News for the Week of April 8, 2007
Tops in kid-tech news this past week was what appeared — for now — to be the end of discussion about a "red-light district" for the Web...
Dot-XXX nixed
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees Internet addresses worldwide, has rejected the .xxx top-level domain (the most common one is .com), the International Herald Tribune reports . ICM, the would-be dot-xxx registrar that has been working on the establishment of a Web "red-light district" for seven years - says a lawsuit against ICANN is "likely," the International Herald Tribune reports. ICANN first rejected the dot-xxx domain in 2000, and ICM resubmitted its proposal in 2004.
Canada weighs in
Key to ICANN's final decision this time was the Canadian government's warning this past week that "a decision to approve dot-xxx, could put the agency... in the tricky business of content regulation, having to decide which sites are pornographic and which are not." The final decision was 9-5 against in "an open board meeting, with each of the voting members explaining their reasoning." In his commentary, BlogSafety.com's co-director Larry Magid writes, "Despite years of advocacy on the part of its sponsors, I remain unconvinced that that the .XXX top level domain would have furthered the causes of child protection or free speech. It might have been effective had it been mandatory for all porn sites, but that would have brought up enormous free speech issues that many of us would not fathom. Because it would have been voluntary, there would continue to be porn sites with .com TLDs, possibly giving parents a false sense of security by believing that all porn was walled off."
In other news...
- Principal sues former students. A Pennsylvania principal has sued four former students for defaming him in three MySpace profiles. "Each of the disputed sites, which went online during the course of one week in December 2005, was removed within days of its appearance after school officials contacted MySpace.com, CNET reports. In the complaint he filed, the administrator said they were imposter profiles that "falsely portrayed him as a pot smoker, beer guzzler and pornography lover and sullied his reputation." One of the students and his parents earlier sued the principal and the school for what they called excessive action that violated the student's First Amendment rights. CNET reports that the school suspended the 3.3 GPA student and placed him "in an alternative education program that allegedly prevented him from progressing with his normal coursework." Meanwhile, in Indiana, the state's appeals court ordered a lower court to set aside its penalty against a student who criticized her school principal in a MySpace profile, the Associated Press reports. The appeals court said the earlier decision violated the student's free-speech rights.
- UK's cyberbullied teachers. In British classrooms, it's the teachers who are getting bullied (well, in North America too, actually see "We're all on Candid Camera"). In its usual irreverent style, The Register reports on its investigation into what was really being said in RateMyTeachers.com about "front-line educator" Andy Brown when he spoke about his and other educators' experiences at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference (yes, there were some meanies, but there were also some nice ones about how "witty, intelligent, inspiring, encouraging, kind and creative" Mr. Brown is).
- MPAA's college black list. The film industry's trade association has announced its Top 25 movie piracy schools, as well as its support for the Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act of 2007, ArsTechnica.com reports
- Life's 'remote control'? That's kind of what cellphones are becoming - digital remotes, a CBS executive told the New York Times. "In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets." Pretty soon, using the Web won't be something you head to the office or find a wi-fi hotspot to do, it'll simply happen on a whim, or whenever anybody needs a little more info, a reservation, an address, or a map. "Links" won't just be on Web pages. A researcher at Hewlett-Packard in the UK calls them "physical hyperlinks" - bits of information that everything in the real world is associated with. Phones will be the way to connect objects with their info - like the nutritional info for a bottle of juice that will no longer have to be on the packaging. We'll also no longer need to go to an ATM for money; our phones will be our teller machines.
- Phone for 'tweens'. Heard of Kajeet? You may from your kids soon. It's a new cellphone, a rare one specifically aimed at 8-to-16-year-olds (but probably more appealing to, say, 8-to-11-year-olds). It has a "mature look and simple pricing," the Washington Post reports. "Parents can set monthly allowances" for minutes, ring tones, games, and text messaging on the $99 phone's "pay-as-you-go cellphone service" on the Sprint Nextel network. No contracts or cancellation fees. And there's a "wallets" option, so that calls to family members are covered by Mom, for example, but ring tones come out of the kid's wallet. Kajeet has three phone styles available, the Post says, at Best Buy, Limited Too, and - on the West Coast - Longs Drug Stores. As for kid phones, The Olympian describes popular brands like Wherify, Disney Phone, Firefly, and Tic Talk.
