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May 2, 2003

Dear Subscribers:

Lots of news this week - plus our series. So jumping right in, here's the lineup for this last of April, slightly May week:


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And the winners are___! (2003 Cable & Wireless Childnet Awards)

Who could tell you what Childnet Awards week was like better than the winners themselves?! Here are insights from just two of the 12 winners representing sites built in Sierra Leone, Egypt, Canada, Italy, Australia, the UK and the US:

  1. Heather Lawver (US), first prize in the Individual category and winner of the BBC Newsround Viewers Award:

    "On the first day of the Cable & Wireless Childnet Awards, in the midst of our first official activity, I have ferreted myself away in a small corner of our common room. Far from being a recluse, I am observing a rare group of people who have gathered together from all over the world, joined in a common pursuit. Each of these people have been hand-picked for their efforts and flown to London in celebration of "The Dot Hope Effect." All of these people, from Egypt, Sierra Leone, The United States, Great Britain, Italy, Australia and other countries have in some way dedicated their lives to charity. Through cables, phone lines, and computers, this group of people has changed the lives of others for the better." For more on this remarkable young Webmaster and activist, see our profile of Heather last February.

  2. Andrew Greene (Sierra Leone), second prize in the New to the Net category:

    "I reckon that our world has so hugely changed due to the power of the Internet. Changed for the better indeed! As young people there is no escaping this avalanche of new ideas that the Internet has for us. We must be part of the educational revolution.... In spite of the glaring constraints in using the Internet in a country like Sierra Leone, the children and youth have worked miracles during the short time they have access to the Internet."

    Andrew is a co-founder of ChildSoldiers.org - "a place where the youth of Sierra Leone could bear witness to the issue of the Child Soldier as they saw it impacting their lives and that of their families, communities, and country." Andrew (meet him here), Wilfred Mohamed Kuteh, a war-affected child and peace advocate, and Marian Fonnie, a community health nurse who volunteers her nursing and counseling skills, all flew from Freetown, Sierra Leone, for the awards. ChildSoldiers.org started out as a site for children in Sierra Leone but has since heard from people in Uganda, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the US (about children involved in gang violence), Andrew told Larry Magid in an audio interview last week. During Sierra Leone's 10-year-long conflict, "at least 5,000 children, some as young as 10, were forced to take up arms. The UN estimates there are more than 300,000 children in government armies, rebel forces, and guerrilla groups in more than 30 countries," according to a BBC report on the Childnet Awards.

All the other remarkable winners - including those in the Schools and Nonprofits categories - can be found on this page at Childnet, and some are described in a report by SafeKids.com's Larry Magid (one of the judges for the awards) at CBS News. Additional BBC coverage can be found here.

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Conversations with teens about tech, Part 2: Music & file-sharing

At least for our teen experts, file-sharing has turned a corner. Or maybe they have. All three like music a lot but none of them uses Kazaa, Morpheus, or any other peer-to-peer (P2P) service to share music files across the Net. Will (a musician himself) and Steve (most of whose non-school-related Net communications focus on music) both used to use one of the file-sharing services but neither still does. Liz doesn't even have sound on her computer (no great loss to her, since communications is her main focus of computer-based recreation).

This was a revelation to us - three very tech-literate teens with no interest in file-sharing. Because the figures we see in the media are staggering. Kazaa alone (the most popular such service) claims more than 4 million people are using its service at any given moment and that its software has been downloaded 218 million times. And Kazaa is one of more than 50 such services (see a list of them at AfterNapster.com). The recording industry says that 41% of all music downloads (using this software) are done by kids 12-18 (figures cited by the Washington Post).

[All of this is important for parents to know because of some risks associated with file-sharing: the well-known legal/ethical issue of music piracy, still very much in the courts (see News Briefs below for a surprising victory for peer-to-peer services this week), as well as the presence of porn, viruses, and spyware on the file-sharing networks. porn photos and videos are widely passed around on these networks, and a recent study we covered found more porn than music on one of the popular ones: Gnutella. Everyone knows what viruses are - just not that they can be downloaded via file-sharing as well as email. Spyware is a bit like viruses - software that's installed on a computer without the user's knowledge, but instead of doing damage to the system, it gathers information about the user for the people who control the spyware.]

But getting back to avid music fans Will and Steve and why they take a "been there, done that" position on file-sharing.

Will: "I used to be really into Napster and services like it, then I got paranoid about spyware, and I also realized it really slowed down our home network." Referring to the piracy/copyright theft issue, acknowledging that he and his parents had talked about it, he told us, "I feel better about myself too [not using file-sharing services] - even though most of my friends are downloading movies and stuff like that."

Steve: "I've used Limewire, but not anymore." We asked why, and he said these services "have lots of adware and spyware, and [they] use up all your resources - like my [computer] memory. Everything goes slower." That's a serious drawback when you use a computer a lot! Even more interesting, though, is what technologies they do use for their music interests. Last week we mentioned how Steve has gone beyond instant- messaging to communicate with about 20 long-distance friends online. They use an older, pre-Web technology called Internet relay chat for music file-sharing as well as chat (their private channel is called "#Sellouts"). "A few of them are people I've been talking to for the past three years," Steve said, "but we've all been talking to each other for the past year since the channel was made. It's mostly a music-based channel.... We don't need Kazaa because we have our own mini music service. We just grab music off our own server with FTP [file- transfer-protocol software]. One of my friends [in the group] has a music server at his house." It's the ultimate in music-sharing security, really, because all the participants know and trust one another - they not only know what they're downloading, they know they'll like the music or at least find it interesting.

Will is a musician himself. He writes music and plays trumpet, guitar, and bass. "I use Sonar Excel, which allows me to combine synthesized music with the audio I create. He'll write, then record himself playing trumpet and bass tracks. Then he creates drum and keyboard tracks on a synthesizer, records those, and mixes and edits all the tracks in Sonar Excel. "I can go in there and compose an entire song by myself." The other, equally powerful element in Net-enhanced music composition, Will points out, is not just audience feedback but audience participation: "Then I'll go into IM and send it to all my friends, and if they have a suggestion, I'll change [the song] right there. While they're listening, I can be editing it."

Will also goes online - though not in file-sharing sites - for musical ideas. "Most of the music I download is kind of avant garde - things you wouldn't find on CDs - most of it I find at MP3.com. I'll search around there and usually find something. It's a great way to find new music, all categorized and everything." (We later checked out MP3.com; it claims to be "the largest musician community on the Internet," giving exposure to more than 250,000 emerging and indie artists.)

To us, Will and Steve's experiences with music on the Net illustrate several things, and we were delighted with the insights they gave us: that kids and teens definitely have work-arounds for file-sharing's problems; that their solutions represent helpful advice to both peers and parents; and that the interactivity of the Net brings a new dimension to both listening and composing.

Next week: Teens' online lifestyles

For further reading:

"For kids, media convergence just seems natural" - just ask 3-year-old Madison (the reporter's daughter) and just about any teenager. It's in the San Jose Mercury News.

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. Spam's hot

    Spam was all over this week's Internet news - not only because it now makes up half of all email traffic. On the federal level, the US Federal Trade Commission held its first public conference on spam, or junk email, to introduce some legislation designed to deal with it. CNET ran an excellent overview of the conference, as well as on anti-spam action to date (here's the New York Times's report from the conference floor, highlighting the rare display there of spammers' tricks and tools). The FTC's particular interest is in fraudulent spam - and "about two-thirds of all e-mail spam flooding Americans' inboxes appears to contain false claims," the Washington Post reports. Wired News ran a piece about criticism that federal legislative efforts are drawing, and the Washington Post reports about complaints from some states that federal legislation would undermine their own anti-spam laws. A New York Times piece about the Virginia law helpfully provides a chart showing what other states have done about spam (see the box headed "Multimedia" on the right-hand side of the page).

    At the state level, Virginia now has a tough new law that makes spam a felony and "enables prosecutors to seize the profits, computers, and other assets of high-volume offenders," according to another Washington Post report. Virginia's significant because "half the world's Internet traffic passes through the Washington suburbs and other parts of Virginia," the Post adds, and the state is also home to America Online and UUNet.

    Earlier in the week, three giant Internet services providers - America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo - announced they were working together to combat spam, the New York Times reports. In a separate report from CNET, AOL boasted it repelled more than 2 billion spam emails in a single day this week. Meanwhile, another group of ISPs and marketers announced they're trying to find a way to differentiate between spammers and bona fide bulk emailers [like us and a lot of online newspapers, who have lists for which subscribers themselves sign up]," the Washington Post reports.

    In other spam news, a porn operator this week agreed to stop sending deceptive spam. In a federal court in Chicago, the 23-year-old from Ballwin, Mo., agreed "to stop flooding consumers with emails containing innocuous subject lines. The messages tricked thousands of computer users into opening photos of nude women," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. It was a civil suit brought by the FTC.

  2. In a twist, court favors file-sharing

    Online music/file-sharing was the No. 2 story in Net news this week. First the twist: In a surprising decision that likened Grokster and Morpheus to companies that sell VCRs, a federal judge in California this week ruled that these and other file-sharing services are "not responsible for copyright infringements by users," the Washington Post reports. He basically dismissed most of the recording and film industries' lawsuit against Morpheus and Grokster. The ruling doesn't directly affect Kazaa, which has also been targeted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). CNET and Wired News also covered this news, and here's the court document in pdf format (thanks to BNA Internet Law for this link).

    As if in response to that decision, the RIAA launched a new campaign using instant-messaging to "educate" individual users on the file-sharing services. "Thousands of people trading copyrighted music online yesterday saw a message appear unbidden on their computer screens: 'When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: DON'T STEAL MUSIC'," the New York Times reported this week. The message also says the user can "easily be identified," CNET reports - though the RIAA told the Los Angeles Times it didn't plan to take action beyond the IM campaign. The campaign, a joint project of the RIAA, the Christian Music Trade Association, and the Gospel Music Association, planned to send 1-2 million of those IMs this week.

    Meanwhile, Australian police shut down what they called a "music piracy site" and arrested the students running it, Reuters reports. "The three students - two Australians aged 19 and 20 and a 20-year-old Malaysian - are accused of running a dedicated Web site known as MP3 WMA Land at which visitors could download free music files and video clips." Many of the files were hosted on university computers, Reuters added. As for the four US university students sued by the RIAA for file-sharing piracy, their suits have settled - they agreed to pay $12,000-17,000 each over the next three years, CNET reports.

    Following up on our coverage of Madonna's personal anti-P2P campaign last week, the Washington Post asks the question: "Did the Material Girl really think she could trick Internet music pirates without suffering the consequences?".

  3. Apple's new e-music store

    The New York Times puts it right up there with self-adhesive postage stamps, seedless watermelon and waxed dental floss. "Mr. Jobs and his team have taken another dysfunctional, user-hostile product and bashed the ugliness out of it: the downloadable-music service," writes David Pogue in his review of Apple's just-unveiled iTunes Music Store. CNET calls it "a solid, but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market." Wired News cites "some experts" saying it "breaks down the barriers to online music distribution," "making more than 200,000 songs from all five major music labels available at 99 cents a download."

    As for what this means for the free file-sharing services, iTunes certainly won't pose any real threat, Wired News points out in a separate piece. Kazaa, Grokster, Limewire, etc. "are increasingly trafficking in dirty video clips," says Wired, echoing earlier reports by Congress and the private sector (see our coverage 3/14 and 3/21).

    Two great resources for anyone trying to get a handle on the online music scene include: AfterNapster.com (listing 50+ "sons of Napster," as we put it - all those file-sharing services, many of which are even improvements over the almighty Kazaa) and allrecordlabels.com out of Canada ("a comprehensive listing of over 9200 record labels indexed by genre, format, and location" and other resources). The latter courtesy of Marylaine Block of Neat New Stuff.

  4. PROTECT signed into law

    President Bush this week signed into law the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today (PROTECT) Act of 2003. PROTECT means prison sentences for online pornographers who deliberately hide their Web sites behind innocuous URLs, strengthens penalties for sexual exploitation of children, provides funding for a national Amber Alert (child-abduction alert) system, bolsters prohibitions against child pornography, and bans the distribution of virtual child pornography (sexually explicit images of adults digitally altered to look like children), the Washington Post reports. Here's the Michigan angle in the Detroit News. For more on the PROTECT Act, see Web News Briefs, 4/11.

  5. FCC revamps e-rate

    The US Federal Communications Commission recently announced it has set new rules for the school-connectivity fund - rules aimed at protecting it from fraud and abuse, CNET reports. "Among other things, new eligibility rules bar individuals, for three years or longer, from participating in the program if convicted of a criminal offense or found civilly liable for misconduct in relation to the program," according to CNET. Under the revisions, the e-rate program now also embraces voicemail and wireless services.

  6. FTC goes after Net auction fraud

    And the Federal Trade Commission is not fighting this battle by itself. This week the FTC and "33 state and local law enforcement agencies announced 51 criminal and civil cases that have been filed as part of a coordinated effort against auction fraud," the New York Times reports. The Times says the cases show how the deceptions are "expanding and becoming more sophisticated," with con artists turning the auctions' own safety measures - e.g., escrow services and online payment services - into tools for their scams. These popular auction services, such as eBay, make up 46% of all complaints at the Internet Fraud Complaint Center.

  7. Teacher sues over student's site

    A teacher who is also president of a teacher's union is suing a Pennsylvania school district over a "secret assassination plan" that was allegedly posted by a student on the Web because he was upset about a teachers' strike. The teacher said in his suit that the student should be "further disciplined by the school for threatening him on his personal Web site," the Associated Press reports. The district had suspended the student for two days and "referred the matter to police, who filed charges of making terroristic threats and harassment by communication."

  8. Video games teaching kids how to think?

    That's what reading professor James Paul Gee at the University of Wisconsin thinks. In a commentary in Wired magazine, he writes that "when kids play video games, they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom. Learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts. It's about connecting and manipulating them. Doubt it? Just ask anyone who's beaten 'Legend of Zelda' or solved Morrowind." Professor Gee goes on to suggest some of the skills/values video games teach: strategizing to solve problems; "micromanaging an array of elements while simultaneously balancing short- and long-term goals"; the principle of expertise - "achieving total mastery of one level, only to challenge and undo that mastery in the next, forcing kids to adapt and evolve." Of course, if you disagree, email us (via feedback@netfamilynews.org)! We'll pool responses for publication - nothing like a good debate!

  9. AOL offers virus protection

    At $2.95 a month, the virus guard is part of a series of paid services America Online will offer its members in an effort to "turn itself around" financially, Reuters reports. Other such services at AOL are which include are online music service MusicNet, voice mail, and call alert, "which notifies subscribers when someone is calling while they are online," Reuters adds.

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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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