- GetNetWise relaunched!
GetNetWise.org
now has a broader, more media-rich mix of services that address spam,
online privacy, and computer security, as well as children's online safety.
The relaunch is timely, PC
World points out, coming "just as experts are hammering on the need
to educate computer users about security." In two separate hearings in
the past two weeks, the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Science,
and Research and Development heard that message. For example, AT&T research
fellow Steven Bellovin told the subcommittee that "95-98% of virus attacks
could be prevented if PC users knew how to properly safeguard their computers."
The new GetNetWise section on "Protecting Your Computer from Hackers and
Viruses" has tips and tools (including easy to understand little video
tutorials) for both broadband and dialup Net users. Likewise for dealing
with spam and protecting your personal information online.
We have to admit we have a bias - both SafeKids.com
and NetFamilyNews.org sit on
GetNetWise's Advisory Board, and Larry Magid and I now appear in a handful
of experimental "GetNetWiseTV" spots sprinkled throughout the site. Here's
the Center for
Democracy and Technology's Policy Post on the relaunch, as well as
GetNetWise's press release.
- One very wired (and wireless) family
They are also one very courageous family to have
the story of their family life told, at length, in the Sunday Magazine
of one of the world's most widely read newspapers. In a fascinating article,
the Washington
Post's Ariana Cha writes that when Fred Peters and Tiffany White married
each other and each brought a son and daughter to their new home (ranging
in age from 10 to 17), they were feeling their way in all aspects of the
challenging new arrangement, including each very-tech-literate family
member's use of technology. It wasn't long before the family had six PCs
networked and connected to one high-speed wireless Net connection (including
one connected PC in each of the kids' own rooms), nine TVs, nine phones,
six cell phones, six VCRs, two DVD players, three stereos, three MP3 players,
an Xbox, and a Nintendo gaming system.
There is infinitely more to this story than the technologies the kids use, how they use them, and the decisions their parents make. In fact, there are a bunch of sub-stories - including
the one about blending families with teenagers and one with a happy ending
about an introverted young, tech-literate guy going off to college and
getting hooked on a multiplayer game his entire freshman year. Just as
interesting is the question of how representative this family is, say,
of upper-middle-class America.
In the equally compelling online discussion with
writer Ariana the next day (transcript here), one reader - an expat living in Moscow - suggested
this must be a pretty extreme situation, where family tech use is concerned.
Ariana's response was, "This may surprise you but I'm not sure this family
is really on the 'extreme side' at all. Studies show that it's more uncommon
than common for parents to restrict their children's Internet use. In
fact, one survey shows that, on average, children ages 13-17 spend 3.1
hours a day watching TV, 3.5 hours on video games, and non-Internet computer
use plus another 1.2 on the Internet for a whopping 7.8 hours of 'screen
time' EACH DAY."
For a broader picture of tech and media use in
US families, see the Kaiser Family Foundation's just-released "Parents
and Media," from its Key Facts series. Here are some interesting stats
that further bear out Ariana's point just above: "Among children age 8
and older, 65% have a TV in their bedroom, 45% have a video game player
there, and 36% have a VCR."
Email us your views on kids' tech-use patterns
at home and how much access they should have - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.
- Cosmogirl.com to be COPPA-compliant
CosmoGirl.com
is the Web edition of the teen version of Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine.
It attracts tweens (children under 13) as well as teens, so the site is
subject to COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) regs. The
New York-based Children's Advertising Review
Unit (CARU), one of the Federal Trade Commission-appointed experts
on those regs, announced this week that, upon bringing a COPPA violation
in CosmoGirl.com to Hearst's attention, Hearst quickly agreed to make
some changes. Parents of tween daughters might be interested in what those
changes will be....
According to its press
release, CARU found that children under 13 who wanted to receive a
free "mystery gift" by subscribing to CosmoGirl magazine could disclose
personally identifiable information (e.g., surname, street address, and
email address) without parental consent, contrary to COPPA rules. The
site also required personal information (without a parent's consent) if
readers, including tweens, wanted to register for "Club 2024," "talk"
to the editorial staff, or get the "CG! E-zine." CARU reported that, "although
Hearst had asked visitors to state their date of birth and informed children
under age 13 that they were too young to register, it had not instituted
a tracking mechanism to insure that a child could not change her age to
avoid being barred from those features of the site." Hearst agreed to
add age screening mechanisms to all areas requiring personal contact data.
- FTC's file-sharing warning
The Federal Trade Commission issued a warning
this week about the risks of file- sharing, the latest in its series of
consumer privacy alerts, CNET
reports. Stopping short of telling consumers not to swap files on
networks like Kazaa and Morpheus, the FTC
cited three privacy risks: the possibility of downloading viruses, sharing
copyrighted files that could land them in legal trouble, or downloading
mislabeled pornography. We would add a fourth but lesser risk: downloading
the spyware on these networks which tracks users' online movements. "The
[FTC's] warning intensifies the drumbeat of concern over file-sharing software,
as courts, legislators and copyright holders put more pressure on peer-to-peer
networks and individual file-traders," CNET adds.
- The real beauty of iTunes
It's a "tool of liberation," according to Business
Week columnist Charles Haddad. He makes a lot of sense. Bands like
Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers who refuse to sell their music on
iTunes "fear buyers will buy individual songs, breaking up the artistic
fabric of their albums." They're not without their supporters, Haddad
writes, citing a fan in Alabama who wrote him that when an album's songs
are isolated the message is lost. But most iTunes fans feel they, not
the musicians, should have control over their musical experience. They
love making their own personal playlists and compilation CDs or storing
their own top 1,000 tunes on their iPods. And the other part of the liberation
is knowing it's all legal; everyone's on the up and up by paying for each
tune, then doing whatever s/he wants with it. Nice piece, Charles!
- Do file-sharers care?
About copyright laws, that is? Not particularly,
according to survey data gathered this past spring by the Pew
Internet & American Life project. Pew found that 67% of Internet users
who download music say "they do not care about whether the music they
have downloaded is copyrighted. A little over a quarter of these music
downloaders - 27% - say they do care, and 6% said they don't have a position
or know enough about the issue." In its coverage of the survey, the BBC
points out that adults 18-29 were the least concerned, with 72% saying
the copyright didn't concern them. Among users 30-49, 61% are unconcerned.
As for full-time students, 82% are not concerned about violating copyright
laws.
- EFF's file-sharers subpoena database
File-sharers concerned they might be subpoenaed
can now check to see if their screennames are on the RIAA's list. As promised,
the Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a site
and search engine that will match screennames to the database of subpoenas
at the federal district court in Washington where the RIAA is filing them,
Wired
News reports. There are no fees for this search service (please see
last week's report
on the other, court-provided service). The EFF is also involved in a site
providing information about the misuse of subpoenas and a reporting mechanism
thereto - that of the Subpoena
Defense Alliance.
As for the people tracking file-sharers who might
have subpoenas in their future, the BBC
takes you behind the scenes at "one of the biggest companies working in
the business of patrolling the Web to unmask violators of copyrighted
music" - a cyberdetective agency, if you will.As for the people tracking file-sharers who might have subpoenas in their
future, the BBC takes you
behind the scenes at "one of the biggest companies working in the business of
patrolling the Web to unmask violators of copyrighted music" - a cyberdetective
agency, if you will. Meanwhile, the anti-RIAA backlash is growing, with a major
ISP lawsuit and a US senator questioning RIAA tactics, the New York Times reports.
- UK: Unsupervised teen Net use is up
In its latest study, "Young People in 2002," the
Schools Health Education Unit, a UK research firm, found that more and
more teens are going online without adults looking over their shoulders,
the BBC
reports. "In answer to the question, 'Are you able to browse the Internet
without adult supervision?' the latest figures show a sharp rise in the
numbers saying they are never supervised. For example, 53% of girls aged
12 or 13 said this in 2002, compared with 33% in 2000." Also among the
findings: At least half of the kids surveyed said they "never had adult
supervision" and fewer than 8% said they never used the Net at all, down
from about 25% in 2000.
- Online cliques
Remember Web rings - strings of like-minded Web
sites all linked together like boats rafted together? Well, online cliques
are like a hipper, 21st-century version popular among teens, we read in
Wired
News. They're also more elitist - like high school cliques, all about
popularity, knowing "the rules," and the subtle exercise of power. Here's
how it works, as Wired explains: "Someone builds a site focused on a topic,
say, anime, chocolate, or Moulin Rouge. The owner then accepts applications
from others with like-minded, well- designed sites who want to join the
clique. The owner sets rules and conditions for membership and then provides
links to all the approved member sites." Sounds perfectly innocuous in
theory, but the execution isn't always so simple.
- Web's No. 1 for teens
The Internet beats TV, radio, and books for Americans
in the 13-24 age group, according to a recent study by Yahoo and ad agency
Carat North America. "The study found that young adults spend more time
on the Web than with any other media source and are not likely to be partial
to one medium, as older generations are," CNET
reports. The some 2,500 young adults surveyed said they spend an average
of 16.7 hours online a week, excluding email. TV comes next at 13.6 hours
a week, followed by radio (12 hours). The report said they prefer the
Web mainly because they "like the control it gives them over their media
experience." Also, instead of being intimidated by a large array of media
offerings, as older adults tend to be, they welcome the it and are more
likely than other generations to use a bunch of media all at once (no
huge surprise to their parents!). Here are MSNBC
and Reuters
on the study.
- NZ study on who downloads porn
Contrary to what many people think, child porn
users are not likely to be "dirty old men," a New Zealand study found.
"These days it is likely to be Internet- savvy young men living at home
with their parents who are trading illegal pornography," according to
the BBC report
on the study. The study, by the seven- year-old Censorship Compliance
Unit of New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, profiled 106 people
who had been investigated by the Unit. The people were "overwhelmingly
male (only one was a woman), mostly Caucasian, likely to be middle class
and adept at using the Internet." Their ages ranged from 14 to 67, the
average age being 30. Almost a third were students and a third lived at
home with their parents or grandparents. "The most common age of offending
in the study's sample was 17," the BBC adds.
- Porn spam surge over past month
The volume of pornographic email "increased four
times from June to July worldwide," Australian IT reports. The figure's from Message Labs, an email
security firm for the corporate market. The company "scanned 123.7 million
emails for pornography, with more than 200,000 of those messages found
to contain pornographic material." Message Labs also scans for viruses
and spam in general. It told Australian IT that spam, virus, and porn
email activity can "vary greatly between months," but over the past year,
spam accounted for 34% of all email scanned, on average. Its competitors
have different figures. Symantec says spam will reach 50% of all email
traffic by 2005, and Brightmail says spam represents 48% of all email
traffic each, right now (the latter from the New
York Times).
- Spam filters: Mixed results
There are spam filters and then there are spam
filters, "with subtle differences among them that can affect system performance,
filtering speed and accuracy," the New
York Times reports. After telling us that the filtering used by Web-based
e-mail services (such as HotMail and Yahoo) isn't as good as what's found
in email software (e.g., Eudora or Outlook) or at ISPs like AOL and MSN,
the Times looks at each type in detail. Also this week, Times columnist
David Pogue asks the question, "When Is Spam Acceptable?"
- Parents sue child's classmates
A Canadian teenager became known Internet-wide
as the "Star Wars Kid" after a private video he made of himself practicing
his lightsabre moves was posted on the Web by schoolmates. "Now his parents
are claiming damages of $160,000 from the families of the four classmates
who digitized and published the video" on the Kazaa file-sharing network,
Wired
News reports. The parents say their son was so humiliated by teasing
about the video that he dropped out school and has had to undergo psychiatric
care. The BBC
reports that the boy's video has been seen by millions of Kazaa users
and now has 38 versions "that add all kinds of effects to his stick twirling
tricks or mock" him. He is not without supporters, though. Two bloggers
raised $4,300 for him by posting an appeal on their blogs, receiving 421
donations. Another site started a petition to get George Lucas to give
the boy a part in the next Star Wars film.
