy Sweden and Denmark have more with 17.4% and 16.3% respectively,"
the BBC adds. Banking and genealogy are cited as among senior surfers'
favorite online activities.
- Deaf students online in Kazakh
The heart of this very international story (at
the BBC concerning a US government program in Kazakh) is one of the first
computer labs set up for deaf students in the former Soviet Union. Teachers
at the school in question "are impressed with how the Internet has increased
the children's vocabulary, made them more curious about the world, and
given them career aspirations far and above what they had before," the
BBC
reports. These were the results, apparently, of those teachers having
taken the initiative to get computers donated to the school, winning a
grant, and then creating a Web site that defined in sign language tech-
and Net-related terms that deaf students needed to understand in order
to gain this new sort of literacy - terms such as "browser," "host," and
"Internet." "The teachers worked with deaf scholars to create this language
and make it available on their Web site," the BBC adds.
- Is online privacy improving?
On the one hand we hear it is. Witness a just-released
survey from the Progress and Freedom Foundation finding that "among the
most popular 100 domains in the US, the proportion collecting personal
information fell from 96% in May 2000 to 84% in December 2001," reports
Nua
Internet Surveys. The survey also reported that "privacy notices [were]
'more prevalent, more prominent and more complete' on Web sites than in
May 2000." (Here's the Washington
Post's article on the survey.)
On the other hand, the New
York Times reports that "pressed for profits, Internet companies are
increasingly selling access to their users' postal mail addresses and
telephone numbers, in addition to flooding their email boxes with junk
mail." The Times cites Yahoo!'s recent change in its privacy policy as
a key example. Yahoo! says it hasn't loosened its privacy policy, only
made it more explicit.
- Less searching for sex
Search engine users are searching less for sex-related
content and more for jobs and business- and travel-related material. "In
May 1997, 16.8% of searches on the Excite search engine were for sex-related
or pornographic Web sites. By May 2001, that percentage had dropped almost
in half to 8.5%. During the same period, searches related to commerce,
travel, employment, and the economy rose from 13.3% in1997 to 24.7% in
2001," reports CNN.
CNN was citing a report in IEEE Computer, a journal of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Expert sources for the article said
part of the explanation is that Web demographics increasingly reflect
the mainstream population. But sex-related searching is still high, they
add, and "people looking for pornography today are more likely to go to
newsgroups than to a search engine," CNN reports.
- Open source, sorta
Given what happened to 15-year-old software writer
Finlay Dobbie in the UK, Apple's open-source software development project
is open only to people 18 and older. Dobbie was banned from contributing
to the development of the Mac OS X when Apple found out he was 15. The
story in VNUNET indicates
it's all just a legal issue, but Dobbie's experience just may help define
exactly what "open source" means. For example, the young programmer asks,
where's the openness if non-disclosure agreements have to be signed?
