File-sharing's up

Unless your family's had "the discussion," chances are any file-sharers at your house are swapping tunes as much as ever. Despite recording industry's thousands of lawsuits, last month file-sharing was up 19% over that of June 2003 - "8.3 million people were online at any one time" using P2P services such as Kazaa and eDonkey, USATODAY reports. Kazaa is becoming less popular, while New York-based eDonkey and Israel-based iMesh are picking up some of that P2P traffic. Most of the files being swapped were tunes (1 billion songs were available for downloading last month, up from 820 million a year ago). But parents, look at this: porn videos and images came in second. So back to "the discussion" - about file-sharing activity at your house. The very best way to start might be to discuss PC security: e.g., how the eDonkey software's preferences have been configured, what's being shared (if anything), if the kid's concerned about spyware, and whether we shouldn't take a look at all this at the PC together. For more discussion points, see "Teen writes: Kids like P2P risks", "A tech-literate dad on file-sharing" and "File-sharing realities for families." After you've been through the security issues, it might be interesting to ask your kids about the ethics involved. We'd love to hear how the discussion goes - email me anytime via anne@netfamilynews.org.