News for the Week of February 12, 2006
The number of things online kids need protection from has grown quite a bit in the decade-or-so we've had the Web. In online safety's early days, pornography was the main blip on our radar screens. Then it was online predators. Lately, with cyberbullying, blogging, and all manner of kid-published content, they're learning about how they can protect themselves from each other and even themselves. The big news this week? That oldest issue - protection against porn. Why? Because COPA, the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, is back in the headlines...
Will COPA get the go-ahead?
It's hard to say if it will, but everybody will be watching the next set of high-level arguments over the 1998 law in Philadelphia's Third Circuit Court of Appeals in the fall. It raises a question courts have been wrestling with for years, both sides of which nearly every American cares about deeply: How simultaneously to protect free speech and online kids. Wired News has some excellent background.
The two were never such a problem for each other till the Internet arrived. The first time they bumped into each other was when the Supreme Court had to decide on the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which it struck down in mid-'97 because the court said it violated the First Amendment. Not long after, COPA (aka son-of-CDA) got blocked by a federal court in Philadelphia and has been bouncing back and forth between that and the Supreme Court ever since, with the latter sending it back down to Philly for the third time, for a full trial in the fall (see my 1/20 issue for more on this). Among other things, the court will look at whether current filtering technology will provide better child protection than a law requiring porn producers (when many are not US-based and not accountable to the law) to block children's access with some sort of barrier like a credit card. Check out the Wired News article for a sense of how the Net and its users have changed since the Supreme Court's decision on CDA, and (on its 2nd page) which of its provisions were not challenged and do help protect kids.
Filtering, parenting or the law?
It'd be great if there were more choices but - in any case - the protection "tool" that comes up more than any these days is parenting. That's because no longer does a child simply access the Net via a family PC plugged into a wall (hopefully) in a single high-traffic spot in the house. Laws and filters can't seem to keep up with the ever-more-mobile Internet. "Now parents face video iPods with 150 hours of viewing storage that seem tailor-made for illicit flicks and an always-on Internet that delivers a wealth of porn that neither the government nor software companies are able to adequately block," reports the San Francisco Chronicle in a thorough update on how best to protect kids from porn. The article includes the online-safety practices of several smart parents.
In other news...
- New PC patches! Windows PC users should make sure they get the seven security patches Microsoft issued this week, two of which the company says are critical, the Washington Post reports. To get the patches, go to Windows Update or, to make patching automatic, go to this Microsoft page. Another option is to subscribe to Windows OneCare Live, free because still in beta. Microsoft will start charging $49.95/year in June, but if you sign up by April 30, it'll be $19.95 for at least the first year.
- Playboy in MySpace. The magazine's Web site will soon feature "Girls of MySpace," Online Media Daily reports. "MySpace is not participating in the pictorial, but Playboy.com has established its own MySpace page, which is promoting the search for women to pose; Playboy.com also has purchased ad space on MySpace," according to Online Media Daily, which adds that Playboy has been "overwhelmed with the number and quality of submissions." The development "comes at a dicey time for MySpace, which has found itself under scrutiny for exposing teens to possible danger." MySpace currently has about 13.5 million teenaged members.
- Music piracy & iPods. The RIAA has opened a new front in its war on music piracy, and it's not about file-sharing or P2P. "Wipe your iPod before selling it," The Register is telling people. The Recording Industry Association of America "last week told sellers in the US that doing so is a clear violation of copyright law [at least in the US and Europe] and warned them that it's sniffing out for infringers."
- Parents, teachers agree ... on the Internet & schoolwork, anyway. A new Associated Press-AOL Learning Services Poll found that the two have very different views on life in school, the AP reports. But there's one thing about which they see eye-to-eye: the Internet's value. The survey found that "81% of teachers and 83% of parents agree that the Internet and online sources are helpful." Here's AOL's press release, and here's the Christian Science Monitor on how software helps with homework and communications between home and school.
