Home page| Extended HTML version
(Euroap) The European Commission has opened a formal investigation under the EU state aid rules into the new tax based funding system for the Spanish public broadcaster RTVE. Spain is planning to modify the public broadcasting system by abolishing advertising and other commercial activities of RTVE and replacing this source of income by newly introduced taxes on TV and telecommunications operators. The Commission does not object to the modification of the funding system as such, but has doubts concerning the compatibility of the new tax with EU law. In particular, the Commission doubts whether the new taxes are in line with EU rules on electronic communications networks and services.
(TED) As part of the European Commission's development of a media literacy policy, the Commission is seeking assistance in the form of an experts' study on the analysis and testing of the media literacy assessment criteria set in the 2009 study on assessment criteria for media literacy levels. The study will be a close follow-up of the previous one; however it will have more of a practical approach. The main goal is to analyse and test out the criteria detected in the previous study and to get in-depth and concrete results on the media literacy levels of European citizens. (The European Commission will provide the study team with the assessment criteria for the analysis and the testing of the media literacy levels). Time limit for receipt of requests for documents or for accessing documents: 14.1.2010.
(New York imes) The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children assists law-enforcement authorities by culling through 250,000 images a week, looking for illegal material, and sends daily alerts to 68 Internet service providers worldwide. It is difficult, labor-intensive work for all. But Microsoft is contributing new image-matching software, PhotoDNA, that promises to automate and streamline online child-pornography monitoring. The new software is the result of two years of collaboration by a team at Microsoft Research, led by Larry Zitnick, and a group at Dartmouth College. In test runs, PhotoDNA has processed images in less than five milliseconds each and accurately detected target images 98 percent of the time.
(ECPAT) The ECPAT International Report of the World Congress III against Sexual Exploitation of Children & Adolescents is available online. The report includes: Keynote Speeches made at the opening of the WCIII, Summaries/abstracts of Panels, Workshops and Dialogues for each of the five WCIII themes, PowerPoint presentations presented at the WCIII Panels and Workshops, Participants List and a historical overview of past World Congresses and an overview of the Preparatory Meetings leading up to WCIII. See also the ECPAT website on the World Congress III and in particular, the report of the Regional Preparatory Meeting for Europe and Central Asia and the outcomes of the Children and Young People Preparatory Forum for Europe and Central Asia with specific recommendations from children and young people who participated in the World Congress III. See also the Rio de Janeiro Declaration and Call for Action to Prevent and Stop Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents. Labels: Child_abuse_images
(RAPID) The European Commission has adopted a decision that renders legally binding commitments offered by Microsoft to boost competition on the web browser market. The commitments address Commission concerns that Microsoft may have tied its web browser Internet Explorer to the Windows PC operating system in breach of EU rules on abuse of a dominant market position. Microsoft commits to offer European users of Windows choice among different web browsers and to allow computer manufacturers and users the possibility to turn Internet Explorer off. Microsoft is also publishing an undertaking whereby it commits to make far-reaching interoperability disclosures. See Your Internet, Your Choice: Microsoft web browsers decision (RAPID) Opening remarks by Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Competition Policy at press conference Brussels, 16th December 2009.
(Tim O'Reilly) I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects. One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly. And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network. But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas?
(Guardian) In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography.
(BBC) More than 1,200 websites that claim to sell cut-price designer goods have been shut down in the biggest police operation of its kind in the UK. The 1,219 sites, which advertise brands including Ugg boots, Tiffany jewellery and Links of London, were removed by the Metropolitan Police. Customers who buy from the sites either receive nothing, counterfeit goods, or have their credit card details stolen.
(IDG News Service) Chinese regulators have taken a wide-ranging war against online porn one step further by closing a series of popular BitTorrent and other video-sharing Web sites in recent days. The move against video-sharing sites comes as efforts grow to stamp out porn elsewhere too. Regulators have cranked up their work to eradicate porn accessed by mobile phone and called for more control of vulgar content in online PC games. Last week state media also criticized Google and local rival Baidu over pornographic search results.
(Rebecca MacKinnon) China's blocking of overseas websites - including Facebook, Twitter, and thousands of other websites including this blog - is more extensive and technically more sophisticated than ever. Controls over domestic content have also been tightening. The past few weeks have seen four new moves which are not officially or overtly aimed at political content, but which have implications for the way in which the government controls all conveyors of all kinds of speech. First, late November saw the launch of a mobile porn crackdown. The draconian way in which this crackdown is being implemented involves a great deal of collateral damage for non-pornographic content. Second, Chinese the state-run media is going after the search engines again for turning up smutty results when users search for smutty information. Third, last week the government shut down more than 500 file-sharing websites as part of an anti-porn and anti-piracy crackdown, on the grounds that these websites don't have proper licenses. Fourth, CNNIC, the organization which runs the .cn top-level domain has announced that it is no longer accepting domain name applications from individuals.
(Xinhua) Tip-offs on Internet and mobile WAP sites containing pornographic contents have surged in China as authorities announced to give each qualified informer with up to 10,000 yuan (1,465 U.S. dollars) in reward. Since the announcement, the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center had received more than 13,000 online tip-offs and more than 500 phone calls, 10 times the usual daily number. The center, together with ministries and the National Office against Pornographic and Illegal Publication, issued a circular encouraging the public to report on websites and mobile WAPsites that contain obscene information or put on illegal advertisements of sex products. China has launched several rounds of crackdowns on online pornography. In mid-November, the crackdown was extended to WAP sites that can be accessed by mobile handsets.
(BBC) A Paris court has found Google guilty of copyright infringement in a ruling which could have ramifications for its plans to digitise the world's books. The search giant must pay 300,000 euros in damages and interest to French publisher La Martiniere. It was one of many to take Google to court for digitising its books without explicit permission. Google was also ordered to pay 10,000 euros a day until it removes extracts of the books from its database.
(Guardian) The digital economy bill is misnamed. A more honest title for the legislation, recently introduced in the Lords, would be the copyright protection and punishment bill. It is less about creating the digital businesses of the 21st century than protecting the particular 20th century business models used in music and film. See also Digital Economy Bill: Industry disputes gov't claims.
(Open Rights) by Francis Davey. This is an explanation and analysis of the "copyright infringement provisions" of the Digital Economy Bill. These provisions are being popularly referred to as "three strikes" law directed against peer to peer file sharing. This is an extremely serious misconception. The bill gives enormous powers - exercisable with no Parliamentary oversight - to the Secretary of State to require the disconnection of individuals' internet access for any reason. Not only is there no requirement for such disconnections to relate to a number of "strikes" there is no need for disconnection to be linked to infringement of copyright. The Bill's proposal goes far beyond what we have seen attempted in other countries such as France and New Zealand. See also Explanatory notes prepared by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
(Computing) Virgin Media is trialling a copyright infringement tool that could be built into the technology underpinning its upcoming music download subscription service. The Detica-supplied system is now being tested by the internet service provider (ISP) in what is claimed to be a UK first. According to Virgin, the trial is aimed at understanding how consumer behaviour is changing and will also support upcoming government requirements for measurement of copyright infringement levels on ISP' networks. see also Net piracy: The people vs the entertainment industry (New Scientist) and What does Detica detect? by Richard Clayton.
(Facebook blog) Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" - communities for your school, your company or your region. The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone. We're adding the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings.
(O'Reilly) by Andy Oram. Social networking is the Internet phenomenon of the year and deserves an end-of-the-year profile. In a recent 19-month period, Facebook rose from 75 million to 300 million members, and Twitter has gone from perhaps 1.3 million users (depending on how you count them) to an estimated 18 million. Before the end of the year, I'll post eight related entries that add up to a treatise titled "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between:"
(TechCrunch Europe) Facebook's German clone StudiVZ follows the US social network's most successful move by adding support for third-party applications. The 15.7m users of StudiVZ and its siblings MeinVZ and SchülerVZ can now play games from Plinga or Wooga, sing online Karaoke with Mikestar or order Italian food from Pizza.de. CEO Markus Berger-de León has applied tight security policies to third-party apps to avoid the type of scams that TechCrunch recently dug up on Facebook and MySpace. German online privacy laws are among the strictest in the world, even Google Analytics is in danger of being banned in our country. To address this, VZ-Netzwerke works with so-called "business cards": For every app, users have to complete a form with the information they want to share. False names and incomplete data are also possible.
(BBc) Facebook is launching new privacy settings, designed to simplify the process for its 350 million users. It is the latest in a string of changes that have been made to its privacy policy this year. One new feature - the ability to control who sees every post made - was made following a stream of requests from users. The social network will also require users to update their privacy settings, in a first for an internet firm. See also Facebook faces criticism on privacy change.
(Press Release) Yahoo! has released a beta version of a new consumer tool called Ad Interest Manager, which takes transparency in online advertising to a new level for building user trust. Ad Interest Manager http://privacy.yahoo.com/aim is a central place where Yahoo! visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising served from the Yahoo! Ad Network.
(boersenblatt.net) Viviane Reding, Brüsseler Medienkommissarin und designierte EU-Kommissarin für Justiz, Grund- und Bürgerrechte, spricht mit boersenblatt.net über Google und den Rest der Welt, über verwaiste Bücher und deren Bewahrung für die Öffentlichkeit – und über die Herkulesarbeit der Digitalisierung gemeinfreier Werke.
(Reuters) European Union members want to create a joint project on the digitization of books, French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said, challenging Google's plan to create a massive digital library. EU ministers agreed in Brussels to create a committee of "wise men" to carve out a plan, Mitterrand said in an interview with French newspaper Journal du Dimanche. He also said the digitization of books should not be left to private companies, and governments had to come up with appropriate policies.
(20minutes.fr) C´est un énorme coup de pouce pour la numérisation du patrimoine français. Le ministre de la Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, a décroché lundi matin le budget de 750 millions d´euros qu´il réclamait pour financer ce vaste chantier. Il prend ainsi une sérieuse option pour se passer du géant américain Google.
(Google European Public Policy Blog) The value of open access to publicly funded data extends far beyond geographical or transport-related information. In the Netherlands, for example, we've combined freely available Central Statistics Bureau and European Central Bank information with search trends data to create a barometer for consumer confidence in a variety of industry sectors. And the combination of publicly funded epidemiological data sources with aggregated search query data has enabled us to launch the cutting edge Flu Trends product predicting the spread of an epidemic in 20 countries. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to get access to this information required to develop such cool, innovative and useful, services. Despite being public, open access to this data is not automatic, and complex licence agreements remain de rigueur. The good news is that the European Union understands the potential for innovation and economic growth that easy access to publicly funded information could unlock. It was also encouraging last week to see the UK government taking an important unilateral first step towards freeing public data: from April next year, a good number of the UK's Ordnance Survey maps will become freely available - and re-usable - online. This represents an important victory for the Guardian newspaper's laudable "Free Our Data" campaign which has been running for the last three years.
(News.com) The Obama administration has officially unveiled its Open Government directive, a document that charges each federal agency with making high value data publicly available and with quickly coming up with formal open government plans. Among the major points of the directive (PDF), it:
(ZDNet) Mandatory ISP filtering legislation is expected to be introduced in Australia around the middle of 2010, after which there will be a one year period to implement and activate the filtering technology. The Federal Government announced it will introduce amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act, which will by 2011 require all ISPs to block refused classification-rated material hosted on overseas servers.
(Daily Telegraph) Sexual offenders are using the internet to fast-track abuse, according to new research. Previous studies into child sexual abuse had shown that offenders spent months befriending a young person, and in some cases their family, to prepare for the abuse. But latest research, from the European Online Grooming Project, shows that the grooming process by offenders using the internet is much faster. Rather than selecting one vulnerable child to abuse, some offenders also appear to target numerous young people until they find someone willing to meet them. They are increasingly using social networking sites such as MSN and Facebook and are becoming technologically-advanced, often operating in communities sharing indecent images between countries, according to the research conducted by NatCen (National Centre for Social Research), Kingston University and Royal Holloway, University of London - which was presented at the UK Council for Child Internet Safety's (UKCCIS) first annual summit. Prof Julia Davidson, from Kingston University, said. "The research shows that the grooming period has been speeded up with chat room communication becoming almost immediately sexualised".
(CNET News.com) by Larry Magid. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that more than 3,500 sex offenders from his state have been purged from Facebook and MySpace. Both companies have long had policies against registered sex offenders using their services, but the implementation of New York's new Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act ("E-Stop") has made it easier for the sites to identify perpetrators from the Empire State. Facebook, according to Cuomo, was able to identify and disable the accounts of 2,782 registered sex offenders. MySpace deleted 1,796 accounts.
(Michaal Geist) The Justice Minister has tabled the Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation). Bill C-58 creates a mandatory disclosure requirement on Internet providers where they become aware of child pornography websites or have reason to believe a subscriber is using their service to violate child pornography laws. Where an Internet provider submits a report on a user, they must preserve the relevant computer data for 21 days and they are prohibited from disclosing the disclosure to the customer. Failure to report may result in fines or imprisonment and providers are granted immunity from liability for reporting the activity. The definition of Internet provider is broad, extending beyond just ISPs to include those providing Internet access, hosting, or email services. In other words, services like Google, Hotmail, and Facebook are all covered.
(SIDN) SIDN, the .nl registry, is one of the prime movers behind the Notice and Take Down Code. Developed in 2008 under the auspices of the NICC, the Code describes how internet service providers should respond if someone complains that the content of a website is unlawful or criminal. SIDN has introduced a version of the Code tailored to the .nl domain. As the .nl registry, SIDN's role in the context of Notice and Take Down (NTD) is limited to three fields of activity. The first of these fields is advice and referral. What types of complaint can you make, and who can you make them to? For example, if you see something on a website you are unhappy with, the first person to talk to is the person who put it there; next you might go to the organisation that runs the website, then the firm that hosts it and the internet access provider. Only if none of these people and organisations will intervene should you take your complaint to the registry (SIDN). Second, SIDN can play a role in the provision of information. When someone complains to us about the way a domain name is being used, we can tell the complainant about the domain name in question, who the registrant is and which registrar manages the registration. Third, in the last resort, if all other possible ways of getting criminal or unlawful content removed from a website have been tried and failed, SIDN can take the domain name out of use.
(Europa) Council Conclusions on media literacy in the digital environment have been adopted by the Education, Youth and Culture Council meeting on 27 November 2009. In these Conclusions, the Council reaffirms its commitment towards media literacy and welcomes the Commission Recommendation C(2009)6464 of 20 August 2009.
(Ars Technica) Data from Opera's mobile Web proxy servers suggest mobile Web browsing is exploding among users of standard cell phones, thanks in part to demand driven by consumers that expect smartphone-like browsing as well the more advanced capabilities of mobile browsers like Opera Mini.
(eNACSO) eNACSO launches its digital manifesto at the fourth Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Egypt on the 14 November 2009. This manifesto includes recommendations to governments, industry and other stakeholders on how to create a safer online environment for children and young people. The European NGO Alliance for Child Safety Online is a network consisting of children's rights NGOs from across the EU working for a safer online environment for children.
(01net) La secrétaire d’Etat à la Famille estime que les avertissements Pegi de classification par âge sont peu lisibles. Les éditeurs de jeux vidéo sont en colère.
(CNET News.com) The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) announced its new iPhone app, which is designed to put the board's full written summaries of more than 2,500 video games right at parents' fingertips.
(Facebook blog) Improving safety online is a group effort. At Facebook, we took another step by launching a global Safety Advisory Board. This group of five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europe will consult with us on online safety issues. One of our first projects together will be to overhaul the safety information that's available to you from the Facebook Help Center so that the resources are more comprehensive and include content that's specifically tailored to the needs of parents, teachers and teens. The initial members of the Safety Advisory Board are Childnet International, The Family Online Safety Institute, Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely and WiredSafety. See also press release.
(Google European Public Policy Blog) It's become a preoccupation of many parents: they want their children to benefit from the power of the Internet and yet not be infected by its dangers. In order to help, Google, Calysto and the Voix de l'Enfant joined together to produce a video offering advice to help youngsters adopt an informed and responsible attitude to surfing the net. It includes demos of tools and testimonies of children. Bruno Solo, ambassador of the association la Voix de l'Enfant, narrates. We timed the release to the 20th anniversary of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. You can watch here the YouTube channel of La Voix de l'Enfant.
(BBC) Lessons in using the internet safely are set to become a compulsory part of the curriculum for primary schoolchildren in England from 2011. The lessons are one element of a new government strategy being unveiled called "Click Clever, Click Safe". Children will also be encouraged to follow an online "Green Cross Code" and block and report inappropriate content. The measures have been drawn up by the UK Council on Child Internet Safety, a new body comprising 140 organisations. see Click Clever Click Safe: The First Child Internet Safety Strategy. see also Son's Rogue Tweet Taught Brown A Lesson (Sky News).
(BBC) A group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army managed to redirect Twitter users to its own site displaying a political message. Twitter said the attack had been carried out by getting at the servers that tell web browsers where to find particular sites. The site said it would start an investigation into what allowed the "unplanned downtime" to take place. see also Twitter hack by 'Iranian Cyber Army' is really just misdirection (Guardian).
(BBC) Doctors are being warned not to respond to flirtatious approaches on social networking sites. The Medical Defence Union, a legal body for doctors, said communicating via sites such as Facebook may be a breach of ethical responsibilities. It issued the warning after a number of cases in which patients propositioned doctors after searching for their details on the internet.
(Net Family News) The Federal Trade Commission has sent to Congress its close study of 27 online virtual worlds - 14 for children under 13 and 13 aimed at teens and adults - looking at the level of sexually explicit and violent content and what the VWs were doing to protect children from it. The FTC found at least one instance of either sexually or violently explicit content in 19 of the 27 worlds. Half the explicit content found in the teen- and adult-oriented virtual worlds was text-based, while the other half appeared as graphics, occasionally with accompanying audio. Measures these VWs surveyed take to keep minors away from explicit content included "age screens" designed to keep minors from registering below a site's minimum age; "adults only" sections requiring subscriptions or age verifications; abuse reporting and other flagging of inappropriate content; human moderation; and some filtering technology. See also FTC Press Release .
(Heise) Absehbare Schlappe für Deutschland und die Telekom: Die von der letzten Bundesregierung im Telekommunikationsgesetz (TKG) verankerten regulatorischen Rahmenbedingungen für neue Netze verstoßen gegen europäisches Recht. Mit diesem Urteil (Az: C-424/07) kippt der Gerichtshof der Europäischen Union (EuGH) in Luxemburg den § 9a des TKG, von Kritikern auch "Lex Telekom" genannt. Diese Regelung nahm neue Märkte grundsätzlich von der Regulierung durch die Bundesnetzagentur aus. Wettbewerber der Telekom und die EU-Kommission hatten den Paragraphen vehement als "Regulierungsferien" für das VDSL-Netz der Telekom kritisiert.
(Mashable) As the Wall Street Journal reports, AOL is in talks to sell ICQ, the once prominent - but now archaic - instant messaging service. The Wall Street Journal also says that Bebo, the social network AOL acquired in 2008 for a jaw-dropping $850 million, may be on the block.
(BBC) AOL and Time Warner have formally split after almost 10 years as one company. Under the terms of the deal, qualifying shareholders will receive one AOL share for each 11 Time Warner they own. AOL shares will even regain the market ticker symbol they used before the merger. But the company will be worth a tiny fraction of what it once was. Its market value is put at about $2.5bn - 10% of its value at the firm's height. At the time of the merger in 2001, the marriage of Time Warner with AOL was dubbed the "deal of the century" - one that brought superstars of both old and new media together. But the new media element, AOL, soon started to look jaded as its once-popular dial-up internet model was superseded by broadband. [Ed: the deal was announced on 10 January 2000 and QuickLinks subscribers received a "QuickLinks Flash" - a special email message. See QuickLinks item].
(BBC) Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google. The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages. Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.
(MakeUseOf) Have you ever wondered what happens to your email accounts and social networking accounts such as Facebook and MySpace when you die? Who gets access to your accounts, can people get even get access to your account and your stored personal information?
(CNET News.com) Microsoft said that millions of Xbox Live members have used the new social-media features giving access to Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm. While the manifestation of each of those services is scaled down on Xbox Live, the rollout has been one of the company's big pushes this fall for its hugely popular online system. The first-week figures show that at least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook, and that half a million Last.fm accounts were created in the first 24 hours of availability. Figures were not given for many Xbox Live users have used the service's Twitter feature.
(CNET News.com) A robotic penguin, apart from being cute, can bring Facebook connections to life, quite literally. About the size of a small chicken egg and taking the shape of a penguin, the new device is called Pingo. It's an interactive electronic playmate that can move around your desk, express moods, respond to voice commands, sing songs, and read aloud e-mail messages, headlines, stock quotes, and weather.
(Mashable) TrendStream, who publishes the Global Web Index, has created a fantastic visualization that shows the penetration of different social technologies in major markets around the globe. The research is based on interviews with 32,000 Internet users in 16 countries.
(Hamburg Media School) Um den internationalen Dialog zum Thema „Privatsphäre und Web 2.0“ zu fördern, finanziert die DFG ein wissenschaftliches Netzwerk von fünfzehn internationalen, renommierten Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern. Zum Netzwerk unter der Leitung von Prof. Dr. Sabine Trepte von der Hamburg Media School gehören auch Dr. Jan-Hinrik Schmidt vom Hans-Bredow-Institut sowie als Mentor Institutsdirektor Prof. Dr. Uwe Hasebrink. Das DFG-Projekt „Young Scholars' Network on Privacy and Web 2.0” ermöglicht den direkten wissenschaftlichen Austausch zwischen exzellenten, internationalen Nachwuchsforscherinnen und -forschern. Die fünfzehn Mitglieder des Netzwerkes stammen von der Harvard University, der University of Amsterdam, der Michigan State University, der City University of Hong Kong, der University of Bath, der Universität Hamburg, dem Hans-Bredow-Institut Hamburg, der Universität der Künste Berlin, der Universität Hohenheim, der Universität Mainz und der Universität Duisburg-Essen.
(IPTS) This report by the The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies provides a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing applications and its impact on industry, personal identity, learning, social inclusion, healthcare and public health, and government services and public governance.
(CNET) Sending explicit content, such as naked or near-naked photos, via text message - a phenomenon also known as "sexting" - is a familiar phenomenon among some teens, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Older teens, especially those who foot their own cell phone bills, are much more likely to send and receive these images. While 8 percent of 17-year-olds with cell phones have sent a sexually provocative image by text, this number goes up to 17 percent among those who pay their bills themselves. In all, 30 percent of 17-year-olds have received explicit images on their phones. The survey also shows that while the exchange of nude images mostly takes place among romantic partners or potential partners of the same age, these images are also forwarded to non-partners or people in different age groups.
(Wise Kids) WISE KIDS is organising two one-day conferences in Wales together with the Wales Internet Safety Partnership (WISP) entitled Young People in a Digital World 2010 - Preparing, Supporting and Inspiring, on the 1st and 3rd of February in Swansea and Bangor respectively. The south Wales conference will be opened by Leighton Andrews AM, Minister for Children, Education and Lifelong Learning, and the confirmed keynote speaker is Professor Tanya Byron, author of Safer Children in a Digital World (the Byron Review). The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ypdw2010. Young people will also be involved in presentations and a panel session.
(News.com) The joint U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command's annual NORAD Santa tracker program has presences on Facebook, Twitter and Picasa Web. Google - which, like all the corporate partners in the program, offers its assistance at no cost to taxpayers - has dozens of people working on helping to track Santa. Those people provide technical consulting and server provisioning for the NORAD Santa Web site, as well as helping put together YouTube videos, information for Google Maps and Google Earth and, soon, a new service that will allow people to use their mobile phones to track Santa on Christmas Eve. It also helps out by providing and monitoring a Gmail account for the program. Labels: Who's who
(QuickLinks) You can now follow QuickLinks updates on Twitter. Labels: Editorial_information
QuickLinks consists of
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.