At the U.S. Capitol today, the Internet Keep Safe Coalition and Symantec Corp. announced the launch of a new, interactive tutorial designed to help educate parents about online security for children. The tutorial, Parents’ Top 10 Technical Questions: What Every Parent Must Do to Keep Children Safe Online, is part of a new Parent Resource Center on iKeepSafe.org that provides parents with valuable information on how to keep their children safe online from a variety of Internet threats and risks, such as cyber-predators, online fraud and viruses.
The Coalition also awarded today the 2006 Internet Keep Safe Award to Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) and Bob Bennett (R-UT) for their exceptional contribution to protecting the children of America online. This award is given annually to public figures who have shown an extraordinary commitment to protecting children from the growing, and often lethal, threats they face on the Internet and through other connected technologies.
More than 30 million children currently cruise the Internet, with the number of kids spending two or more hours online per day doubling during summer months. This opens up opportunities for kids to run into viruses, spyware, online fraud and predators. According to a December 2005 survey by the Polly Klaas Foundation, 56 percent of teens and 12 percent of tweens have been asked personal questions online, and 42 percent of teens have posted information about themselves on the Internet for other people to see and contact them.
The Coalition’s campaign features the 3 KEEPsSM of Internet safety: Keep Safe • Keep Away • Keep Telling. SM This message is reinforced through the Faux Paw the Techno Cat Internet Safety Series for Children, which includes colorful children’s books and animated films, written by Jacalyn Leavitt. The Faux Paw series teaches children—in a fun, non-threatening way—the essential rules that will keep them safe online.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) software design promises to populate the world's networks with many small, lightweight, reusable programs that can automatically combine to perform a vast range of services. This will allow simple functions to unite to perform complicated tasks. But a major challenge exists.
That challenge is how to find a robust, efficient and economical way to introduce all these tiny programs to each other, and to alert other programs of their function. Or as Dr Dominik Kuropka, scientific coordinator of the IST-funded Adaptive Services Grid (ASG) project, puts it: "How can we represent the functionality of real world services in a way that computers can deal with it?"
Internet Detective, a free online tutorial designed to help students develop the critical thinking required for their Internet research, is being launched on the Web on June 13th in the RDN Virtual Training Suite at: http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/
The tutorial offers practical advice on evaluating the quality of websites and highlights the need for care when selecting online information sources to inform university or college work.
Downloading reduces per capita expenditures by $25, but increases the amount of music each individual consumes by the equivalent of $70
An important collection of papers from the current issue of the