News for the Week of December 16, 2007
In this week's tech news, we peer across the Pacific to see what Net connecting looks like in Oz...
Australia's very connected families
Ninety percent of Australian families with children are online, up from 7% in 2005, reports and Australian IT, citing new findings from the Australian Communications and Media Authority, Three-quarters (76%) of those online families have broadband connections. The study also found that "most Australian families with children older than eight now have three televisions, three mobile phones, a gaming console, and Internet access," and 98% own a computer. Oz's 15-to-17-year-olds spend on average an hour and 15 minutes a day online, and 42% have posted content to social-networking sites. As for TV, it has diminished in importance in Australia too, but 20% of Australian children have TV sets in their bedrooms now (up from 8% in 1995), and that compares to 70% of UK kids and 75% of US kids, according to the report. "The vast majority of [Australian] parents say their children's media consumption is fairly easy to control."
'Cool girl' game raises eyebrows
Is it a way for "cool girl" wannabes to vent their frustrations, does it teach them to bully, or does it simply entertain? Those are the questions reportedly surrounding a new mobile-phone game in Australia that's drawing international attention. Called "Coolest Girl in School", the game - quite an anomaly because designed specifically for girls - "invites young players to 'lie, bitch, and flirt your way to the top of the high school ladder'," reports Sydney-based SmartHouse magazine. It went on sale last week and the Australian Family Association called for it to be banned. The game was designed by Adelaide-based developers Holly Owen of Champagne for the Ladies and Karyn Lanthois of Kukan Studio, who said they were surprised by the pre-release international attention.
Oz union's Facebook profile
The Australian Workers Union is marketing itself to youth by establishing a presence in Facebook, Australian IT reports. Though union leaders say its profile will get more sophisticated, for now "users can add the 'Proud AWU Supporter' application to their profile pages to obtain the organisation's latest news feeds." Version 2.0 will let users "interact directly" with the union, which says it wants to differentiate itself from most unions, which "generally ignore new forms of communication."
In other news...
- Schools' sex-offender detection tech. The national sex-offender database is being put to another use in some of the US's public schools. The Washington Post describes a new computerized security system being put in place in the Prince William County School District, Virginia's second-largest. The system, called "The Raptor" "scans government-issued identification cards and checks them against a database of listings of 460,000 sex offenders from across the country." Designed by a Texas company, it's now in some 4,000 US schools, the Post reports. "In many cases, the security programs can also store parental custody information and tabulate parent volunteer hours." Some parents think it's a lot faster than waiting in line to sign in. But some immigrant-rights organizations worry about possible privacy violation, though school officials say IDs will only be checked against sex-offender registries. "Signs are being placed at schools' front desks to advise visitors that they can show an ID other than a U.S.-issued driver's license, such as foreign driver's license, a passport, a green card or a reentry permit."
- Very public binge drinking. When CNN contacted a 22-year-old university business major about a video she posted of herself drunk she took it down, saying the interview request made her realize anyone could see it, CNN reports. She's a member of a Facebook group with more than 172,000 members called "Thirty Reasons Girls Should Call it a Night," which has a page linking to 5,000 photos of drunk college students - many of them extremely humiliating (CNN describes some of them). And many of the photos "are accompanied by full names and the colleges the women attend, apparently without much concern that parents, or potential employers, will take a look." I hope it doesn't take a call from a news reporter for it to occur to other group members that the images and videos they post could be harmful to future prospects! Forty percent of US college students binge drink, reports CNN, citing a 2007 report by the Center on Alcohol and Substance Abuse.
- Fresh data on phone-based porn. "Revenues from mobile 'adult services' are set to approach $3.5 billion by 2010," reports VNUNET in the UK. It's citing new findings by Juniper Research, which says the growth "will be fuelled by increasing adoption of streamed video and video chat" on phones and "a sharp rise" in the use of "3G" or smart phones that are really Net-connected computers more than mere communications devices. A lot of that new revenue will come from North America because it's an "underdeveloped" market for phone-based pornography, compared to Europe. And eastern European consumption "is rising at a higher rate than previously anticipated." Cellphone service providers are reluctant to provide the content in North America, VNUNET reports, but the Web on phones is another whole platform for porn operators. in the adoption of 3G services. But analysts say that the most popular content is "graphic amateur content." That would be the user-produced kind, not the "professional" kind. What worries me is the kids who share risqué or sexually explicit video of themselves via the Web or phone - the devastating impact this can have on their lives if the content is made public (see "Teens' child porn convictions upheld"). Here are some tips in ConnectSafely.org for safe video-sharing.
- Parents speaking 'txt'? This is probably not news to you: Many technologically challenged parents are being introduced to the world of texting by their children, the Denver Post reports . "Statistics point emphatically to kids and young adults under 25 driving the tidal surge in text messaging - up fourfold in the past two years to almost 30 billion messages a month," the Post cites wireless industry figures as showing. But I love the basic message of the article, that "the process of young people instructing their parents can be gratifying for both." It tells of an Arizona computer services company advising parents that it's fun to surprise your kids by sending them an out-of-the-blue message like, "I love you" or "What would you like for dinner?" Meanwhile, it looks like 2007 is the year when Americans will have spent more on cellphones than on landlines, the Associated Press reports.
