The Guardian reports that adults are banned from searching children’s computers or phones under a new law passed in Chongqing, southwest China.

It is a ruling that teenagers around the world will regard with a certain amount of envy. Parents in one Chinese city are to be prevented from snooping on their children’s online activity and text messages.

Adults, including family members, are banned from searching through children’s computers or phones under a new regional law passed in Chongqing, southwest China, state media reported today.

The regulation outlaws snooping into their emails, text messages, web chats, and browser history. The regulation is designed to protect the rights of children, but is surprising given widespread concern in China about excessive internet use among young people and their access to unsuitable material.

Psychologists have sought to have internet addiction listed as a clinical disorder and treatment camps have sprung up across the country. The Chongqing Evening Post described the new regulation, adopted on Friday by officials in Chongqing, as the first of its kind in the country.

Other Chinese media said it expanded an existing national rule. But both experts and children doubted whether it would have an impact in practice.

Lu Yulin, a professor at the China Youth University of Political Science, told China Daily that children were unlikely to take their parents to court. “Parents who habitually check such information won’t stop due to the regulation,” he said.

Eleven-year-old Song Jingbo, from Xi’an, told the newspaper he did not think his mother and father would be able to access his data anyway, adding: “I am far more internet savvy than them.”

China has the largest population of internet users in the world and minors alone account for more 126 million of them, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

Access the original article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/china-law-checking-childrens-computers

The Guardian reports on a fake analyst that gained access to dozens of US security and intelligence officials using Facebook.

In just a month, Sage made connections with hundreds of people from the US military, intelligence agencies, information security companies and government contractors. The 25-year-old navy cyberthreat analyst was invited to speak at security conferences and offered jobs at companies including Google and Lockheed Martin.

Her Twitter profile proclaimed: “Sorry to say, I’m not a Green Beret! Just a cute girl stopping by to say hey! My life is about info sec [information security] all the way!”

But there was a slight hitch: Robin Sage did not exist. The pretty cybergeek, supposedly educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a prep school in New Hampshire, was in reality an avatar created by a security researcher to find out how social networking sites could be used to covertly gather intelligence.

Thomas Ryan, co-founder of Provide Security, said that despite claiming to have worked professionally for 10 years, Sage attracted dozens of connections across sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, including a senior intelligence official in the US marine corps, the chief of staff for a US congressman and several senior executives at defence contractors, as well as an official from the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds, launches and runs US spy satellites.

Many of her new online friends shared personal and professional information and photos, which Ryan claims could have compromised corporate and possibly even national security.

Ryan, who will present his study at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas next week, told Computerworld: “I had access to email and bank accounts. I saw patterns in the kind of friends they had. The LinkedIn profiles would show patterns of new business relationships.”

The security analyst told the magazine that the vast majority (82%) of Sage’s online friends were men, suggesting her looks lay behind her popularity. His conclusion after completing the study: “The big takeaway is not to befriend anybody unless you really know who they are.”

Access the original article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/24/social-networking-spy-robin-sage

Some internet porn sites in China now accessible

The Independent reported on leaks from Twitter that internet porn that once was blocked by Chinese government censors was now openly available.

“Are they no longer cracking down on pornographic websites? A lot of porn sites and forums are accessible,” technology blogger William Long wrote on his feed.

Messages like that startled Chinese Web surfers, long accustomed to the authorities’ Internet blockades. The country had been in the midst of highly publicized anti-pornography sweeps, and there had been no announcement of any change in government policy.

Yet eight weeks later, the porn sites are still accessible. Still unanswered are questions about whether it’s an official change in policy, a technical glitch or some sort of test by the usually disapproving Chinese Internet police.

“This has never been done with the (Chinese) Internet before,” said Beijing-based Internet analyst Zhao Jing, who goes by the English name Michael Anti.

Whatever the reason, the change has thrown into sharper relief what many people see as the main mission of China’s aggressive Internet censors: blocking sites and content that might challenge the political authority of the communist government. Websites about human rights and dissidents are also routinely banned.

“Maybe they are thinking that if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won’t pay so much attention to political matters,” Anti said.

The government has not said why the porn sites were unblocked. Repeated calls to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology went unanswered, and the Ministry of Public Security and State Council Information Office – all involved in Web monitoring – did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/some-internet-porn-sites-in-china-now-accessible-2033867.html

India unveils world’s cheapest laptop

The Guardian reports that India has developed the world’s cheapest laptop – a touchscreen device which resembles Apple’s wildly popular iPad but will cost just £23.

The prototype was unveiled today by Kapil Sibal, the country’s human resource development minister, who said 110 million Indian schoolchildren would be the first recipients.

Then, from next year, the device – designed to bridge the digital divide and boost India’s economy – will become available to students in higher education.

Sibal said: “The solutions for tomorrow will emerge from India. We have reached a stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35 [£23], including memory, display, everything.”

Past low-cost technologies produced by the country include the £1,450 Tata Nano car and a mobile phone costing less than £11. The iPad retails at about £429 in the UK – 18 times the cost of the Indian laptop.

The tablet computer, developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science in Bengalooru, will eventually be made available to the public. It will run on an open source Linux operating system with Open Office software and can be powered by solar panel or batteries as well as mains electricity. It will have no hard drive but users will have access to a USB port, 2GB of memory and a video-conferencing facility, internet browsing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/23/india-unveils-cheapest-laptop

Be careful what you tweet

The BBC discusses how online tools and services such as Twitter and Facebook create a social space that encourages informality, rapid responses and the sort of conversation that typically takes place between friends in contexts that are either private or public-private, like the street, pub or cafe.

Unfortunately, online interaction has other characteristics which are very different from those of a casual conversation in a cafe.

Not least the fact that many services make comments visible to large numbers of people and search engines ensure that a permanent record is kept of every inane observation, spiteful aside or potentially libellous comment on a respected public figure.

This is something that TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith has just discovered the hard way, and her experience offers a salutary lesson for anyone who wants to use social media tools to enhance their reputation rather than expose themselves to public ridicule.

It all started last week when Twitter user @rachelemoody made a remark about Bad Science, Dr Ben Goldacre’s much admired book on the poor state of media coverage of medicine and science. The book includes a chapter that criticises Gillian McKeith’s work…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10740954

British newspaper helps trap online predator

The News of the World recently undertook an operation to trap a paedophile who was using the web to groom a 13 year old girl.

Sameer Jusab, 30, bombarded the girl with inappropriate and explicit messages in a chatroom called No Adults. Jusab thought he was speaking to Karene, a vulnerable schoolgirl, but it was actually an undercover reporter from the newspaper.

The evidence was passed straight to child protection officers and Jusab was hauled before the courts. A judge at the town’s crown court ordered he join a sex offenders’ re-education group as part of a three-year community order and banned him from using the internet or working with children under 16 for five years.

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/880300/News-of-the-World-victory-We-nail-pervert-on-web.html

China may shut porn fiction websites

China’s press watchdog has threatened to shut down more than 120 websites offering pornographic fiction, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Thursday. An official with the General Administration of Press and Publication said websites which failed to remove the content would be taken offline.

The crackdown comes as China continues to tighten control over its booming Internet sector. Since the second half of last year, it has introduced new regulations on online pornography.

Late last year China cracked down on mobile websites offering pornography downloads and more recently it barred online game companies from using lewd marketing tactics to attract users.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/china-may-shut-porn-fiction-websites-2028168.html

Using computers to teach children with no teachers

A 10-year experiment that started with Indian slum children being given access to computers has produced a new concept for education, a conference has heard.

Professor Sugata Mitra first introduced children in a Delhi slum to computers in 1999. He has watched the children teach themselves – and others – how to use the machines and gather information. Follow up experiments suggest children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly with little supervision.

“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,” he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.

Professor Mitra’s work began when he was working for a software company and decided to embed a computer in the wall of his office in Delhi that was facing a slum.

“The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn’t know what the internet was.”

To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet. “I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

He saw children teaching each other how to use the computer and picking up new skills. One group in Rajasthan, he said, learnt how to record and play music on the computer within four hours of it arriving in their village.

“At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can lean to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are,” he said. His experiments then become more ambitious and more global.

In Cambodia, for example, he left a simple maths game for children to play with.

“No child would play with it inside the classroom. If you leave it on the pavement and all the adults go away then they will show off to one another about what they can do,” said Prof Mitra, who now works at Newcastle University in the UK.

Access the rest of the article online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10663353

The Guardian reports on how 2 million South Koreans – nearly one in 10 online users – are addicted to the internet. Many spend every waking moment immersed in role-playing games, in which players form alliances to guide their characters through mythical worlds, collecting extra powers and other items as they go.

The government has responded to juvenile web addiction by spending millions of dollars on counselling centres and awareness classes for children. From September, gamers aged under 18 will be unable to access 19 popular online titles, such as Maple Story and Dragon Nest, from midnight to 8am. Those who play outside the curfew will find their characters growing weaker the longer they play.

Now, however, the government must reconcile its support for online activity with the emergence of an older generation of web addicts. While the number of teenage addicts has fallen from more than 1 million to 938,000 in the past two years, those in their 20s and 30s have risen to 975,000, with the unemployed and university students considered at greatest risk.

South Korea’s status as the world’s most wired nation gives them the technical wherewithal to fuel their addiction. The country boasts the fastest and most developed broadband network on the planet, and more than 90% of homes have high-speed internet connections.

There are almost 22,000 PC bangs – online havens where, for a small hourly fee, the real world gives way to a virtual one that some enter only to find they are unable to leave. They are the driving force behind a gaming industry worth an estimated £1.6bn and involving 30 million people.

Gee-jun, president of the Korea Computer Life Institute, says South Korea is simply going through the growing pains of becoming the world’s first fully fledged information society. And the authorities, he adds, are reluctant to stifle the county’s thriving online culture. “The government is in charge of promoting gaming, so although it has established regulations, there are no penalties if they are broken. The ministry of culture, tourism and sports has established regulations that game companies don’t have to follow.”

South Korea was reminded of the tragic consequences of gaming addiction earlier this year when a couple were found guilty of starving their baby to death while they raised a virtual child in an internet cafe. The father, Kim Jae-beom 41, was sentenced to two years in prison in May after admitting neglect of their three-month-old daughter Sa-rang – “love” in Korean – while they spent up to 12 hours a time at a PC bang playing a 3D fantasy game called Prius Online.

Access the original article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/13/internet-addiction-south-korea

Education journalist and broadcaster Mike Baker has written an interesting article for the education section of the BBC website.

He questions if the “government’s attitude to computer technology in schools taking us back to a “dark age” of chalk-and-talk…”

That is the fear of many in education who think the coalition government’s actions are turning back the clock on recent developments in the use of computers for learning.

First there was the decision to abolish Becta, the agency that advises schools on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Then there were speeches on the curriculum given by the new Education Secretary, Michael Gove, which focused entirely on traditional subjects and were silent about ICT.

Then the government scrapped the Rose Review recommendations for primary schools, which had proposed putting ICT at the core of the curriculum. And just this week, the Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, in a major speech on the curriculum, did not mention ICT at all.

But for many the straw that broke the camel’s back was an announcement slipped out quietly as part of the government’s “free schools” policy.

This said that to provide capital for these new parent-run schools, the government was taking £50m from the Harnessing Technology Fund for schools. This fund provides money to improve schools’ broadband connectivity, computer hardware and software and the sums involved represent a quarter of the total investment fund.

This came as a nasty shock to Mike Prince, head of Staveley CE primary school in Cumbria. He regards a fast broadband connection as essential not only to children’s learning, but also for keeping in touch with parents in a rural area. He says “to have the rug pulled on us mid-year leads me to think it’s either being done unwittingly or, more sinisterly, because the government has decided that these things are no longer important”.

After the recent push for parental engagement and rural schools connectivity, he says, it “feels like we are on the edge of the dark age”. Others too have detected more to this than simply the need to make financial savings.

Before the election, Merlin John – a journalist who specialises in technology and learning – tried to get details of the Conservatives’ policy on ICT. However, after a series of e-mail exchanges over almost two years, he failed to receive anything concrete from Conservative Party headquarters.

So, the question that is worrying many in education is whether the government is making these cuts reluctantly in order to avoid hitting core school budgets or whether it is indifferent, or even hostile, to ICT in education?

Access the rest of this article at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/10495726.stm

Sky News reports that the number of children rescued from paedophiles prowling the internet has doubled to a record number in the past year.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) said it safeguarded 278 young people over the past 12 months. This was twice the amount protected in the previous period and the most in one year since Ceop was established in 2006.

Of the children, 47 were identified through analysis of photographs and videos posted online by paedophiles. Meanwhile, 417 suspected child sex offenders were arrested for offences from possessing indecent images to rape.

Home Office crime prevention minister James Brokenshire said the Government was committed to protecting children.

“Ceop plays a vital role which means more children are safeguarded, more offenders are apprehended and more professionals are trained,” he said.

The unit has seen some success in introducing a “panic button” for websites, despite a public spat with social networking site Facebook. Investigators received more than 6,200 reports of suspicious activity online through the button, including grooming and fraud.

The unit has also set up a network of more than 46,000 volunteers to give internet safety lessons.

Access the original article online here.

The Telegraph reports on how Google has promised to cease automatically redirecting its Chinese users to its Hong Kong website, which lies outside the bounds of Chinese regulations and can therefore offer uncensored results. However industry experts warned that its move may be too little too late.

The search engine had been using the Hong Kong loophole to game the system since March, after previously announcing that it was determined to stop censorship on its searches.

However, the Chinese authorities have now acted to close down the route. “It is clear from the conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed,” said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, on the company’s official blog.

Without the license, which expires in two days, Google would not be able to operate a business in China and its site would “effectively go dark”, Mr Drummond added.

In a last-ditch bid to save its China site, Google has resurrected its Google.cn webpage and will now use it to offer its music service and its maps. Any user who then wishes to carry out a search can click a button which will send them back to Hong Kong. “This is not a concession, it is exactly the same service except with one extra click,” said one industry source.

A spokesman for Google would not comment on whether the gambit would satisfy the Chinese government. However, Yu Yang, the head of Analysys International and one of China’s most prominent internet experts, said it was “not likely” that Google would have its license renewed.

He said: “As long as the fundamental dispute over censorship continues, Google will have to keep stepping back as the government advances forward.” But he added that Google would probably “come back to China one day” and that the company’s Hong Kong and American websites would still be accessible to mainland Chinese. “If they blocked the Hong Kong site it would contradict the idea that Hong Kong is part of China,” he said.

Google has been locked in a head-to-head battle with the Chinese government since January, when it announced that it would stop all censorship on its Chinese search engine, Google.cn. Although the company only has 30 per cent of the Chinese market, its users include the influential middle classes, academics and professionals.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7860639/Google-may-be-forced-out-of-China-despite-changing-censorship-tactics.html

CNN reports that the mobile web in China has loopholes where content could go under the radar of government censors, analysts say.

“It could be anything else the government normally frowns upon or does not consider healthy, which could be political content to pornographic content,” said Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting, a market research and strategy consultant firm.

Mobile phones in China have not escaped government control. Last December, nine Chinese ministries initiated a campaign, which ended in March, to crackdown on pornography transmitted via mobile networks.

Mobile carriers also began monitoring text messages for pornographic and other “illegal” content, blocking phone services to subscribers found to have sent such messages, state media reported in January.

However there are signs that the mobile Web has holes, which some say could grow bigger as more people buy smart phones and third-generation networks become stronger. Out of China’s 346 million netizens, as the country’s Web users are known, 233 million use mobiles to access the Internet, according to government statistics.

“It’s not because the government does not want to regulate the mobile Web, it’s because the system and the situation makes it much harder to regulate the mobile Web than the real Web,” said Li Qiang, a researcher with the Institute of Policy and Management at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Technically, for the moment, the mobile Web is less regulated than the real Web.”

The country’s three mobile phone operators — China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom — shoulder responsibility for monitoring content flowing through their networks.

Access the full article online at: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/06/17/china.mobile.phone.web/index.html

The Telegraph reports on a leading expert’s comment that children should be banned from using computers in schools until they are nine-years-old because the early use of technology is destroying their attention span.

The premature introduction and overuse of technology is damaging young children whose brains are not yet fully formed, according to Dr Aric Sigman, a psychologist and author.

As a result, the “nappy curriculum” – the statutory rules introduced in 2008 which dictate that toddlers should be introduced to computers as early as 22 months of age – is “subverting the development of children’s cognitive skills”.

Speaking to a conference of childcare specialists yesterday, the academic said children needed to use the three dimensional, real world to learn.

“There is evidence to show that introducing information and communication technology (ICT) in the early years actually subverts the very skills that Government ministers said they want children to develop, such as the ability to pay attention for sustained periods,” said Mr Sigman.

“There is a conflict between multitasking and sustained attention. These things cannot and should not be developed at the same time. Sustained attention must be the building block.

“The big problems we are seeing now with children who do not read, or who find it difficult to pay attention to the teacher, or to communicate, are down to attention damage that we are finding in all age groups.”

The controversial Early Years Foundation Stage, which sets dozens of learning goals for children from their first year to the age of five, says that computers should be introduced from 22 months and that from 40 months children should be able to “perform simple ICT functions, such as select a channel on the TV remote control and use a mouse and keyboard to use age-appropriate software”.

Primary schoolchildren have at least one ICT lesson a week and computer use is widespread in other subjects. Research evidence on the effect of ICT on children’s learning, social development and health is mixed but the debate is becoming increasingly polarised.

In the US a number of studies show that age-appropriate software can bring benefits in areas like language development. Other research suggests that prolonged television and computer viewing stunts brain development.

Mr Sigman said that while screen technology can be an important tool in learning, it should feature in schools much later than it does at the moment. “It must be introduced and used judiciously at much later ages – ideally at least age nine – or it can subvert the development of the cognitive skills and curiosity it was intended to foster and enhance,” said the author of Remotely Controlled: How Television is Damaging Our Lives.

“We risk infantilising the child’s mind by spoon-feeding it with strong audio-visual sensations.”

The psychologist dismissed arguments used by some academics and the education technology industry to justify exposing very young children to computer use.

“The rationale behind it is that children are interested in these things and that it is the world that children are growing up in. Therefore we must have them getting to grips with it at 22 months,” he said. “Children might be interested in alcohol, hand guns and pornography – that doesn’t mean we should give them access to these things. Just because children are interested in something, it does not mean by any stretch of the imagination, that it is in their interests to expose them to these things. Children may well be good at using technology but monkeys can learn to use new technology, it is not necessarily something to strive for in itself.”

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/primaryeducation/7823259/Ban-computers-from-schools-until-children-reach-age-9-says-expert.html