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June 21, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this third week of June:


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Family Tech: New e-virus carrier

There's a new kind of computer virus to watch out for, but SafeKids.com's Larry Magid suggests that everybody "stay calm" in his latest syndicated column. What's new about the "Perrun" virus is that it can infect digital photos - those ".jpg" files stored on the PC hard drives of people who use digital cameras and love emailing photos around to friends and family.

However, "before you delete all your digital photographs," Larry writes, "take note that this type of virus has not infected anyone's computer. The person who created the virus sent it to McAfee [the computer security company]. This is one of many examples of viruses that are, so far, confined to a lab - it is not 'in the wild' and it does not represent any immediate threat." Although this photo-virus news has gotten a lot of media attention this past week, it confirms what computer experts have known for a long time - that "it is theoretically possible to hide a virus in virtually any file type."

Which means that PC owners should have virus protection and be aware of virus hoaxes. Larry's article offers examples of anti-virus software and services and advice on what to do about hoaxes (emails warning about a virus and, for example, telling recipients to delete certain files).

As for anti-virus and firewall software, here's a very useful article from ZDNet on the difference between the two and how the most popular (and free) personal firewall, ZoneAlarm, works.

Do email us about the solutions that work best for you - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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A subscriber writes: Where are the girls in the games?

Subscriber Gen Katz in California, an expert in interactive games for girls and women, emailed us about her experience this year at "E3," the huge games tradeshow held in Los Angeles (its Web site claims 60,000 game industry people were in attendance this year). Gen reviews games in her two Web sites, Games4Girls.com and Games4Women.com. Below is an edited version of her email (her complete comment on specific games is available here):

"The annual computer game trade show - E3, held in LA last month - is a preview of games that will be out for the coming holiday season. This show is not a female-friendly environment, but I go anyway. I start by looking for female heroes, then female tag-a-longs and then, finally, just females in games. This year's games continued to push women and girls to accommodate the offerings of the game industry rather than the game industry catering to women. Preteen girls still do pretty well because games for their age group, with few exceptions, include boy and girl characters or genderless animals.

"The Learning Company is one of the few companies producing educational and fun games for kids, and they are one of the small number of companies still producing games for Macintosh computers. Their "Clue Finders" series for grades 3-6, with boy/girl teams of detectives, holds up well, and each game now comes with a bonus disk full of additional puzzles. The company has come out with an inventive new series, "Star Flyer," featuring Katie, a spunky girl. She's a dreamer, an inventor, and with her friends surmounts challenges to save the universe. The game will bring praises from mothers and daughters and will make up for the lack of new "Freddy Fish" and "Pajama Sam" games. The games fall into the "edutainment" category, but the Leaning Company has managed to make them as interesting as any puzzles I have seen. The age range is 5-8, but when the games are good, players tell me that they keep them around and play them for years.

"As for women in games, this year they are equal-opportunity assassins and secret agents, all of them dressed in black. What looks to be an exception is Syberia from Dreamcatcher. Moody and mysterious, it features lawyer Kate Walker, who has to find the elusive and maybe mad heir of an old robotic toy factory in order to negotiate its takeover. It was made in Canada and has a unique sensibility quite different from adventures made in the US. The Web site alone is enough to keep you entranced for hours.

"While there are other games that girls will enjoy playing - sports, racing and anything from Hogwarts - games that have role-model female characters are still not plentiful enough to prevent girls from being the shadow player. I want the industry to bring back Orley, and Smarty and Madeline. As for me personally, I want a game with Allison Janney as the main character. She's smart, lippy, elegant, and articulate - and she holds down a good job, as press secretary to the President (in "The West Wing").

"You can get a sense of some of the above games at their Web sites:

For more details from Gen on specific games, please see her complete email.

As for online games and hybrid console-online games (the Internet is, of course one, of the "platforms" - like a Game Boy or PC - in the cross-platform trend Gen mentions), DVC Intelligence reports that "114 million people worldwide are expected to be playing online games by the year 2006, and online game usage is expected to increase nearly six-fold in that period." Microsoft has invested heavily in console-Internet gaming, the report says, referring to Microsoft's "Xbox Live" service as "probably the biggest investment in online games yet." An example of a very successful online game you might find a gamer playing at your house is Mythic Entertainment's "Dark Age of Camelot", a fantasy role-playing game. (The UK's VNUNET covers the report in "Online gaming set for massive boom".)

We love to hear and publish other voices besides our own! If you have responses to Gen or comments on particular games played at your house or school, please email us!

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Web News Briefs

  1. Mom's-eye-view on library filtering

    A mother of twins in Virginia does not allow her children to use computers at public libraries, reports the Washington Post at the start of a full overview of what's going on with online kids in local libraries since the CIPA decision. The article looks at Virginia and DC-area parents' perspectives since a US federal court ruled against the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requiring libraries to filter or block Internet access on federally funded connected computers. Librarians' perspectives are offered, too. "In spite of the lack of filters locally, most libraries try to discourage patrons from looking at objectionable material and offending others. In many cases, Internet-accessible computers are in the center of libraries to create what librarians call a 'fish bowl effect'," the Post reports. The article points out a metaphor used by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, who chaired a recent National Research Council study, "Youth, Pornography, and the Internet" (see our 5/3 coverage). He likens filtering to putting fences around swimming pools. He said that fences are certainly helpful, but the best protection is teaching children how to swim.

    As for libraries beyond the Washington, D.C., area: Here's an excellent roundup of what many US libraries are doing about online porn in the library - "The Librarian's Web Dilemma" at the New York Times this week.

  2. Translation service for old fogies (SMS/English)

    "Armed with their favoured weapon of linguistic destruction - the mobile phone - ["the nation's youth"] have reduced our beloved tongue to a series of abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons meaningless to anyone over 25. Until now." Thus, in its singular style, UK-based TheRegister.com this week pointed out a translation service that parents of cell/mobile phone users may find useful: transL8it.com (or "TranslateIt.com"), which converts English to SMS lingo and vice versa. SMS is short for "Short Message System," or text on cell/mobile phones. One of the more innocuous examples The Register provides is: "wud U lIk 2 accompany me 2 d shopping centre 4 a candlelit dinr? = Would you like to accompany me to the shopping centre for a candlelit dinner?"

  3. Iranian women's Weblogs

    There's been a "big jump" in the number of Persian Weblogs, reports the BBC, many of them are run by women - offering insights into their lives and culture. "Weblogs, or blogs, are online journals where cyber-diarists let the world in on the latest twists and turns of their love, work, and internal lives," the BBC explains, adding that "the rise of the blog in Iran has been made possible by the huge growth of the Internet" there - 400,000 connected Iranians in 2001, according to Iranian government figures, projected to grow to 15 million over the next three or four years. The article mentions an Iranian in Canada who last year published on the Web a simple guide in Persian for setting up Weblogs. Since then, some 1,200 Persian-language blogs have sprung up. Here's the Financial Times on the blog's big picture: " 'Blogs' has moved into the big time," says the headline. The article refers more to news blogs than personal-journal blogs.

  4. Profile of a filtering critic

    Bennett Haselton is probably filtering's No. 1 critic - he's definitely the most famous one. According to the Associated Press (via USAToday), one of the 23-year-old Net activist/code writer's critics - at a filtering software company - says Haselton undermines parents' rights. It's not quite that simple, though. By publishing ways to work around or disable filtering software in his Web site (Peacefire.org), for one thing, Haselton actually helps software companies make their products better - the way hackers-cum-computer security consultants help companies find vulnerabilities in their networks. He also helps frame the filtering debate - an important one - by publicizing the technology's flaws. "But many who share Haselton's opposition to filtering consider his position extreme," reports the AP, citing "Haselton's line of thinking" that parents don't have the right to monitor their children's online activities. If that correctly characterizes his view, we wonder if it would change at all, were he to become a parent.

  5. CliffsNotes, et al, online

    Whether they're supplements or substitutes for procrastinating book-club members or bleary-eyed students and disapproving professors, those black 'n' yellow little Cliffs Notes booklets have been around since 1958, according to the New York Times. The Times takes a look at the Web versions at CliffsNotes.com and knock-off SparkNotes.com, which make these time-honored "cheat sheets" accessible 24x7. A third site, CheatBooks.com, sells (with Amazon.com's help) "literary guides from six brand names, including Bloom's Reviews, written under the direction of Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and a guru of Great Books, and new, updated CliffsNotes, which have been redesigned for a microwave age, with less dense type and catchy icons to alert readers to themes, character insights and literary devices," the Times reports. "Barnes & Noble recently bought SparkNotes, which started online and plans to publish paperback versions of the hottest titles from the Web site ... in July."

  6. Email hoax update

    Have you, like us, received emails from mysterious persons representing former Nigerian dignitaries who need help in funneling millions of dollars (of which you purportedly get a cut) through (your) foreign bank account? Well, it's one of the more well-known and, for its perpetrators, lucrative email hoaxes. "The US Secret Service estimates that the fraud costs victims hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide each year," Wired News reports, and it's been circulating since the mid-1980s. It has many variations, a number of which are cited in the Wired article.

  7. Secure IM-ing

    It has arrived, but - because it costs - it's more for the corporate market. We're telling you about secure IM-ing because it's a milestone in the development of instant-messaging - what we think of as an almost-killer app in online communications. According to Wired News, a software product called IMPasse "encrypts conversations between chatters, making the chat unintelligible to those who might be listening in.... [It] sits on a machine alongside AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger," the three biggest instant-messaging services. "Both parties to a chat need the software; IMPasse charges $20 for two licenses."

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News

 


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