lcannell's blog
Practical Internet Safety
Submitted by lcannell on Thu, 03/02/2006 - 8:22pm.In today's highly connected society parents are torn between two opposing needs. How can we prepare our children with skills that help them master high-tech Internet-based communications while the Internet is full of bad people who want to take advantage of the innocent?
On one hand we want our children to grow up to be comfortable with technology so they can focus on achieving the great things that these advances in productivity enable. But, connectivity comes with risk, just like the first time your parents had to deal with the prospect of cable TV. Wasn't it great to have all of these new TV channels? But what about those movies on Cinemax and HBO? With the steady march of progress come new opportunities to embrace, and potential new risks for our children.
Save your PC from being a Zombie
Submitted by lcannell on Thu, 12/29/2005 - 9:30pm.If you are like me, you are the one friends and neighbors call when they are having problems with their home computer. I love providing this type of help to those I ...well, love, but it gets a little frustrating when you see the same problems over and over again.
Microsoft and the FTC had a press release last week called "Don’t Get Tricked on Halloween: Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Action and Microsoft Warn Internet Users of Zombie Computers". It was accompanied by a really good Powerpoint presentation that illustrates what can happen to an unprotected computer. Be sure to read the speaker notes to get the full story.
Apologizing for a child's natural inclination to "tinker"
Submitted by lcannell on Thu, 12/29/2005 - 9:29pm.A recent post by Joe Wilcox on his Microsoft Monitor Weblog made me stop and scratch my head at what we are calling bad behavior. In his post Sleepover Sunday Joe tells an engaging tale of the good time his daughter and some friends had playing with his computer during a slumber party. It seems the girls took images from Nintendo's website and pulled them into a photo editing program. They were having a blast changing the images (the digital equivalent to drawing moustaches on pictures in a magazine). Clearly harmless fun but in the end Joe says:
Of course, I may need to talk to my daughter about the risks of snatching copyrighted characters from a Website, even for innocent offline fun.
But, do you think anyone told the school about the "risks of snatching copyrighted characters" from the book. It was obvious to me that these posters were violating the publishers intellectual property rights by creating a deriviative work. Perhaps the school received permission but in most of these harmless situations they don't.
This is a theme in Lawrence Lessig's Free-Culture book. In chapter 2, "Mere Copyists" Lessig says:
Yet the freedom to tinker with these objects is not guaranteed. Indeed, as we'll see through the course of this book, that freedom is increasingly highly contested. While there's no doubt that your father had the right to tinker with the car engine, there's great doubt that your child will have the right to tinker with the images she finds all around. The law and, increasingly, technology interfere with a freedom that technology, and curiosity, would otherwise ensure.
