toolbar
Search this site!
 


November 1, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Can it be November already?! Here's our lineup for this last week of October:


~~~~~~~~~~Support the Newsletter!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Help support Net Family News and take a free, 7-day trial of eLibrary -
100s of newspapers, magazines, reference books, maps, transcripts...
a real reference library online, completely child-safe. Try a search now:

eLibrary Logo

Or make a tax-deductible donation to our free public service, via...
Network for Good's online fundraising system for nonprofit organizations
or NetFamilyNews.org's page at Amazon.com's Honor System.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Family Tech: New online-safety solutions!

It's been an eyebrow-raising couple of weeks for those of us who follow children's online safety. For the first time since the dot-com meltdown some 18 months ago, new or updated tech products and services are being announced - all at once, as if timed to the US President's focus on Net safety last week (see our 10/25 issue). Though tech tools can never replace loving, engaged parenting, new ones certainly signal that increasing amounts of creative thinking (and funding) are being applied to kids' constructive use of the Net, which is good certainly news. The latest developments include:

[We alert you to these with the proviso that - though we wish it were possible - this small nonprofit organization does not have the resources to test new software and services for you. But you can help fellow readers by emailing us what you think of a product or service so we can make your comments available to other parents - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.]

The children's browser/network/safe e-playground solutions all have similar, tried 'n' true features - with, not surprisingly, increasing emphasis on communications, especially IM. Instant-messaging has become "the killer app" of online kids, and products new and old are all indicating this.

  1. The Children's Internet. It makes sense that the company that created this subscription-based safe e-playground (or walled garden, as they say in the UK) has decided to upgrade, becoming "the only children's Internet service provider." They launch as an ISP next week, at $12.95/month for complete dialup access, creative director Soraiya Hamedani told us this week. The service turns home access into "a completely protected," real-time child's-eye-view of the Internet - until a parent clicks on the little padlock, types in a password, and gains unrestricted Internet access (at that $13/month price). Features include a "white list" of thousands of Web sites approved for children; an "E-budds" buddy list not restricted to the service's own users (but only parents can create the list of allowable addresses); a child's own customizable calendar/scheduler; monitored chat; homework help; child-safe searching; electronic books read to children; and other features we described last year, when the service was basically a kids' browser.

  2. KidsWorld. It's not the first time a closed children's network has been tried (see our 3/2/01 issue to read about the now-defunct eKIDS Internet). KidsWorld is a private network that works with your regular Internet service, locking all aspects of the computer and Net away from kids "until the parent actually signs the child out and unlocks it," KidsWorld president Judy Lastrina told us this week. The program takes up the entire computer screen, giving kids something more like a CD-ROM experience than an online one. "We protect the kids but the kids don't actually know they're being protected," Judy said. [Not being up front with one's kids is not an approach we'd normally suggest, but we'd like to hear from you about that - would this work for your family?] There are about 1,500 child-appropriate Web sites on the KidsWorld network, all approved by staff as well as the company's Advisory Board, with about 200 more being added each week, Judy said. The service is ambitious, with seven channels, among them Entertainment (games, movie reviews, music downloads), Learning (with homework help), Creative, and Community. Children can chat, email, and instant-message only with other kids on the service.

    Many of you already know that even a completely closed network can't be a "total" (24/7) online-safety solution, if such were possible, because kids can log on in places outside the home (school, friends' houses, libraries) that have less-restricted Net access.

  3. MomsandDads.com. This is kids'-Web-browser technology that used to go by the name of Crayon Crawler. Features include parent-controlled communications (IM coming), a personal-info filter (so kids can't give it out), and a safe-Web-sites database, or white list, to/from which parents can add/delete. Features not found elsewhere include a cartoon character who reads email to a child (for pre-readers) and provides (parent-configured) "Encouraging Words" and "Chore Reminders." The $69.95/year service works with your own Internet service and has multiplying branding relationships (in a revenue-sharing, your-brand- our-technology arrangement) with the likes of Garfield the cat, Noah (for the Christian community), and football star Trevor Pryce. For more details, see our item on Crayon Crawler, 3/2/01).

  4. Watch Right. After receiving an email from Bob DeMarco, CEO of IP Group, about his company's new monitoring product for AOL subscribers, we asked him about something we'd suspected: "Do you find that parents use monitoring more for finite periods of time than 'permanently' - e.g., when they sense a child is at risk in his/her online activities in some way?" He said, yes, the parents his company talks to tend to be "worried" when they download Watch Right - "they already had a problem," he wrote. Watch Right monitors and records all URLs a child goes to and everything a child says in instant-messaging and email (sent and received), as well as in chat and on discussion boards. Its controls are behind a password, and the parent can choose which screen names are to be monitored (not necessarily everyone using that PC). What do parents look for in all this recorded text? Some of Bob's examples were sexually explicit or violent-sounding screen names of people that might be communicating with a child or date, time, and name of a chat room used. "Specifically, they can look for private rooms which usually have a 'kinky' name. Private rooms can mean trouble. They can click on the name of the chat room and see a copy of the entire chat. That includes everything typed by every person in the chat room." He emphasizes date, time, and name of chat rooms because those are the kinds of specifics police look for when they're called about a child at risk.

    Monitoring appears to be the way more and more parents are going. Josh Finer, CEO of Software4Parents.com (which sells both filtering and monitoring products) told us this week that "the market is clearly starting to show a lot more acceptance for monitoring products - I used to sell way more filtering, now it is the other way around."

    There are other products that monitor AOL as well as other IM and email applications, such as IamBigBrother and Spector PRO, which are among the products Software4Parents sells. For file-sharing services like Kazaa (music, video, images, etc.), "Cyber Sentinel has done the best job," Josh said. "It works with almost any Internet-enabled application." Software4Parents says it tests and reviews the products it sells.

  5. Net Nanny 5.0. A significant upgrade, the latest version adds IM protection, among 25 other new features. It's blanket protection, though - not all parents will want to eliminate instant-messaging altogether (blocking rather than monitoring IM activity). According to Instant Messaging Planet, Version 5.0 can block AOL's, MSN's, and Yahoo's IM services, as well as file-sharing client software such as Kazaa, online games, and pop-up ads. Filtering is better too now, IM Planet says, employing both a blocked-URLs list (parents can add or delete Web addresses) and keyword filtering (which blocks pages containing inappropriate words).

  6. Don't forget 6-month-old Kidfu. As we wrote last April , this is not a tech tool. Parents can only encourage kids to go there, but there are reasons why kids will want to. Kidfu is like a safe haven of totally kid-driven interaction out there in cyberspace; when kids hang out there, they can relax and have fun because they know the place is safe. Here's a piece about Kidfu in the New York Times this week.

Please note: We do not promote filtering or monitoring for every family, per se. By its nature, technology is flawed, and what does work for some families doesn't for all. Sometimes technology is a useful addition to family online-safety rules and agreements, but nothing can replace hands-on parenting. If you try a product - the above or any online-safety software - please let us know what you think so we can make your comments available for the benefit of other parents.

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. Freenet file-sharing good and bad

    Its latest release is good news for free-speech advocates worldwide, but possibly also for distributors of child pornography. We are pro- free-speech but also believe parents need to know about points of intersection - where free-speech-protecting laws, products, and services can have an impact on children's well-being online. Freenet, like its more popular peer-to-peer counterparts Kazaa and Gnutella, "allows people to exchange files over the Internet through a shared network. But unlike other networks, Freenet's creators say they designed the application with free speech, not free entertainment, in mind," Wired News reports. Freenet allows for totally anonymous publication, with data encryption and (like Kazaa) "a decentralized network designed to prevent shutdown by anyone - unfriendly governments, ISPs, and even the network creators themselves." Freenet's founder, 25-year-old Ian Clarke says the software is downloaded roughly 2,000-3,000 times a day. Wired adds that last week Kazaa averaged 442,460 downloads a day on CNET's Download.com alone. Here's what parents will want to know: "Freenet's distributed design means that a network participant could unknowingly store fragments of illegal or offensive content on their computer, in encrypted form."

  2. Net dating's hot

    "Today one in five singles look for love on the Web," reports Wired magazine. So why are online personals so popular? Wired ventures the guess that, though we all used to think love was found spontaneously, society is getting less tolerant of chance in this part of life: "Serendipity is the hallmark of inefficient markets, and the marketplace of love, like it or not, is becoming more efficient," with the arrival of the online dating service. After all, Wired continues, "Monster and HotJobs rationalized the labor markets; eBay streamlined the collector markets." Why wouldn't online personals - "just now generating the kind of growth metrics witnessed at the height of the dotcom frenzy" - rationalize "dating and mating?" goes the logic.

    For example, did you know about eCrush.com, which claims to have matched more than 600,000 people with their crushes since launch on Valentine's Day 1999? The service, which acts as a go-between to connect users with their "crushes," includes eSPIN-the-Bottle: "a quick and easy way to meet new people and find out if they want to meet you too - without the risk of rejection." (Anyone can click to the personal profile of the day's "featured spinner" from the eSPIN home page.

  3. Japan's e-dating numbers

    In Japan, more than one-third of males and almost a third of females aged 15-29 say they've accessed Internet dating sites, according to a recent Cabinet Office survey. The study also found that one-fifth of Japanese males in that age bracket had accessed child pornography, the Japan Times reports. "The survey constituted an effort to garner public opinion on issues such as child prostitution and child pornography for future policymaking purposes," according to the Times, adding: "The move came amid a surge in crimes related to Internet dating sites, as well as a global drive by the United Nations and other organizations to protect children's rights."

  4. COPA arguments heard again

    Arguments for and against the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) were again heard at a US federal court in Philadelphia this week, and a decision could be handed down anytime, CNET reports. The 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals had blocked enforcement of COPA shortly after it was passed in late 1998. The decision was appealed and reviewed by the US Supreme Court last spring, but the high court sent it back to Philadelphia saying the 3rd Circuit Court had not considered carefully enough all the reasons why COPA may be unconstitutional (see "COPA on hold - again" in our 5/17 issue). COPA was Congress's second attempt at protecting children from online pornography, after the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act in 1997.

  5. Girl Guides' Net safety guidance

    This week the Girl Guides and the Media Awareness Network launched You Go Girl In Technology, "a new national Internet literacy project aimed at helping Canadian girls learn to be safe, wise, and responsible Internet users," reports the Toronto Globe and Mail. Canada's nearly 140,000 Girl Guides will earn a You Go Girl in Technology crest, or badge on completion of the Net safety project. The Media Awareness Network's latest study found that 99% of young Canadians have been online, 70% have their own email account, and 56% say they regularly visit chat rooms and use instant messaging, according to the Globe and Mail.

  6. Organizing info overload

    There's a new software company called Groxis that's built on the premise, basically, that Google isn't good enough. The company, founded by Paul Hawken (of Smith & Hawken fame), has created a software program called Grokker, reports the New York Times. Hawken says computers run on numbers, but the people who use them take in information visually. So Grokker "builds a visual map of the general categories into which documents fall by using what computer software designers call metadata, which describes each Web page or document." The story gives insights into where search engines are going. The software is already being used at the Stanford University library and has drawn the attention of a Chicago carpeting company. "In March," the Times reports, "the company plans to begin a division, Interface Flor, offering a Grokker-based catalog that will permit Web customers to view, organize, and select from 50,000 samples."

    And along similar lines, here's another New York Times piece about a renowned computer scientist (Brian Kernighan, who actually gave Unix its name back in 1970) who demystifies computers for liberal arts students. "Computing, they figure, is a good thing to know more about and to understand in a deeper way - while satisfying that pesky requirement that all Princeton students must take a course in "quantitative reasoning."

  7. AIMers & ICQers to 'talk' to each other?

    This week AOL Time Warner started an experiment to see if subscribers of its two instant-messaging services - AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ - should be able to "talk" to each other. So far, AOL has treated the two as separate services. AIM claims to have 180 million registered accounts and ICQ 135 million, mostly outside the US, the Washington Post reports. "AOL Time Warner is conducting a limited test to gauge demand for connecting the two and to refine the technology," the Post adds. Many IM users (teenagers too, certainly) have multiple accounts because they can't send messages among the various services, whether between AOL's two or to and from Yahoo's, MSN's, etc. Here's CNET's coverage.

  8. PS2 the winner

    It may not be news to the gamers at your home or school, but Sony's Playstation 2 has won the console-game wars. The BBC cites the findings of a market research firm that Nintendo's GameCube and Microsoft's XBox trail far behind Sony's numbers, which will amount to 120 million PS2s in homes worldwide by 2006. More than 40 million PS2 consoles have sold since they became available in Japan in early 2000. All three companies' next generation of consoles, strongly featuring online gaming, are expected to hit store shelves in 2005.

  9. PowerUp shuts down

    A nonprofit organization designed to help bridge the digital divide closed its doors this week, saying the community tech centers it was meant to support will continue their work. According to the Washington Post, partner organizations such as Boys and Girls Clubs of America and the YMCA said they were prepared, having always known PowerUp's support was intended to be temporary. PowerUp was funded by the Case Foundation, the AOL Time Warner Foundation, Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co,. and the Waitt Family Foundation.

* * * *

Share with a Friend!! If you find the newsletter useful, won't you tell your friends and colleagues? We would much appreciate your referral. To subscribe, they can just click here.

We are always happy to hear from potential sponsors and distribution partners as well. If you'd like to make a tax-deductible contribution or become a sponsor, please email us or send a check payable to:

Net Family News, Inc.
P.O. Box 1283
Madison, CT 06443

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

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News

 


HOME | newsletter | subscribe | links | supporters | about | feedback


Copyright 2002 Net Family News, Inc. | Our Privacy Policy | Kindly supported by the UK Domain Name Registration Centre.