Week of November 13, 2005

Heads up, parents, caregivers, and educators, the top story this week is “Porn's new platforms”....

By "platforms" I mean video players, music players, phones, gameplayers - and this story’s been all over tech news of late. Online porn is getting much more mobile. One publisher told the Washington Post that his industry's Web business peaked a couple of years ago, so there's great interest among porn operators in moving onto new, more portable platforms. Of course, because of the iPod's popularity, much of the news focuses on that (it took 20 days from the day videos became available for iTunes to reach 1 million video downloads), but it’s a good idea to look at the big picture.

Besides video iPods (see this about how porn, formatted for the iPod, will be conveniently searchable at Guba.com), there's the everywhere news of porn and parental controls on phones (last week). And last July, in "Mobile porn", I linked to a Newsweek piece reporting that Japanese adult-DVD makers H.M.P. and GLAY'z had joined Playboy on the Playstation Portable gameplayer.

The PSP does have parental controls. Here's a post about them at PSPJunkies.com : "With those porn coming out, the GTA ["Hot Coffee" mod] scandal, if I was a parent, I'd freak with real scary thoughts of having my 10-year-old having hands on the Sony PSP. With the 2.0 firmware update, under Security Settings, a concerned parent can set up the Parental Controls to stop little kiddies playing that R-rated stuff not meant for them. To set it up (or un-set it), the password is 0000, and turn it on as you like. This is a community service from PSPJunkies making the Sony PSP a safer device. :)" [Of course, there's a workaround detailed at PSPHacks.net, which someone not much over 10 could easily find.]

Naturally, the Web is far from passe, especially on the amateur front - for example, "vlogs" (video blogs) are taking off, with tech startups offering "tools that make it easy to create, distribute, and monetize homemade content," Red Herring reports.

In Other News

  • Anime on iPods. It's nice to know the porn industry isn't the only early adopter of new technology. Anime characters can now be found on video iPods too, the New York Times reports. Nine days after Apple introduced the device, anime distributor Central Park Media announced it would make some titles available on iTunes for the video iPod. Titles the Times mentions include "the adventures of Chirico Cuvie in the series 'Armored Trooper Votoms'," and - to be offered a little later - "Descendants of Darkness," "Revolutionary Girl Utena," and "Shadow Star Narutaru."
  • More 'digital shoplifters' sued. That's what Britain's version of the RIAA, the BPI, is calling the file-sharers it's suing these days: "digital shoplifters." The BPI announced yesterday it had filed 65 new lawsuits in the UK, "among 2,100 similar cases launched around the globe this week by local recording industry trade associations," The Register reports. The 2,100 this week bring the total to 3,800 lawsuits, in addition to "the 16,200-odd individuals targeted to date by the RIAA in the US."
  • Everybody's site? database? store? Want to put the new baby's photo on the Web so all the distant relatives can ooh and ah? Or perhaps your child will post her class schedule so you know when *not* to call on her cellphone? Now you can put info or photos or sell goods on the Web for free and for everyone in the world to see at a new service called Google Base, basically Google's new global database or classifieds, maybe (though postings need to be in English, Google says). Certainly there are qualifications: no pirated material, no promotion of violence, no gambling, hacking, or weapons or drugs sales, and no child pornography or "non-consensual material" (which means consensual explicit content isn't ruled out, for parents concerned about kids' exposure to that). Here’s CNET on this.
  • TV on the Web. Shows old and new are popping up all over cyberspace these days, a true trend. First Desperate Housewives turned up in iTunes (along with a few other ABC shows). Now AOL announces it's launching an online TV channel, In2TV, offering dozens of old shows like "Welcome Back Kotter" and "Growing Pains," grouped "by genre, including comedies, dramas, animation, sci-fi and horror, action-adventure and 'vintage TV'," the Associated Press reports.
  • Facebook getting students in trouble. Colleges and universities are beginning to use Facebook.com as a tool for monitoring and protecting students. "Nine underage students at N.C. State are facing charges of violating the school's alcohol policy after a residential adviser visited one of their profiles on Facebook and found links to pictures of them drinking," CNET reports. The article also looks at what high schools are doing about their students blogging at MySpace and other social-networking sites, and there's some good advice (in a sidebar) about parental involvement.

For daily news, visit the NetFamilyNews blog or NetFamilyNews.org.