by Larry Magid

Unlike some of my fellow Internet safety activists, I think that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers did the right thing by rejecting the proposed .XXX top level domain designation. See Story

For the record, in addition to my work as technology commentator, I run SafeKids.com and Safeteens.com and am co-director of BlogSafety.com.

Despite years of advocacy on the part of its sponsors, I remain unconvinced that that the .XXX top level domain would have furthered the causes of child protection or free speech. It might have been effective had it been mandatory for all porn sites, but that would have brought up enormous free speech issues that many of us would not fathom. Because it would have been voluntary, there would continue to be porn sites with .com TLDs, possibly giving parents a false sense of security by believing that all porn was walled off. I don’t agree with those who say it would have promoted porn nor do I fully agree with those who fear that such a voluntary process would have been a likely first step towards government regulation. I do, however, understand why some adult site operators and civil libertarians would worry about that, especially if the voluntary xxx didn’t cut back significantly on the use of .com for porn site. › Continue reading…

by Anne Collier
NetFamilyNews

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has 1,434 MySpace friends – and counting (1,417 at the beginning of this week). That means 1,434 MySpace users have a link on their profiles to the Lifeline. This past year, just one of those profiles referred nearly 14,000 people to the national hotline. “Our site received more than 128,000 unique visitors from MySpace in the past 12 months,” the Lifeline’s Christopher Gandin Le told me, referring to the Lifeline’s Web site (as opposed to its MySpace page). Even though MySpace donated $3 million in Lifeline ad placements a month this past year, only 13,000 of those 128,000 referrals actually came from the Lifeline’s own MySpace profile. “It’s individuals who are exercising the power they have to help their friends and visitors,” said Le, who is resource and information manager for the federally funded network with 120 call centers around the country. The support they give callers is free, confidential, and available 24/7, and they receive 1,300 calls a day nationwide (if someone doesn’t answer after six rings, the call bounces to the nearest crisis center). But they don’t only help people in suicidal crisis. The crisis centers get questions about depression, relationships, loneliness, substance abuse, and how to help friends and loved ones, I learned from Ginny Gohr, director of the Girls and Boys National Hotline, which is both local to Nebraska and the backup national hotline in the Lifeline network (its tagline: “Any problem. Any Time.”). For more on this and the Lifeline’s growing presence elsewhere on the social Web, please click to this week’s issue of my newsletter.

by Larry Magid

Whether your goal is to influence an election, display your creativity or just have some fun, creating and editing your own video is easier than ever.

YouTube and other online video sharing services are all the rage — getting plenty of attention along with some hefty lawsuits, such as Viacom’s $1 billion complaint that YouTube has been allowing people to illegally post segments of the media company’s copyrighted programs from MTV, Comedy Central and other channels.

While it’s true that some users ignore YouTube’s admonition: “Do not upload copyrighted material for which you don’t own the rights or have permission from the owner” there are plenty of people posting their own video which is exactly what these services are designed for. › Continue reading…

by Larry Magid

The March 22^nd ruling by judge Lowell Reed Jr. heralds the end of a long and torturous battle over Congress’s ill-fated 1998 Children’s Online Protection Act. The law, if it had ever been allowed to go into effect, would impose a $50,000 fine to any commercial website that allowed minors to access material deemed “harmful to minors.” The idea was to require sites that had such material to require a credit card or other documentation that would establish that the site visitor was an adult.

I testified as an expert witness at the original trial on behalf of the ACLU. My job was to explain to the judge that there are other methods parents can use to control what their kids do on the web. Though imperfect, Internet filters are a relatively effective means to block kids from visiting sites that parents – not the government – deem to be inappropriate for their child. As founder of SafeKids.com (www.safekids.com), I had spent a great deal of time looking into effective and ineffective ways to protect kids on the net. I’m currently co-director of BlogSafety.com (www.blogsafety.com), a forum where parents can discuss child safety. › Continue reading…

by Anne Collier
NetFamilyNews.org 

Parents who have seen “To Catch a Predator” on Dateline NBC are asking how much they should be worrying about their social-networking kids. They need to know that the Predator series is no representation of risks to youth on the social Web. It’s not even presenting a credible picture of sexual predation in general, we find in an in-depth look at the social costs of producing “The Shame Game” in the Columbia Journalism Review. It shows how Dateline is fueling public fears not because it’s representing reality but because it’s representing reality TV.

“The explanation of why Dateline has seized on this mythical trend [of growing numbers of sexual predators] to anchor its venerable news show,” CJR suggests, “is that reality TV has so altered the broadcast landscape that traditional newsmagazine fare — no matter how provocative — just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

The CJR article continues, “Dateline has argued that ‘Predator’ serves a genuine public good, but it could be argued that, in fact, Dateline is doing the public a disservice.” One significant disservice is the way Dateline presented the numbers. “When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech about a major initiative to combat the ‘growing problem’ of Internet predators, he cited a statistic that 50,000 such would-be pedophiles were prowling the Net at any given moment and attributed it to Dateline.” An investigative reporter looked into the figure Attorney General Gonzales used and found Dateline had gotten it from “a retired FBI agent who consulted with the show” and who, when asked, suggested he kind of pulled it out of the air (Dateline has since disowned the figure, CJR adds). › Continue reading…

by Anne Collier
NetFamilyNews

It’s very difficult to determine how much criminal intent a minor has in cases of possession of child pornography, the Bangor (Me.) Daily News reports. Bangor police confiscated a 15-year-old boy’s home computer on Dec. 20 after finding it contained child porn. They said they collected enough computer evidence to charge him with “felony possession of sexually explicit materials.” Apparently, his possession of the images was reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline.com, which is how Bangor police learned of case. As of this report, it’s not known if the boy will be prosecuted. A lot of cases like this don’t get prosecuted for reasons of “lack of criminal intent,” according to a police officer on Maine’s Computer Crimes Task Force policy board. Cases like this that are most likely to be prosecuted are those in which the subject has disseminated the child-porn images, he said. The Daily News also reported that,” on average, police officers in Maine seize a computer every two days.”

by Anne Collier
NetFamilyNews

Way to go, parents – 86.4% of teens say their parents have discussed online safety with them. That’s teen users of the social virtual world Habbo.com, anyway, but I suspect they’re very representative of teen social-networkers in general. Habbo recently completed its Teen Online Safety Awareness Month, which it says got “over 20,000 teens taking part in safety-related activities and educational programs, including many that involved discussion time between the teens and their parents. Nearly 21,000 teens received limited edition virtual safety badges to show that they had their parents read Habbo’s online safety guide. Nearly 10,000 teens visited a virtual lounge within the community with a safety theme.” On the sobering side, here are other key findings:

By DAVID FINKELHOR

Discuss this article in our forum 

“What are you doing here?” asks NBC’s Chris Hansen, as he steps into the room to confront would-be child molesters in the fabulously successful “To Catch a Predator” series. But as the show now takes its extended national tour into Florida, having left Texas with one suspect dead and one district attorney fuming, perhaps it is time to ask Hansen and his colleagues the same question.

Is it really a good idea to have a TV program conduct undercover sex crime investigations? Simple as it may seem to impersonate a 13-year-old online and attract a swarm of felons, undercover police work in this field is a highly technical business. It requires knowledge of the legalities concerning entrapment and the admissibility of evidence.

It requires awareness of complex state laws around sexual solicitations of minors. It merits professional understanding about the dynamics of sex offenders, and appreciation of the possible dangers to innocent neighbors, show staff and the suspects themselves. The Texas DA believes that if local police had not been catering to “Dateline’s” cameras and entertainment priorities, they might have averted the suicide. › Continue reading…

Parents,

Your kids are on MySpace but what about you? In this 2 minute audio slide show, Larry Magid, of SafeKids.com and BlogSafety.com takes you on a tour of setting up a MySpace Account.

Here’s a little video clip we posted on YouTube about how to turn on and use Vista’s Parental Controls: