Takes on Tiger

The latest version of Apple's OS X (v. 10.4), nicknamed "Tiger," is being released today, so I thought you might appreciate a few tech journalists' reviews: Ed Baig at USATODAY, David Pogue at the New York Times, and Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal. A few words to the wise: 1) If you already have a Mac and want to upgrade, Mossberg suggests you wait a few months for Apple to make some tweaks that will help Tiger work better on older, slower Macintoshes. 2) The new parental controls are fairly extensive, but no one should expect them to do their thing right out of the box - they'll need some configuring (e.g., choosing sites that little Web-sters can visit) and some considering (e.g., what controls are appropriate for each child).

IM anthropology: Virtual community of 11-15s

"I had the chance to observe an IM chat once," Dr. Robert Price told me in a recent phone interview. "It wasn't about anything; it wasn't a conversation. It was more like graffiti than a conversation." This observation of Haworth School's tech coordinator would probably sound about right to any adult observing middle-school students' instant-messaging conversations. When I watch a session of my 13-year-old's, it seems like a sort of digital snowball fight - a playful group experience with lots of what might be suggestive of communication - not apparently meaningful, yet *so* meaningful to the participants. IM-ing is a compelling, emotionally safe (somewhat) extension of middle-schoolers' budding social lives. Sometimes too compelling, some parents feel. But our kids' instant-messaging also offers insights into what they're dealing with at school and in their social lives, insights that might help us in our parenting. For more on this, please see this week's issue of my newsletter - and feel free to send comments or post below. I'd love to hear from fellow parents of IM-ers!

New law after uber file-sharers

Not all file-sharers will find life more difficult with the law President Bush just signed, but if they share a film, tune, or software program before it has been released, they could go to jail. "The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act also includes sections criminalizing the use of camcorders to record a movie in a theater, and authorizing the use of technologies that can delete offensive content from a film," CNET reports. Bush signed the law yesterday. Wired magazine's "The Shadow Internet" describes the kind of "file-sharing" this law's going after.

Kids need Net-literate parents: Study

"Parents who lack Internet skills could be damaging their children's education and job prospects," reports CNET, citing the just-released final report of the study "UK Children Go Online" at the London School of Economics. There are reams of arresting findings in this study (e.g., 46% of UK 9-to-19-year-olds have given out personal info online, 57% have run across online porn, 30% have "made an online acquaintance"), but much of the coverage zoomed in on this one about parents, the first connection I've seen a study make between parental Net literacy and children's futures. Eighteen percent of parents surveyed said "they don't know how to help their children use the Internet safely," study co-author Sonia Livingstone said. Here are the BBC and Silicon.com.

Digital music: More options

If there are online music fans at your house, they now have more options - including free *and* for-sure legal. This week RealNetworks unveiled the new Rhapsody, TIME.com reports, which includes Rhapsody 25 (listen to 25 songs for free on a PC); Rhapsody Unlimited ($10/month to "rent" unlimited songs, listen to them on your PC for as long as you're a subscriber; or 89 cents/tune or $8.99/album to "own" and listen offline on the PC); and Rhapsody to Go (for $15/month, listen online, offline, or put music on an MP3 player or burn a CD). The "free" category represents something of an alternative to illegal file-sharing: 25 free "plays" a month (whether 25 songs or 25 plays of the same song). Of course, there are still restrictions. The number of MP3 players Rhapsody's tunes can be played on is limited, though Real says it has made its service compatible with the iPod. "For the moment, Real says it only supports the Creative Zen Micro and the iRiver H10, but if you already own a Dell Pocket DJ or one of iRiver's H300 series players, my educated guess is that they could work, too." All this is a good sign that online music retailers are aware that flexible, fluid music consumption is the goal for all those music fans out there. More than 300 news outlets covered this - see also Internet News.

Spell 'Google' right!

Tell kids and students: Be careful how you spell "Google" if you're heading there to do a search. If you happen to type "googkle.com" and go to that site, it will automatically "download and install harmful Trojans and spyware on the computer of susceptible users," Techtree.com reports. It cites an alert from Finnish security firm F-Secure saying that "once a user's computer has been attacked by the malicious website, it installs several malware applications such as Trojan droppers, Trojan downloaders, backdoors, a proxy Trojan and a spying Trojan along with adware-related files, leading to the computer being infected by a host of viruses." Looks like what it *really* spells is "total PC meltdown"! Safe ways to go to Google: bookmark it, make it a "customized link" in Explorer, FireFox, etc., or use the Google search window in your browser or browser toolbar (for Explorer, you can download Google's own toolbar).

The Matrix as online game

Are their Matrix fans at your house? The Matrix Online (rated "Teen," or 13+) sucks up as many as 30 hours of every week in 26-year-old Christina Carkner's life, and she's just fine with that, the New York Times reports. So is Warner Bros. and the gaming industry. They're counting on the move of the massively popular Matrix film series to the online world to make MMPGs - massively multiplayer (online) games - a mainstream thing in the US, like it is in Korea and Taiwan, for example. Not that Christina's helping - she was already "deeply involved" in another MMPG called World of Warcraft but ran out of challenges in it (Christina's interesting - read more about her in the Times piece). "Unlike traditional video games, which have their roots in arcades, these games have more in common with role-playing pastimes like Dungeon & Dragons," according to the Times. That potentially makes them big moneymakers, because players get immersed and become willing to pay subscription fees of around $15 a month in addition to buying the software up front for $50-or-so (Sony expects EverQuest's sequel, which launched last November, to make $500 million in its first eight years). To see what The Matrix looks like, go to CNET.

Also from the "How They Might Spend Their Allowance Dept." - This says something about how immersive these games can be: Sony just unveiled an auction site for EverQuest II players to buy and sell virtual artifacts, CNET reports. It's called "Station Exchange" and, yes, that's real money for faux goods, such as an opportunity to buy that "Flaming Sword of Destruction" your Shadowknight always wanted.

TV makes us smarter?!

Now there's a twist! According to this New York Times Magazine article by Steven Johnson, author of the soon-to-be-released "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the human mind "likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system." And, Johnson says, TV's producers are meeting that demand because it's good business. He explains how. But, parents, if you read nothing else in the article, read the last two paragraphs. In the first he suggests that we reconsider "the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing." But his most interesting suggestion of all is that we see today's programming (maybe media in general) as an opportunity instead of a crisis: "The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play." I think, too, it's an opportunity for more, very rewarding, parent-child communication.

Kids seeking Star Wars games?

Ah yes, the marketing blitz for Star Wars Episode 3 continues and - for those of us hearing more about it from the gamers at our house than from the media even! - New York Times gaming columnist Charles Herold says there are two great game options for them. One is a role-paying game for Xbox called Jade Empire that isn't about Star Wars at all but is "instantly recognizable as a follow-up to Bioware's 2003 game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, with a similar interface and almost identical morality and dialogue systems." The other is more for kids and those who just love the Star Wars experience: Lego Star Wars, which "recreates scenes and events from 'Star Wars' Episodes I, II and the forthcoming III" in animated Lego-style, Herold writes. You can't die in the game, which is good for kids, but it's even "easygoing fun for adults with poor gaming skills ... who want to bond with their children by playing along [in] cooperative mode, which allows two players to go through missions together." Speaking of Jade Empire, the Times reports separately that a new language - Tho Fan - was developed just for the game. It "sounds ancient and distinctly Asian. Its "sh" sounds come from the back of the throat, as they do in Chinese. Its "r" sounds are made with a tap of the tongue, echoing Mongolian." And it was created by Wolf Wikeley, PhD candidate (with a weakness for Japanese animation and first-person-shooter video games) in the linguistics department at the University of Alberta.

Family sues P2P service

A family using the class-action process to sue, that is. This is the first report I've seen about parents of file-sharers suing a file-sharing, or peer-to-peer (P2P), service: "Couple plans suit in Web music case" at the Cincinnati Enquirer. Sally and Jim Wilson of Cold Spring, Ohio, were sued in February by the Recording Industry Association because, the RIAA said, their two teenage daughters had downloaded 653 songs illegally. The RIAA added that they "could be liable to pay $750 for each," or $490,000 if they lost the case in court (they settled with the RIAA for $3,000). They are now suing Kazaa, the P2P service their daughters used, basically for profiting from the ignorance of parents of file-sharers, according to the Enquirer. They're using the class-action method so that other parents who have settled with the RIAA will join them in the lawsuit (more than 10,000 people, not necessarily parents, have been sued by the media industry so far). Kazaa is reportedly on the decline among P2P services, but it's still widely used. "In October 2004 alone, approximately 2.4 million users of the FastTrack network, which includes Kazaa and Grokster, traded 1.4 billion files," according to RIAA data cited by the Enquirer. [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this one out.]

New P2P-carried worm

There's a new P2P-carried worm kids and parents need to be on the alert for: Nopir.B. By "P2P-carried," I mean that it's spreading on file-sharing networks and infects Windows PCs when downloaded and run by file-sharers. Why would they do that? It's "designed to look like a DVD-cracking program," tricking file-sharers who are looking for software that circumvents copy-restriction technology on DVDs, ZDNET UK reports. What it really does is delete people's music libraries (all MP3 files on hard drives), as well as some P2P programs (e.g., LimeWire, Grokster, or Kazaa, but ZDNET doesn't say which ones). Sophos, the anti-virus firm that discovered the worm, says it thinks Nopir's creator is on some sort of anti-piracy mission. It's too early to tell how infectious this one will be, but apparently the family PC's safe if your anti-virus software is up to date. For another risk that just came up in tech news again last week, see "P2P's privacy problem."

Buying vs. sharing tunes

Apple's iTunes is two years old this week, and Rob Pegoraro, the Washington Post's tech writer, has spent "a fair amount of change" at iTunes since he first went there, he reports. "And yet millions of people still get their music online from a file-sharing service or site - and in the process, put up with an often dubious selection, spyware-ridden software, and the unpleasant reality that the artists who made that music won't make a cent off each such download." So he looks at why people put up with the downsides of P2P and what's still missing at "the legit online stores." Examples, no Beatles or Led Zeppelin in any of them, hardware (MP3 player) restrictions, and sharing/transferring tunes with/to friends. By spelling out these points that any of our kids could probably tick off in two seconds, Rob's providing us parents with some helpful insights into the online music world.