News
September 29, 2005
Most Americans Say 'Net is a Danger to Kids
Nearly everyone thinks the Internet is a menace to kids.
In a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Zone Labs, 94 percent of consumers agreed that the Internet presents a threat to children. Results of the survey of 2,322 men and women were released on Thursday.
The respondents' biggest fear was that kids would connect with pedophiles in chat rooms; 61 percent cited predators in chat rooms as the biggest threat. An additional 16 percent said pornographic Web sites posed a danger.
The survey also asked about phishing scams, computer viruses and spyware from Web sites for gaming.
Consumers in this survey didn't think the hazards of spyware and identity theft applied to children. Only 8 percent believed phishing was the biggest threat to kids. Just 3 percent identified spyware as the biggest threat to kids, and a mere 4 percent said viruses were the worst danger.
Of course, they are a danger to adults with credit cards and credit scores, yet only 50 percent had installed a software firewall, and only 23 percent had installed a full security suite to secure their personal computers against such Internet threats.
To get the word out, Zone Labs launched a new consumer education portal, safe.zonelabs.com, where people can download a free guide called "How to Protect your Family Online." Consumers also can download the company's free ZoneAlarm personal firewall and find out about the company's other products.
Laura Yecies, general manager of Zone Labs, said the company wants to get across the message that both technology and good parenting are needed to keep kids safe. "You need to take the basic, logical steps to protect the computer and also the basic parenting steps of working with your kids and supervising them appropriately," she said.
One tip in the guide is that the PC should live in the family room or other public place, not behind a closed bedroom door. "There's a totally different psychology between having the PC in a family room where mom is coming in and out than when it's in a bedroom with a closed door," Yecies said.
The company also signed on as the primary sponsor of SafeKids.com, a Web site dedicated to helping families make smart choices about technology and the Internet.
SafeKids.com founder, journalist Larry Magid, is also on the board of directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
"Parents are right to be concerned with what happens in chat rooms," Magid said. "The Internet has opened the door for predators to reach children. They have an enormous opportunity that was not there before."
But Magid pointed out that the Internet is not the only threat. While Internet chat is the most dangerous activity at home, he said that mobile phones have opened up another way for pedophiles to communicate with kids -- away from their parents' eyes.
"The danger comes from instant messaging on phones, and also the exchange of pictures or video in both directions, as well as telephone calls," Magid said. "Now that a very large percentage of teens have cell phones, they're accessible away from home."
Ultimately, Magid said, it's not a technology problem, but a social one. It's kids who don't get security and emotional support from family and friends who are most at risk of getting involved with an adult stranger who seems so much more available and understanding than the parents.
"Part of the answer," Magid said, "has to do with creating support systems at home that are adequate, and part is the kids understanding that there is no free lunch."
Teenager Dumped By Chat-Room Girlfriend
CYBERSPACE -- Joey Passmore is alone. The 14-year-old Internet enthusiast recently lost his cyber-girlfriend and computer soulmate, LUV_U2, and he's not sure how to deal with the confusing new emotions that have begun to stir inside him.
"I don't understand," moped Joey. "I gave her my love, my devotion, and the IP's of some private FTP sites. "
Joey, 14, never met LUV_U2 in Real Life™. They met online almost two months ago, but were committed to each other after only a few short chat sessions over a two-week period.
"Something clicked right from the start," said Joey. "I admit, I found her choice of avatar sexually attractive, but there's more to her than just that. I would show up in the #lookN4love chatroom on Undernet, and we would share the time together, while we did homework, watched 'Mad About You' repeats, and played PopCap games over the Net."
"I thought we had something special," continued Joey. "I would send her e-cards, and links to special poems that were written for people like us. I even photoshopped our avatars together on a Martian landscape--way romantic. But then that one evening, she came into the IRC channel and was really quiet. I knew something was wrong."
Joey has been unable to talk about his break-up with family members and even considered selling his computer, and joining the school volleyball team, just to get away from the pain. At fourteen, break-ups are awkward to deal with. This was Joey's first romance and he believes his few friends at school would only laugh at him if he mentioned it to any of them.
"Those guys at school would only want to know how far I got, like did she send pictures of her tits, or something like that," said an angry Joey. "They wouldn't understand it was so much more than that."
His only source of closure has been a couple of Internet love forums that he has bookmarked on his web browser.
"I posted a message on a message board for heartbroken individuals who were recently dumped," said Joey, sobbing quietly, "but the only response was from some joker who asked how I knew it wasn't a man I was dating. How cruel can you get?"
"We were at that stage in our relationship where we were almost ready to exchange ICQ numbers, a huge leap in commitment," said Joey, wiping his nose. "Someday I had hoped we could swap actual snail-mail addresses, maybe even a photo, and then, who knows after that? I guess she got scared. I don't understand."
Joey isn't sure he can trust cyberwomen anymore, and is afraid to reveal his true self online to another. He may find escape by interacting only with girls he knows from school, church, and his neighbourhood. But that would mean meeting them and Joey isn't ready for social encounters yet.
"I may never be able to cyberdate again," cried Joey. "I've been hurt once, and now I may never be able to use that same alias. "
Joey almost deleted the chat logs he had with LUV_U2 in a fit of anger. "I was hurt, and I wanted to hurt. But now, those lines of text are the only thing I have left to cherish," said Joey. "The smilicons we shared were special, but now I may never smilicon again."
The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, newly released documents reveal.
In April 2003, the CIA agreed to fund a series of research projects that the documents indicate were intended to create "new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology." One of those projects is research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., devoted to automated monitoring and profiling of the behavior of chat-room users.
Listening in
The CIA has been working behind the scenes for a number of months to help develop technology for monitoring chat on the Internet. A real-world test starts with the New Year.
November 2002: Invitation-only workshop convened by CIA and NSF on antiterrorism research.
April 2003: CIA and NSF sign "memorandum of understanding" to fund technology research.
June 2004: Deadline for submitting research proposals to NSF.
July 2004: CIA and NSF review nearly 250 research proposals.
January 2005: Scheduled start date of chat room monitoring project at Rensselaer Polytechnic.
Even though the money ostensibly comes from the National Science Foundation, CIA officials were involved in selecting recipients for the research grants, according to a contract between the two agencies obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and reviewed by CNET News.com.
NSF program director Leland Jameson said Wednesday the two-year agreement probably will not be renewed for the 2005 fiscal year. "Probably we won't be working with the CIA anymore at all," Jameson said. "I think that people have moved on to other things."
The NSF grant for chat-room surveillance was reported earlier this year, but without disclosure of the CIA's role in the project. The NSF-CIA memorandum of understanding says that while the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the fight against terrorism presented U.S. spy agencies with surveillance challenges, existing spy "capabilities can be significantly enhanced with advanced technology."
EPIC director Marc Rotenberg, whose nonprofit group obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, said the CIA's clandestine involvement was worrisome. "The intelligence community is changing the priorities of scientific research in the U.S.," Rotenberg said. "You have to be careful that the National Science Foundation doesn't become the National Spy Foundation."
"The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention."
--Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute research proposal
A CIA representative would not answer questions, saying the agency's policy is never to talk about funding. The two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers involved, Bulent Yener and Mukkai Krishnamoorthy, did not respond to interview requests.
Their proposal, also disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF. It says: "We propose a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping...The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention."
Yener and Krishnamoorthy, both associate professors of computer science, wrote that their research would involve writing a program for "silently listening" to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel and "logging all the messages." One of the oldest and most popular methods.
"Chatting" the Night Away
by Larry D. Rosen, Ph.D.
With 20% of American homes capable of surfing the net and 85% of businesses connected, upwards of 75 million people are "online." In recent surveys, e-mail still remains the most popular use of the Internet, followed by information gathering. You can talk to people all over the world using chat rooms and message boards. 2. Message Boards/ Forums provide a safe way to post messages.
But a new use is quickly gaining popularity -- Internet chat. Whenever I talk with people about Internet chat, their first reaction is "Hey, isn't that just a group of boys trying to talk to girls?" The answer is that may have been the situation until recently. But no more.
During the past year, Internet chat has expanded and now it is rapidly becoming an application with wide-ranging business and social possibilities. For example, I know several businesses that hold meetings via a chat program and at least one family holds a regular Sunday evening open chat enabling any of their relatives to drop in and "talk."
Chat is really rather straightforward. If you are on America Online you can either join an ongoing chat or create your own private chat room. In most cases, when you enter a chat room you simply type a brief message and anyone in the room can (and will) reply. A warning: Chat rooms can be pretty chaotic and a little disorienting since people respond at different rates of speed. With up to two dozen people, messages can be flying by at warp speed.
A relatively new use of chat software is called "Buddy Lists" or "Instant Messaging." Here you can enter a list of e-mail addresses (friends, relatives, business associates) and a program will alert you whenever they are online. Then, if you choose, you can invite them to chat in a private room, which is simply a "real time" e-mail exchange. America Online's Instant Messenger (www.aol.com) allows you to communicate instantly with any AOL user or any Internet user outside of AOL who has registered with Instant Messenger (at no cost). Mirabilis, an Israeli Company, provides free use of ICQ (pronounced "I Seek You") which is available at www.icq.com and serves the same purpose.
There are literally hundreds of sites available to visit and chat including some that allow you to select a character (an "avatar") to represent you in a three-dimensional space. When you type a message, it appears as though the avatar is speaking for you. Try The Palace at www.thepalace.com if you want to see what this is like.
One downside for this new frontier is that each chat room uses a chat client software that you must first download and then install on your computer. See my article in the May/June issue about downloading and installing software, or read it at my web site at www.technostress.com. Luckily, a few of these programs are becoming popular enough that they are being used in many chat rooms and most can be downloaded in 15-30 minutes. For a list of chat rooms visit www.100Hot.com for a list of the 100 hottest chat sites. Another potential problem concerns your cyberspace identity and privacy. On a discussion group in which I participate, a member told a story about being "Instant Messaged" on AOL by a person seeking advice on how to deal with a problem with her child. She instant messaged him because his profile indicated that he was a psychologist. Fortunately, on most instant messaging systems you can restrict the personal information that is available.
Finally, in the previous issue of The National Psychologist, I asked for people to e-mail me with technology questions and quite a few people took me up on my offer.
Clinton Gary Pettigrew took my advice last month to check out one of the programs I had recommended and he e-mailed to ask me how to uninstall it. With Windows 95 removing a program that you have installed is usually easy. Click on the START button and then move the pointer to SETTINGS. When a menu pops out to the right click on CONTROL PANEL. When the Control Panel opens up click on Add/Remove Programs and then click on the program you want to remove. Beware. Many people think that you can just go to Windows Explorer, which has a list of all folders and files and find the program and send it to the Recycle Bin. This is not nearly as effective as using Add/Remove Programs because a program often places files in other folders that need to be removed, too.
Bob Richard wanted to know how he could prepare for a computer crash. He had heard something about a "boot disk" but wasn't sure what to do. Well, Bob, it is definitely smart to prepare for a crash. Here's my advice. Click START and then HELP and look up "troubleshooting" in the help menu. Scroll down in this topic to "Windows Startup Problems" and read their advice. I would make a "startup disk" which then can be used to start your computer from your disk drive rather than from your Hard Drive (inside the computer). You can make this startup disk either by following the instructions in the Help screen or going to Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel and following Startup Disk there. If Windows starts, but seems to have some problems, you can press the F8 key while it is starting and make a choice from a menu there to help get it started. If any of this sounds too complicated or scary, I would find a local computer repair shop that you trust and bring your problem computer to them. Some will even come out to your home or office for a small extra charge.
My strategy for any PC problem is to first call a friend who both knows about computers and can talk in clear, plain language. If he or she can't provide any suggestions, I call the support line for the product. When my scanner stopped working I called Microtek's support line and got immediate help. When my printer malfunctioned, Hewlett-Packard's support staff quickly diagnosed the problem over the phone, told me how to ship the machine to their repair facility and it was fixed and returned in a week! When neither my friend nor the support techs are able to fix the problem I go to my local repair shop where Irving has fixed my last three computers. Recently, my computer kept slowing down to a crawl. Irving identified and removed a virus and got it working again in a couple of hours. Everyone should find an Irving for just such emergencies.
By the way, do you know what to do if your computer either freezes or seems to take an inordinately long time to perform an operation? Press the CTRL, ALT and DELETE keys all at the same time. If a program is hung up, you will see a menu that allows you to stop that program or close it (remove it from your desktop). If your computer is seriously frozen (a not-uncommon Windows 95 occurrence) and CTRL-ALT-DELETE does not work, then press the button to turn off the machine, wait for a few seconds, and restart the computer. Both of these - freezes and crashes - happen to me routinely and I still have a working computer. Don't be bashful to take action. Chat Rooms and Message Boards
1. Chat rooms are virtual rooms where people can have conversations.
Dangers you should be aware of when communicating online:
Whether you are in a chat room or talking one-on-one with someone online, here are a few tips you should follow: