June 6, 2003
Dear Subscribers:
The newsletter will be on vacation next week. The next
issue will arrive in your in-box June 20. Here's our lineup for this first week of June:
- Interesting games in the pipeline
- Web News
Briefs: New parenting resource on the Web; High-speed access risks;
FBI's teen consultants; Online community not so virtual; Rewards for legal
file-sharing; First law course about spam?; Blogs on the summit; Texting
in the US?!; Great series on wired/unwired kids....
~~~~~~~~~~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:
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Interesting games in the pipeline
E3 - the giant annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles that
"unveils" the video games that will be vying for spots on our children's
wish lists this next holiday shopping season - was "more than usually
interesting" this year, reports subscriber Gen Katz, publisher of
Games4Girls.com. That was enough to make us want to hear more. Here's
her view from the expo floor:
"For kids, one of my top three picks is Boktai' (by
Konami), where sunlight on your Game Boy Advance actually weakens the vampires'
strength, and playing at night gives the vampires the advantage (kids should
be asleep then anyway!). I think kids will be entranced with this new 'special
effect.' Having the surrounding environment physically affecting games is
a new concept.
"My other two top picks are 'School Tycoon' and 'Bombastic.'
The latter (by CAPCOM) uses animated dice that are positively addicting, the
way 'Tetris' was. In fact, this game will appeal to adults as well. As for
'School Tycoon,' kids have asked for a game like this.
The Learning Company - always a reliable source of
kids' games - has trumped the Sims by bringing out this one. You guessed it:
Players create the school from the ground up - buildings, teachers, students
- the works. This works great because kids love to control the environment
in which they spend most of their time.
"A few other interesting developments: 'Spy Kids'
(by BVG), for both Game Boy Advance and PC, will use 3D glasses to explore
the cyberworld in three dimensions. Save the glasses; they will work for both
the game and the movie. There are two haunted house games in the pipeline.
Gregory Horror Show (CAPCOM), where you check into a hotel but you can't check
out until you collect all the lost souls. Arty collage cutouts are the characters
in this game (I can't imagine these cute paper cutouts being scary). Haunted
Mansion (TDK), a theme park mystery based on the Disneyland ride, promises
to be more scary. Of course there will be the usual spate of Barbie games
(Vivendi). With the exception of a face makeup activity and Barbie of Swan
Lake (Note: not Barbie in Swan Lake!), most will be horse titles.
"For grownups, there is 'Identity Theft Protector,'
an easy-to-use primer on how to protect yourself from becoming a victim -
or to prevent it from happening again. Having had my identity stolen, I knew
what to look for in this product, and the creators seemed to have covered
all the bases.
"With few exceptions, the trend in the game industry
is maximizing company assets across media. If there's a movie or hot TV show,
there will be a game. Games such as 'The Hulk' and 'Finding Nemo' are being
marketed as enhancements to the original property. Expect to see the Hulk
and Barbie as news anchors. But seriously, I think that all these 'replicants'
are formulaic and bypass the opportunity to do something creative like 'Syberia'
or 'Myst.' Watch for the new game by Myst's creators - 'Uru'; there's not
much out on it except that it will morph into an online game. As creator Rand
Miller says, 'Then Myst will never have to end.' Sounds a bit like 'The Matrix,'
doesn't it?"
Related links
- Have you heard that video games can actually
be good for kids?! The story's been covered by a lot of media outlets.
The BBC
has it that "regular players of shoot-em-ups, such as 'Half-Life' and 'Medal
of Honour,' have much better visual skills than most of the population....
The researchers have shown that gamers were particularly good at spotting
details in busy, confusing scenes and could cope with more distractions
than average." The New
York Times reports that, though study results may be mildly comforting,
"for many parents, the latest study won't do much to change the limits they've
spent years working to establish. Dr. Maddock [a University of California
(Davis) psychiatrist whose 13-year-old son plays video games and who follows
the literature on the subject], for example, has worked out a complex set
of time restrictions, confining game time to two hours a day and using the
games as an incentive to finish homework. His 13-year-old son, Michael,
does not own a game device and plays all his games on the family computer.
The thorough, 3-page Times piece cites lots of families' experiences with
video games.
- Violent games not to be banned. Meanwhile,
a US federal appeals court this week struck down a law in St. Louis County,
Mo., that restricted children's access to violent video games, CNET
reports. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the ordinance
banning rental or sales of graphically violent video games to minors violates
free-speech rights. The federal court "decided that if the paintings of
Jackson Pollock, the music of Arnold Schoenberg and the Jabberwocky verse
of Lewis Carroll are protected by the First Amendment, then video games
should be, too." [Our thanks to BNA Internet
Law for pointing this news out.]
- Gamers' own views. Two years ago we ran a
2-part series, "Gamers
on games" (insights from conversations with three avid teen gamers)
and "Gamers' advice
for parents". We think much of what we learned from these great guys
is still very relevant.
* * * *
Web News Briefs
- Parenting help on the Web: Mixed results, new
resource
Although 70% of parents (with kids at home) use
the Net for information, vs. 53% of adults who don't have children at
home, the Internet is parents' fifth-most- trusted source of parenting
information, the New
York Times reports. The four information sources parents trust more
are books, pediatricians, relatives and friends, and magazines. "While
the Internet has already proved to be a valuable timesaving tool for many
parents, finding information that is accurate and objective, and that
is not aimed at selling a particular product or service, still requires
far too much effort," says the Times, citing experts who study parental
use of the Internet. One such expert, professor Fred Rothbaum at Tufts
University, says 70% of Internet sites that carry information about products
or services, like educational toys, family vacations, or children's movies,
are also trying to sell a product or service. Because of that, he and
other researchers at the university's Eliot-Pearson Department of Child
Development screened more than 5,000 Web sites "to find those that they
felt were less commercial but were authoritative, easy to use and well
maintained," according to the Times. The 400 sites that met those criteria
are listed in the department's Child
& Family WebGuide, which its creators say they'll update fully about
once year.
- High-speed connecting: Risks
The very benefits of having a broadband Net connection
- that it's fast and always on - also represent its risks. Speed and 24/7
access are exposing families to "far greater risk than most of them realize,"
reports the New
York Times, citing a just- released study from the National Cyber
Security Alliance. The risks, of course, are viruses, identity theft,
and hacking (including both use of data on the home computer itself and
hijacking it for denial-of-service and other mass attacks against commercial
and government Web sites). The Alliance's
home page has 10 tips for securing a home computer. The study "highlights
the chasm between the assumptions of consumers about the security of their
Internet connection and the reality," the Times says. The study found
that:
- More than 40% of those surveyed lacked a firewall
to protect their computers from intrusion from the outside, though 77%
said they considered their systems protected from hackers and 86% said
their systems were protected from online threats.
- Despite the lack of controls, 86% said they
keep sensitive information on their PCs, including medical information
and financial data.
- Nearly four-fifths use the Internet to conduct
financial or medical transactions.
- Although nearly half the families surveyed had
young children who use the computer, only 3% have installed parental
controls software.
- 67% do not regularly update their anti-virus
software.
- The FBI's teen consultants
Is Justin Timberlake still hot or so two-years-ago?
This is a real question on the minds of some FBI agents. We're seeing
more and more coverage about how cops catch s-xual predators online, but
each piece gives a more complete picture of what their jobs are like.
We were fascinated (and impressed) to learn from the Washington Post this week that the FBI works with three 8th-grade
girls in order to pose convincingly as young teens in online chat. That's
the only way they can lure predators into an in-person meeting where they
can be arrested. "The girls were recruited after one of their fathers,
an agent involved in the pedophile investigations, watched her instant-messaging
a friend and couldn't understand what she was typing. He realized that
FBI training wasn't enough," the Post reports. Karen, Mary, and Kristin,
14-year-olds in Howard County, Md., "probably the youngest instructors
ever in an FBI classroom," are teaching agents nationwide about celebrity
gossip, clothing trends, favorite information sources (e.g., Teen People
and YM), and proper teen lingo. "The first time the girls gave a quiz,
all the agents failed," the Post reports. The fun in all this has got
to be a help, considering what these agents have to deal with every day
in their jobs in Operation Innocent Images. Our thanks to the National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this piece out.
- 'Online communities get real'
Online community fostered by instant-messaging,
chat, email, and blogging isn't as virtual as it was widely expected to
be. "The notion that virtual communities would allow people to unite in
a global village, creating false online personas, and moving rapidly from
one Internet community to another is not being borne out," reports the
BBC, referring
to a survey of UK Net users by British think tank The Work Foundation.
People don't use Internet communication tools to conduct some sort of
parallel virtual life. They use "social software" to enhance face-to-face
(e.g., to communicate about local events and neighborhood association
activities) - a lot like the way our teen interviewees use instant-messaging
to talk about "school stuff" with their classmates (see "Conversations
with teens about tech"). "The Web is much more localised, more honest
and less chaotic than original predictions thought," the BBC adds.
- Rewarding legal file-sharing
Now there's a concept! Give file-sharers an incentive
to share, or even purchase, legal files. We're not sure why the very litigious
recording industry doesn't support this rather than going to the expense
of ever-burgeoning lawsuits. The Associated Press describes this as "Internet
file-sharing's version of frequent flyer miles." File-sharers who use
the Kazaa peer-to-peer services will earn points for making legal files
available to fellow Kazaa users. The points can be accumulated and cashed
in for small prizes such as Concert tickets, video games, CDs and DVDs,
and even laptops, the AP reports. "The program is being run by Altnet,
a Kazaa partner trying to promote sharing of legal files that can be limited
in different ways by their creators, for instance songs that can only
be played a certain number of times," according to the AP. "Altnet distributes
about 1,000 of such protected files for music, movies, and software. Many
of the songs available, however, are from obscure bands who aren't charging
for the protected files anyway. Currently, when users search for files
on Kazaa, they get 'gold' listings of Altnet-sponsored items and 'blue'
listings of everything else, much of it pirated." Interestingly, even
without an incentive program in place, "users have been downloading about
20 million gold files each month - even though the blue versions are just
a click away."
While we're on the subject, the latest RIAA lawsuit
is against Streamcast, the company behind the Morpheus file-sharing service.
The grievance behind this second lawsuit against Streamcast by the RIAA
is "not over the software that millions of people use to copy billons
of songs for free but over a service that never launched," the Los
Angeles Times reports.
- First law course about spam?
This summer Chicago's John Marshall Law School
will be offering what it believes to be the first law school course on
spam (unsolicited junk email), CNET
reports. The students will look into legal and policy issues surrounding
email marketing. The course will be taught by associate professor David
Sorkin, who maintains a compendium
on the Web of passed and pending spam laws worldwide. Sorkin "has
long touted the applicability of traditional law to the Internet," according
to CNET, which adds that the professor "has warned against legislation
drafted specifically for online contexts, saying that new spam bills,
in particular, have the potential to worsen the problem they're designed
to alleviate." [As for the latest spam figures, CNET
and the BBC
this week noted that there is now more spam than non-spam appearing in
corporate in-boxes, and the BBC.]
Meanwhile, the first Net-schooled lawyers passed
the bar in California this week, MSNBC
reports. The 10 new attorneys were the first graduating class of all-online
Concord Law School, Among the 10 are a stay-at-home dad, an earthquake
engineer, a mother of two "who 10 years prior sold off her independent
movie studio to raise her kids," a small-town surgeon, and a former AT&T
systems analyst.
- Blogs on the G8 summit
Blogs were popular among people looking for alternative
coverage of the Group of Eight summit in France this week, Wired
News reports. "As journalists filed stories to editors, protesters
posted their own commentary on weblogs. While the Associated Press reported
that riot squads fired 'tear gas, rubber pellets and water cannon to disperse
thousands of demonstrators,' Web designer Geoffroi du Chambon wrote, 'At
least, one can say that the organizers did everything to avoid scuffles'."
No matter which report the average news consumer believes, two conclusions
can be drawn: 1) the range of views available to the public in the media
is widening, and 2) protesting has gone high tech. "So rampant was cell-
phone use at the scene [in Evian]," according to Wired News, "that some
protesters wondered aloud whether authorities would shut down cellular
phone networks to break up the demonstrations. (Chambon said officials
did no such thing.) Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social
Revolution, said cell-phone use already has allowed protesters to better
organize themselves." Wired News adds that, when camera and videophones
become ubiquitous, alternative news will become a multimedia experience
as well.
In a separate look at alternative news coverage,
The Weekly Standard predicts that "The Big Four" blogs for coverage of
the 2004 US presidential election will be Instapundit.com, AndrewSullivan.com,
Kausfiles.com, and The Volokh Conspiracy . The writer
says the four blogs are "poised to remake the political landscape." We
shall see!
- Texting in the US?!
Americans actually love texting too, The
Register reports, contrary to what we (Americans and non-Americans)
all thought. Though instant-messaging still may well be "the future for
wireless messaging in the US," The Register cites recent figures showing
that by 2007 there will be "as many as 75 million SMS [for cell- phone-based
"short messaging service"] users." We noted with surprise how that compares
to the smaller 2007 projection for IM users - 63 million in the US. "The
growth ahead is evident now, the research firm [IDC] says, with SMS subscribers
doubling to 21 million in 2002. SMS traffic, meanwhile, climbed 300% last
year to hit 2.4 billion messages, as consumers began to embrace the service,
mostly for personal messaging and entertainment," according to The Register.
Of course, that compares with western Europe's 186 billion messages last
year - expected to hit 365 billion text messages a year in 2006. Ireland's
among the leaders, after Singapore and the Philippines. The article explains
why Americans have been slow to adopt text-on-cell-phone communications.
And while all this is happening, next-generation
("4G") cell phone technology, "once expected to appear around 2005 is
here now," The
Economist reports - owing "much to the mess surrounding 3G." 4G is
attractive, The Economist says, because it will blend the wireless convenience
of Wi-Fi Net access with the more long- distance blanket coverage (and
fewer base-stations) of a cell-phone network.
- In the Merc: Whole series on wired/unwired kids
Last week we linked you to a great piece in the
San Jose Mercury News, "Growing up wired" in one of the most wired (and
wireless) spots on Earth - Silicon Valley. Turns out it was a whole
series, also about happily unconnected kids, school life in a wired
world, and new rules and roles for teens as online culture takes shape.
Not to be missed by anyone connected to connected kids.
* * * *
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
