- COPA goes back to US Supreme Court
Though the Child Online Protection Act has been
around the block a few times, it should get a final decision by the US's
highest court by the end of next July. This week the Supreme Court agreed
to hear arguments on the law's constitutionality a second time. Passed
in late 1998, COPA - which has always sat right at the intersection of
protecting both free speech and online kids - was blocked as unconstitutional
in federal court in early '99. After that decision was appealed and the
Supreme Court heard arguments in May 2002, it sent the law back down to
the lower federal court in Philadelphia for further deliberation. The
Philadelphia appeals court confirmed its decision that the law was unconstitutional,
this time on broader grounds. The Bush administration appealed, and thus
we have this week's announcement.
The law imposes prison sentences and fines of
up to $50,000 for publishing content that is 'harmful to minors' in a
Web site without restricting their access to such content, according to
CNET's report. The Supreme Court will decide 1) whether
it restricts too much material that adults have the right to see or buy,
and 2) whether the government can require some form of adults-only screening
system to ensure children cannot see material deemed harmful to them,
according to the Associated
Press. But a major obstacle to a final decision so far has been how
"harmful to minors" should be defined by US law in a large, diverse society.
- 'Net-Detectives' in Australia now too
The innovative online-safety training program
turns kids into "Net-Detectives." Developed by London-based nonprofit
Childnet International, the program uses the Net to link young people
with real-life detectives and other experts. Together they solve realistic
online problems (such as bullying) in real time. According to FindLaw
Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Authority, which is adapting
Net-Detectives for Australian schools, recently launched the program in
the Sydney area. Net-Detectives was designed by a British police officer
mostly for middle-school-age students.
- Net vigilantes: New twist
Civilians who try to catch sexual predators on
the Net and then send tips to police are more trouble than help, law enforcement
agencies say. But online vigilantism is also a very gray area, they acknowledge.
The Boston Globe reports that "the Suffolk district
attorney's office 'encourages anyone who observes potentially illegal
activity on the Internet to report it to us,'... but does not enlist civilians
to seek out offenders." In other words, the tips the vigilantes send can
be helpful, but police need to do their own investigation and evidence-gathering
work because they know what can be used as evidence in court.
The new twist is a vigilante Web site the
Globe piece points out: Perverted-
Justice.com. It monitors regional chat rooms (in which, the
site says, a pedophile is usually 30 minutes or less from his target),
catches pedophiles trying to make contact with minors in them, and posts
the pedophiles' contact data in a kind of alternative sex-offenders list
on the site. The site also captures and archives pedophiles' conversations
with children and sends tips to law enforcement. "We wish to take away
a little bit of that 'safe anonymity' wannabe pedophiles think they enjoy,"
the site Mission page says.
- Norway: Crackdown on sex spam to kids
It's the mobile-phone version of sex spam. "A
series of complaints from [Norwegian] parents that children as young as
seven years of age have received SMS messages pushing tele-sex has prompted
action" from consumer advocates in Norway, Aftenposten
reports. What alerted some parents were the phone bills: Last spring
"several children received brochures for tele-sex services [on their mobile
phones], and some parents have found themselves with fat bills after their
children allegedly called up the advertised numbers." Here are the relevant
rules in Norway, according to Aftenposten: Direct advertising to children
is not forbidden, but promoting sex services to them is, and the use of
SMS [text messages on phones] or email for advertising is permitted only
after the customer has registered to receive it. Our thanks to QuickLinks
for pointing this news out.
- US youth media consumption
Harris Interactive's youth research group recently
took a close look at how the rapidly changing, "fragmented," "saturated,"
interactive "media landscape" has affected young people's media consumption.
Harris asked more than 2,600 people aged 13-24 how much time they spend
with various media in a typical week (this was last June). The answers
were divided into age groups, with the Internet topping all lists (17.4
hours a week for 13-to-15-year-olds; 17.3 hours for 16- 18; 16.2 hrs for
19-20; and 15.5 hrs for 21-24). TV, radio, and phone/cell phone followed,
in that order, for all four age groups. The biggest gap in hours of use
between the Net and TV was for 16-to-18-year-olds, who said they use the
Net 17.3 hours a week and TV 12 hours. The chart about which media youth
use for what (Table 2) looks more like an air traffic controller's screen,
but it's worth it to download Harris Interactive's pdf-formatted newsletter for a teen's-eye-view
of media uses.
Another study, of just 7-to-12-year-old Americans,
found that almost half of them (46%) go online at least four times a week
and nearly 20% go online every day. As for their parents, the AOL-sponsored study found that 92% of mothers believe that the Web
is "a great tool for their children" and 53% say that the Web has brought
their family closer together. The study also found that Tampa/St. Petersburg
(Fla.), Philadelphia, and New York were the most "youth-wired" cities.
AOL's press release cited Jupiter Research as saying that 57% of US kids
11 and under will be online by 2007. Here's BizReport's
(brief) coverage. Our thanks to CommonSenseMedia.org
for pointing this study out.
- Australian parents more vigilant
Eighty percent of Australia's parents are involved
in their children's Internet use, up from 60% two years ago, according
to a new study cited by Australian IT. The study, by Internet research firm RedSheriff, found
a much bigger jump in "the number of children requiring parents' permission"
to go online: 20% now vs. 2% in 2001. "All forms of supervision, including
parental involvement in Web surfing, regular checks and monitoring, and
regulating the amount of time children spend online grew over the period,"
RedSheriff found. Even so, the researchers added, parents remain supportive
of kids' Net use, finding it important to "a child's development and entertainment,"
echoing similar findings by the US's Corporation
for Public Broadcasting last March. (We wish there were comparable
recent US figures for filtering and other parental protection measures
in the US.) In other key findings:
- The use of filtering software in Australia has
grown from 12% of surveyed households in 2001 to 18% now (3-year-old
US
stats, the latest available, show that about a third of connected
US households have installed filters).
- 91% of Australian households with children now
have Net access, up from 80% in 2001 and 56% in '99.
- From free music to free calls
The makers of Kazaa are on to their next "killer
app." The two Swedish entrepreneurs and the Estonian programmers they
hired to create Kazaa (later selling it to Sydney-based, Vanuatu-registered
Sharman Networks) unveiled Skype about a month ago, and Skype software
- as of Thursday - has already been downloaded 1.45 million times (up
from 1.37m a few days earlier!). It's basically a free international phone
service that uses peer-to-peer (P2P or file-sharing) tech to turn computers
into phones. People anywhere in the world can just go to Skype.com,
download its free software, buy a headset (for around $25), and talk to
each other. The Skype people say nothing else is needed to make it work
on virtually any computer purchased within the last 2-3 years. Right now,
while in beta, it only works with Windows 2000 and XP PCs, but that's
being worked on (Macs to be included, as well as regular phones). What's
the catch? Well, phone companies are probably reeling (if not following
in the RIAA's footsteps), and there may be a fight with the FBI, CIA,
etc., because Skype calls are strongly encrypted - tough to monitor even
with a court order. Here's coverage at the New
York Times. A Skype alternative, SIPPhone.com
- the brainchild of Michael Robertson, who recently sold MP3.com to Vivendi
- is explained in this interview with him at Voxilla.com.
- No-frills Netscape
AOL's new discount Internet service will cost
$9.95 a month, the Washington
Post reports. Subscribers will get one email account with a "netscape.com"
address. "America Online plans to offer the service primarily to people
calling AOL customer service centers to cancel their $23.90-a-month America
Online subscriptions," according to the Post.
- Wi-Fi unhealthy for kids?
Parents in one Illinois school district think
so and filed suit to stop the district from using Wi-Fi until more is
known. The plaintiffs say "the district, its board, and its superintendent
have implemented Wi-Fi wireless networking technology in classrooms, ignoring
evidence that electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi networks poses health
risks, particularly to growing children," CNET
reports. They told CNET they're seeking a moratorium until the technology
has been proven safe. The district says it's "following all safety regulations
and that there is no hard evidence that suggests wireless technology is
dangerous." It will be interesting to see if these concerns grow the way
those about cell phone risks did in the UK a year or so ago (Consumer Reports says
a firm answer to the cell phone question won't be known for years). Meanwhile,
Wi-Fi's popularity grows. CNET cites data from Pyramid Research estimating
that "the number of individuals who use Wi-Fi will grow from 12 million
in 2003 to 707 million by 2008" and research from IDC showing that "more
than 55,000 new hot spots in the United States over the next five years,
adding to the 4,200 locations in place as of the end of 2002."
- Teen charged with securities scams
A 19-year-old Pennsylvania resident has been charged
with securities, mail, and wire fraud and computer crimes. According to
CNET, Van Dinh,
the scammer, allegedly persuaded investors he "met" in a stock-discussion
Web site to download "a new stock-charting tool" that was actually spyware.
The monitoring software he sent them recorded everything the investors
typed on their keyboards, so Dinh could steal account names and passwords
to the investors' online brokerage accounts. "He then proceeded to drain
[one] account of nearly $47,000," CNET reports, citing complaints filed
in civil court by the SEC and in criminal court by the Justice Department.
The Register
and the New
York Times report on another, fairly sophisticated online securities
scam Dinh allegedly conducted. Here's further coverage at the Washington Post.
- Tech company vs. university student
Within 24 hours, SunnComm Technologies announced
it was suing a student for his critique of it CD copy-protection tech,
then changed its mind. Even so, the story got a lot of coverage in the
US and UK - perhaps because the company's stock value reportedly dropped
$10 million, a third of its total worth, after the Princeton student,
John Halderman, published his paper? Explaining the change of heart, to
his credit, SunnComm CEO Peter Jacobs said he didn't want to have a chilling
effect on copy-protection research, the Daily
Princetonian reports. "Jacobs said ... a successful lawsuit would
do little to reverse the damage done by the paper Halderman published
... about his research, and any suit would likely hurt the research community
by making computer scientists think twice about researching copy-protection
technology." Halderman had published a work- around he'd discovered for
SunnComm's copy-protection software. According to the BBC,
Halderman "found that SunnComm's MediaMax CD-3 software could be bypassed
by holding down the shift key on a Windows PC when a copy-protected CD
was inserted. This temporarily disables the autorun function on Windows,
stopping a anti-piracy program from installing itself on the computer."
Other coverage was in Wired
News, CNET,
and the Washington
Post.
- Microsoft's newest PC security plan
"Microsoft once again is telling us something
we already know," reports the Washington Post: "The 90% of computer users who use the company's
software are sitting ducks for a rogue's gallery of viruses, worms, Trojan
horses and an array of other malicious hacker tools." The Post is reporting
on MS's latest "stab at trustworthy computing." The Electronic Frontier
Foundation provides a lengthy white
paper on current efforts to secure PCs. The bottom line of the EFF
message, we think, is that by turning the control of our PCs' security
over to large companies like Microsoft, we ultimately risk giving up control,
too, of our computer and Internet use - and is likely to create new monopolies
and higher prices. Here's the EFF's
press release (a little more palatable to the average PC user).
- Consumer Reports help for parents
The consumer
advocacy organization has put together an article that explains in simple,
non-technical language "How
to avoid being an online music pirate." The piece explains how to tell...
- If there's file-sharing software on the family
PC
- Whether or not it's sharing music, and
- If it's copyrighted
There's also a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's subpoena database,
in case parents are wondering if an RIAA subpoena's on its way, and information
on how to disable the sharing tool in a very few of the file-sharing programs
out there free for the downloading.
- Next-generation file-sharing services
Parents who think that kids are no longer file-sharing
if Kazaa has been deleted from the hard drive might want to think again.
A forthright teen file-sharer might even tell you Kazaa's almost passe
- old technology. Newer, more efficient file-sharing technology used by
the likes of eDonkey, Piolet, RockItNet, and Blubster are moving in on
Kazaa, Grokster, and iMesh - especially in Europe (Blubster was created
by a 23-year-old progammer in Madrid), CNET
reports. EDonkey is hot in Germany, the UK, and Israel, ZDNet
UK reports. Both ZDNet and The Register
report numbers from the latest research on file-sharers. Part of the explanation
for this move to new P2P technology is its efficiency with bigger files
like videos. "EDonkey is particularly popular for trading videos," The
Register reports. The new generation of services are different from "FastTrack"
technology-based Kazaa in two ways, ZDNet explains: 1) each file is broken
up into tiny pieces, each of which is distributed independently (so "a
movie does not have to be downloaded in its entirety before it can be
offered to other people, making distribution of these and other larger
files much more efficient"); and 2) even more "decentralized search" whereby
individual PCs logged onto the file-sharing network become temporary indexers
of categories of files (not nodes to be checked for just any file queried
for).
- Another person mistakenly sued
The first such case was in Massachusetts. The
latest is a man in California who was among the 261 anti-file-sharing
lawsuits recently filed by the RIAA, the Los Angeles Times reports. The man, Ross
Plank, who says he doesn't use any file-sharing service, found out, with
some research help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), that
the RIAA had the wrong IP address - one he was not using. "Plank and the
foundation said it's unclear whether the record companies had an incorrect
IP address or whether Comcast turned over the wrong name," according to
the Times. Here's the EFF's
press release.
- How to price digital music?
It's not about file-sharing, but rather about
the legal alternatives thereto: The New
York Times takes an interesting look at how the music industry has
priced music since the days of vinyl records. It was interesting to see
how much they're winging it with the new "standard" 99 cents a song on
the online music services.
- Canada's new music service
"Canada's first pay-as-you-go music download Internet
site," PureTracks.com, launched
this week, Reuters
reports. The article surveys its counterparts in the US. [We noted
with interest that, if your connected PC is outside Canada, as mine is,
the site detects this and - when you go to PureTracks.com - it informs
you: "Sorry, PureTracks is limited to Canada." This may be the way the
Web is going as individual countries' laws have increasing impact on its
use.]
