toolbar

Dear Subscribers:

Happy 4th, everyone! Here's our lineup for these first days of July:

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. Capitol Hill's Web literacy rate

    It stands to reason that a lawmaker whose district includes Silicon Valley would be a good email communicator with her constituents! And it's always nice when reality delivers on expectations. Anyway, kudos to Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) for being such a 'Nethead that she actually has staff time devoted to answering every e-mail without automated responses. (You can read about her and all Congresspeople's performance on other issues in a wonderful Web resource called the Congressional Scorecard at Tech Law Journal.)

    In a column called "Wired Women", writer Dianne Lynch says Eshoo's email practices are a giant leap ahead of those of most Congresspeople, many of whom make us voters type our comments into a form in their Web sites, print it out, and snail-mail it! In any case, this is a useful piece about lawmakers' attitudes and approaches to online communications - especially if you're interested in more than Ted Kennedy's chowder recipe!

  2. The great free-email wars

    Competition like this is great for us consumers and online communicators! First there was this brilliant idea called HotMail, spawned in the Silicon Valley work cubicle of Sabeer Bhatia, a smart, young, ex-India would-be entrepreneur who persuaded a venture-capital group to give him $300,000 to fund HotMail (he sold it to Microsoft two years later for $400 million, according to a fun, readable piece in Wired magazine. So Microsoft could offer us free e-mail. (There are other free email services, such as Snap.com's Email.com and Juno.)

    Enter AOL, from a different place. AOL buys an Israeli company called ICQ, which brought AOL's "instant messaging" idea to Web-based email. Basically, this made real-time email communications available to non-AOL customers and revolutionized Web-based email by making it a lot like online chat (or talking on the phone long-distance for free except that you're "talking" by typing).

    The latest development: According to USAToday, Microsoft will add the instant-messaging feature to its HotMail product, and AOL will add the free-email feature to its ICQ service. So, subscribers, pick one (or two!) and tell us which you like better. We eagerly await your feedback (via feedback@netfamilynews.org). :-) If you have teenagers in your house, they're undoubtedly the experts to turn to!

  3. Y2K at your house?

    We haven't covered the millennium bug for a while, and it's worth an update now that's we're about midway through '99. According to a family-relevant article from News.com, most consumer electronic products in our homes won't be a problem when '99 goes to '00. Those using calendar-year data (VCRs, wristwatches, camcorders, PCs, faxes, home-security products) might encounter failures that will cause some inconvenience, but they're easily adjustable. The Federal Trade Commission thinks the inconvenience will be minimal, but says to check the manufacturers' Web sites or otherwise contact them for potential problems and solutions. There are some interesting numbers in the News.com article about Americans' Y2K concerns.

    On the lighter side (well, maybe), the Y2K buzz on honey supplies. According to Wired News, thanks to fears about the millennium bug, one supplier of non-perishable foods has grown from having 12 employees to 115 within six months (hate to think what'll happen to companies like this starting around January 15 next year!).

  4. Drug sales across the 'Net: the big picture

    Doctors' prescriptions based on "virtual" examinations; pharmacies shipping pills across state lines, unlicensed; foreign pharmaceuticals feeding the cyber-black market. It's all going on in what one US lawmaker described in the New York Times as "the Wild West of drug dealing via the Internet." Not that some of the drug e-commerce isn't perfectly legitimate. It's just that - as in trading stocks or about any form of electronic commerce involving physical or financial risk - consumers need to do good research to protect themselves. If you're interested in the difference between what is "illegal" and what is "unethical" or in the many perspectives on this budding category of e-commerce, the Times piece is worth a look.

  5. Australia: One very controversial law

    Remember that touchy 'Net filtering law we reported on about a month ago? Well, it passed (way too quickly, its detractors say), approved by the Australian government this week, according to the New York Times. The law requires Australian Internet service providers "to remove objectionable material from Australian sites and to block access to similar sites overseas," the Times reports. Supporters say it protect children from indecent material; detractors call it censorship and potentially harmful to the Australian economy. At face value, the requirement of ISPs to filter is controversial in its own right; the second requirement - that ISPs actually remove "objectionable material" from Australian sites - seems at best impracticable. It's like telling magazine distributors to cut chunks of copy out of the magazines they transport to newsstands. What about the sites' publishers - those actually responsible for the content? More important, how is "objectionable" defined? What do you think? Do email us via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

  6. 'Liddy': Another pro-filtering candidate for prez

    Now there are two presidential hopefuls pushing filtering in libraries. Elizabeth Dole "asked Congress to deny federal funds to public libraries unless they restrict Internet access for all their patrons," according to Wired News. She joins Republican Sen. John McClain of Arizona in this apparent effort to win over conservative Republicans.

* * * *

Parenting tools

There are two new Web resources to tell you about this week, one a project of Safekids.com and the other a project of our friends at the Center for Media Education….

  1. Cruise Control on the 'Infobahn'

    Cruise Control, a Web primer for parents and teachers new to the 'Net was just unveiled this week. Safekids.com's Larry Magid and Netmom.com's Jean Armour Polly helped develop the content, including safety rules for kids' and families' constructive use of the Web.

    The site, which teaches Internet basics like how to use a browser, search for information, and send email, is sponsored and hosted by Ameritech, the Midwest's phone company. Its other three sponsors and biggest boosters in the public-service arena are the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, "the nation's resource center for protecting children"; Tech Corps, a nonprofit organization that helps bring Internet technology to schools; and the National Urban League, a social-service and civil-rights nonprofit.

    "Cruise Control is a good example of a company taking a proactive stance for child safety on the Internet," Larry Magid told us. "By taking a positive approach - emphasizing what's good as well as warning about the dangers, Ameritech is sending out the right message to prospective users."

    A companion CD-ROM will be released later this summer, to be used primarily by Tech Corps, as it helps schools and teachers teach basic Internet skills. In the fall, Larry and Jean will conduct Internet seminars in half a dozen cities, using the primer they helped create as their teaching tool.

  2. All about the V-Chip

    If you're like us, you've caught wind of a new technology called the V-Chip that has something to do with children and TV, but it was a very small gust of information. Well, we parents should all know enough about this technology in order to decide if it 1) fits with the way we're raising our kids, and 2) therefore can be useful to our families. Technologies like this certainly aren't for every family, but we can't know if they're for us till we know something about them!

    The Center for Media Education (CME), a content partner of Net Family News, has put a lot of time and effort into educating parents about the V-Chip. You can find much of it at "A Parents' Guide to the TV Ratings and V-Chip".

    The site is very complete: You'll find out how the V-Chip works, whether it's installed in a new TV you buy this summer or in a set-top box you can buy and connect to a set you already have. You'll learn what the ratings mean and how the V-Chip blocks shows with ratings you tell it you don't want your children to see. There's even guidance from CME and the Kaiser Family Foundation, which funded the project, on family TV viewing and on how to talk with your children about touch issues and decisions. You might find many of the tips on those Web pages useful guidance for working with kids on appropriate Internet use as well.

    The V-Chip ratings system does have its detractors. For details (and links to othe V-Chip stories), see a piece in Wired News. BTW, what do you think? Do the V-Chip and the ratings system sound like something you'd like to take advantage of for your children's TV-viewing? Please email us!

* * * *

Teen data: reality check

Several recent surveys offer parents insights into teenagers' favorite online activities. The truth might be reasonably reassuring, given what we've been reading and hearing in the media about what kids are doing on the Internet.

According to very fresh research (April '99) by NFO Interactive that was presented last month at Jupiter Communications's Digital Kids conference, 72% of all US teenagers (13-18-year-olds), about 18 million, will be online by 2003. Right now about 11 million of them are. Their top 6 Internet activities are homework, chat, music sites (listening, shopping, downloading), research, Internet games, and event information-gathering - in that order. For girls vs. boys the lineup differs a bit: Girls' order of picks is homework, online greeting cards, music sites, chat, and instant messaging. (Interesting to note that homework and music are the only non-communication items on the girls' list.) Boys' picks are homework, Internet games, instant messaging, chat, research, and music sites.

In "What Teens Really Do on the Web," writer Annette Hamilton of ZDNet, cites research by Simmons market-research firm and Web measurement service Media Metrix. They show that the sites most popular among teens are the "portals" (AOL.com, Yahoo.com, and Geocities.com being the top 3), for purposes of information searches, sending email, checking the weather, and "otherwise hanging out." The Simmons study shows the Web increasing girls' desire to learn and socialize and reducing boys' desire to sleep and watch TV. (Is this sexism or just reality - tell us what you think via feedback@netfamilynews.org.) We won't steal Annette's thunder, so go to the site to find out teen girls' top 3 sites vs. teen boys' top 3.

Of shopping: A survey by PC Data Online cited in CyberAtlas shows teen buying power affecting e-commerce figures more than expected. Shoppers in the 13-to-19-year-old age group represented 16.4% of last month's online shopping traffic, and nearly a third of all traffic at two music-related e-commerce sites, BMG Entertainment and UBL. CyberAtlas reported that other sites with a high concentration of teens include gaming and ticket sites (like Ticketmaster). That, too, says a lot about teens' online interests. (The CyberAtlas piece has a list of the 27 shopping sites teenagers frequent most.)

* * * *

Solid support for teens in chat

Our thanks to new subscriber Shelley in California for raising the following questions, because we feel the substantive answer supplied by our friends at Cybermoms (a division of CyberAngels) will be useful to many parents with teenagers who like to chat:

Shelley: "Yesterday my daughter was online in a chat room (I had put parental controls on and thought they applied to chat rooms also?) and, as she was talking with another person, she was receiving one email after another. When we clicked over to check the email there was about 25 emails for 'the best porn site' and other sexually explicit sites. I've never even received things like that!! What should I do?"

Cybermoms: "In talking to teens who use unsupervised chats, we've found many give it up because they don't like the talk about sex, as well as all the profanity and just plain meanness of other users. You might consider visiting teen chats in preparation for your child using them. Very likely you will find that teen chats are much worse than adult ones regarding the profanity and other problems you encounter. It's like being on a school playground, only there are no adults around and no rules. If there are chats she particularly likes and is already using, we can go check them out for you and let you know how they compare.

"The AOL 'young adult' rooms are really magnets for this kind of unwanted behavior. Using parental controls specifically to protect your child in chat, you could restrict your child to the Kids Only area AOL, limiting her to the Kids Only chats, which are supervised, or monitored by adults who 'dismiss' participants who ignore the rules. Whether or not you and your child decide she should chat in the People Connection chat rooms, there are steps you can take to help your teen take charge of her email and Instant Messages back from the hands of the porn purveyors:

"Go into the parental controls and adjust the settings so that no email comes from people who aren't on the approved list. It's very easy: Sign on to the AOL master screen name for your account. Click 'My AOL.' Click 'Parental Controls.' Click 'Set Parental Controls.' Now look at the setting for your teenager. (Depending on your daughter's age, you may wish to change the age category of your child here. For now, just know how you have the settings.) Click 'Go to Custom Controls.' Click 'Mail in the list,' and then click the red 'Mail Controls' button. Click your child's screen name and click 'EDIT.' Click 'Allow email only from selected AOL members, Internet Domains, and addresses.' In the box at the right, add in addresses from which it's ok for your child to get mail. (Suggestions: friends she might want on her Buddy List, you, relatives, etc.) This works just like an address list - just type in the people from whom you want your child to receive mail. All other mail is blocked. (If a new friend wants to send mail to your child, you'll have to go in through the master screen name again, and add their name to the list.) Click 'OK' to save the settings.

"If you want to block Instant Messages from all users, click 'Instant Messages' and put a check in the box next to your child's screen name. If you only want to block Instant Messages from some users, just leave this setting alone and help your child set up her Buddy List ... more on that in a minute. You can change other settings here, according to your child's age and your preferences.

"Once you have finished setting up the privacy settings as desired, click 'OK.' Then log off the master screen name, and log into your child's screen name with her. In her Buddy List, click 'Setup.' Click 'Privacy Preferences.' Click 'Allow only those people whose screen names I list.' Your child can put in the email addresses of those friends with whom she wants to chat privately. Nobody else's Instant Messages will get through.

"For further privacy protection, while still in your child's screen name, click 'MY AOL.' Click 'My Member Profile.' Just check this over with your child and, together, discuss and remove any personal information that she may have listed here. The safest thing to do is not to have a personal profile at all. If she would really like a personal profile, there should be no personal information listed here at all, such as real name, address, phone number, town, or school teams. All the information listed should be for fun only - nothing that could help anyone locate your child in real life. Once you've made the appropriate changes, click 'UPDATE.'

"While you're doing all this with your child, now is a great time to review the general safety rules. You can find them in bulleted format on that page. As for chat, the basic advice we offer parents is: Empower your child to leave chats when the topics make her uncomfortable. Also empower your child to ignore A/S/L [age/sex/location] requests. Aside from being a rude question, this information is nobody's business. Teach your child either not to answer such questions, or just to leave the chat. Adults may feel comfortable saying, 'I don't give out that information online,' but this can be very difficult for kids, even older teens, to do."

Material supplied by CyberAngels reflects their views, not necessarily those of Net Family News. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email us.

* * * *

Subscribers write

Here's a bit of point/counterpoint on filtering from thoughtful subscribers.

On filtering in public spaces from Carol in Illinois (a grandmother of six and former librarian):

"Thanks for all you do to keep us up to date on the fast-moving world of kids and computer communication. In answer to your request for comments relative to filtering laws, I am strongly opposed to both S.97 and the amendment to the Juvenile Justice bill because:

  1. "[Filtering] is and should continue to be a local problem for community school boards to decide.
  2. "In most good schools, it is unnecessary because kids' time on the Internet is directed and supervised, and they don't have time to go looking for 'pornographic' sites.
  3. "Filters are only computer programs and not necessarily good programs. Why people who don't trust their teachers and school boards would trust a computer program designed by someone they don't know is beyond me.
  4. "Federal action on this matter is pure political show by people who don't care about kids but think this is a way to get votes.
  5. "Long before a federal law can be passed there will be new and better programs to help direct kids' use of the Internet. This is like passing a law against buggy whips!!
  6. "Finally, I think concerns about privacy and commercialism should take priority over worries about pornography.

"Love your newsletter - no one else covers the subject (Kids and the Internet) like you do!!

From Regina in Texas:

"Thanks for keeping me informed. Yes, I favor 'constant' filtering on the Internet of obscene & harmful material. There is no reason for children or even teens to try to understand this junk when they are young. They just need to have fun being a kid. As far as that goes, I don't even want to see it."

* * * *

Tell your story - for a forthcoming book

Parry Aftab, executive director of CyberAngels, is working on a book - The Parents' Guide to Protecting Children in Cyberspace - and she'd like to include families' own experiences on the 'Net. Here are some examples of what she's looking for: "war stories about online safety, what your kids got into trouble doing online, stories about filtering or monitoring, family rules and policies you've worked out, viruses you've received over the 'Net, or questions you'd really like answered." The book's pub date is this coming October (published by McGraw-Hill), so don't wait too long. Please e-mail your stories to Parry, or - if you're willing to share them with fellow subscribers in this space - via feedback@netfamilynews.org. We always love to hear your stories.

* * * *

Share with a Friend!! If you find the newsletter useful, won't you tell your friends and relatives? We would much appreciate your referral.

To subscribe, they can just send an e-mail to subscribe@netfamilynews.org - no need to type anything in the Subject field or the body of the message. We are always happy to hear from potential sponsors and distribution partners as well - via info@netfamilynews.org.

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

Sincerely,

Net Family News


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


Copyright 1999 Net Family News, Inc. | Our Privacy Policy