PFF has just released Version 2.2 of my book, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” It can be found online at: http://www.pff.org/parentalcontrols
As promised when we launched book last month, we plan on making ongoing updates available to ensure that the report offers a timely, comprehensive snapshot of the amazingly diverse marketplace of parental control tools and methods, as well as the ongoing state of child safety efforts.
Toward that end, Version 2.2 offers the following updates:
* over 20 new color exhibits or screen captures that highlight the many excellent websites or products on the market to help parents better manage media;
* a new section on how the “power of the purse” and sensible media budgeting can serve as the ultimate parental control strategy;
* a short section of good books on Digital Age parenting and online child safety;
* various other additions, clarifications and improvements to many other sections.
If you have other suggested additions, updates or corrections, please let me know. Version 2.3 of the book is already in the works!
Ars has a report on a new study showing that college students are shockingly prone to phishing if the email they receive appears to come from an acquaintance:
To generate a database of relationships, the authors used a publicly-available Perl module to crawl social networking sites, including Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, and LinkedIn. They selected Indiana students from this database and picked a target population based on the quality of the personal information that was obtained.
Test subjects received an e-mail with headers spoofed so that it appeared to originate from a member of the subject’s social network. The message body was comprised of the phrase “hey, check this out!” along with a link to a site ostensibly at Indiana University. The link, however, would direct browsers to www.whuffo.com, where they were asked to enter their Indiana username and password. Control subjects were sent the same message originating from a fictitious individual at the university.
The results were striking: apparently, if the friends of a typical college student are jumping off a cliff, the student would too. Even though the spoofed link directed browsers to an unfamiliar .com address, having it sent by a familiar name sent the success rate up from 16 percent in controls to over 70 percent in the experimental group.
Of course, men were far more likely to respond to emails from women than from other men.
Last week, Jerry Ellig and I filed a reply commment (PDF) in the FCC’s ongoing broadband competition proceeding. In it we examined the evidence put forth during the comment period. Today we summarize our findings in an op-ed in TCS Daily:
The Federal Communications Commission recently asked for evidence that broadband Internet companies currently engage in data discrimination that would justify regulation of the Internet. …
… the Commission explicitly asked commenters to “provide specific, verifiable examples with supporting documentation, and [to] limit their comments to those practices that are technically feasible today.” Close to 10,000 comments were submitted to the FCC, yet all but 143 were what the FCC calls “brief text comments,” many of which were form letters generated at the behest of advocacy groups.
Of the 143 more extensive comments, only 66 are longer than two pages, and of these only 20 advocate some form of new regulation. None of these 20 offers any significant empirical evidence to suggest that there currently exists a “market failure” or other systemic problem justifying regulatory intervention in the name of net neutrality.
American consumers are poised to reap a windfall of benefits from a new wave of broadband deployment. But you would never know it by the rhetoric of those who would have us believe that the nation is falling behind, indeed in free fall.
Looming over the horizon are heavy-handed government mandates setting arbitrary standards, speeds and build-out requirements that could favor some technologies over others, raise prices and degrade service. This would be a mistaken road to take — although it would hardly be the first time in history that alarmists have ignored cold, hard facts in pursuit of bad policy.
Adam and I are heading down to North Carolina tomorrow to testify against a bill pending in the state legislature that would require anyone under 18 to have a parent’s permission to join a social networking site such as MySpace. Adam has written extensively about Internet safety. Here’s my take.
At first glance, that might seem like a sensible idea. But, as I keep pointing out to anyone who will listen, it just won’t work. How can a website be sure that someone signing up is really over 18? How can a website be sure that a person giving parental consent is really a parent? Experience and common sense suggest that education and prevention are a far better approach to Internet safety.
Indeed, a study published earlier this year in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine suggests that a lot of the advice we have been giving young people about Internet safety may be off the mark anyway. The researchers found no evidence that sharing personal information online increases the chances of online victimization, like unwanted sexual solicitation and harassment. Victimization is more likely to result from other online behavior, like talking about sex with people met online and intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet.
These findings are in line with earlier research by the University of New Hampshire that examined 2,500 cases where juveniles were victims of sex crimes committed by people they met on the Internet. The study found that these children, almost all teenagers, were not victims of strangers who had lured them into situations where they could be abducted or assaulted. In fact, just the opposite was the case.
On Wednesday this week (7/25; 11:00 a.m.), the Cato Institute will be having a policy forum on the dispute between the United States and the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda over U.S. restrictions on Internet gambling.
The U.S. has lost a series of World Trade Organization rulings on its Internet gambling laws, and its intransigence threatens the viability of the WTO. Will the U.S. burn down an institution of free trade to protect American grown-ups from their own entertainment choices?
Register, watch the live webcast, or watch the recorded webcast here.
Mark Blafkin is confused about my analogy between eminent domain and software patents, which probably means I didn’t explain the analogy very clearly. So let me see if I can be more explicit.
The way modern “redevelopment” projects work is that a large developer will go to a city and say “We would like to develop a new shopping mall/office park/apartment complex/whatever in such-and-such a neighborhood. But we’re only willing to do so if you give us control over all development within that neighborhood. We don’t want to worry about some other company building something in the neighborhood that we didn’t plan for.”
The city will then scrutinize the application, go through some legal technicalities such as declaring the neighborhood to be “blighted” (which, with enough ingenuity almost any neighborhood can be), and then sign a contract with the developer that essentially gives the developer a monopoly on development in the area. Any property owners who refuse to go along with the developer’s plans are removed using eminent domain.
Now, a company like Verizon will go to the patent office and say, in effect, “We would like to develop a new VoIP application. But we’re only willing to do so if you give us control over all development of VoIP applications like ours. We don’t want to worry about some other company building a competing product that we didn’t plan for.”
Try as I might, I can’t think of any strong tie between this video and technology policy. (Not very) sorry for deviating from TLF’s raison d’etre. (Hat tip: The Agitator)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
PFF has just released Version 2.2 of my book, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” It can be found online at: http://www.pff.org/parentalcontrols
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.