MySpace has removed online profiles from about 7,000 registered convicted sex offenders. A group of state Attorneys General have demanded that MySpace disclose information about those individuals and, after initially citing federal privacy laws as a reason for not disclosing that data, the company and the Attorneys General have now come to an agreement regarding the information. Hemanshu Nigam, the Chief Security Office of MySpace parent Fox Interactive explains the situation and what the company is doing to protect children in a conversation with CBS News technology Consultant Larry Magid.

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If you’re looking for a very useful holiday present for a friend, loved one or yourself, you should definitely consider an external hard drive. I realize that a storage product isn’t nearly as exciting or instantly gratifying as a digital music player, a digital camera or a large screen TV, but it can be incredibly useful.

To begin with, you can use it to backup your hard drive – always a good idea. Most external drives come with backup software but you can use any backup program or merely use the operating system’s file copy functions to backup your content.

If you have a Macintosh with the new Leopard operating system, you can use the “Time Machine” backup program that’s included. Time Machine makes backing up and restoring files easy and strangely even fun. Microsoft Windows Vista also comes with a backup program that’s relatively easy to use but not nearly as appealing as Time Machine.

In terms of basic functionality, it hardly matters which brand external drive you get – there are excellent ones on the market from Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Simple Tech, LaCie and others. Your most important decision is how much storage to get.

The more the merrier, of course, but in most cases, you probably don’t need to buy a higher capacity external drive than the number of gigabytes in your internal drive. And you might not even need that much storage since you don’t necessarily have to backup the operating system and your software: your data is what counts. › Continue reading…

Before I describe the bargain high-definition television I’ve been watching lately, a quick lesson in resolution and why you should or shouldn’t care.

Three high-def signals are currently available: 720p, 1080p and 1080i. The 720p has 720 lines vertical by 1280 pixels horizontal. The “p” stands for progressive, which means that 720 lines are shown at the same time. So 1080p gives you 1080 vertical lines and 1,920 horizontal pixels. The 1080i has the same resolution, but the lines are interlaced, which means each line gets painted sequentially.

You may not notice the difference, but theoretically 1080p is smoother. All broadcast TV signals today are either 720p or 1080i, so for TV it doesn’t matter. But some game consoles and Blu-ray and high-def DVDs are 1080p.

Bottom line: Any high-def TV is going to look a lot better than any standard set regardless of the type of signal you have, but if you plan to get a high-def DVD player, you’ll get a slightly better signal on a 1080p set.

The trouble is 1080p sets are typically a lot more expensive than 720p, and that brings us to my short review. I have been testing a 47-inch Vizio 1080p LCD TV, which sells for $1,700 online and at Costco and Sams Club.

I mostly watched high-def programs from a Dish Network personal video recorder and did a fine job with 720p and 1080i programs, but the TV really stood out when I played high-def Blu-ray DVDs. It has four picture modes: standard, movie, game and custom.

A few minutes with the custom settings improved the picture considerably. It comes with removable stereo speakers that sound good. It also has all the inputs you’ll need, including two HDMI ports along with component, composite, S-video and VGA. It also has digital and analog audio outputs to connect to an external sound system.

After two weeks of watching, I’m very pleased with this set. It’s on par with the slightly more expensive Westinghouse LCD I tested but, typical of other LCD sets, the blacks are more faded and the color less vivid than most plasma sets. Still, there are some advantages to LCD. It looks good even in a brightly lit room, it typically uses less power than plasma, and the picture quality won’t diminish over time.

If possible, it’s best to check out a variety of sets at a store and see if they’ll let you switch channels or at least check out a couple of DVDs. In-home testing has taught me that different TVs look better on different shows, so the only way to know for sure is to do some channel surfing.

Most adults I know use their cell phones primarily to make calls. But ask any teenager and you’ll soon find out that that’s only one of many things they’re doing with today’s cell phones.

One thing they’re doing is texting. That’s where they’re using their thumbs to type out messages to their friends. The technology, known as “SMS” or “short message service, has been around for years and it’s long been popular among both adults and teens in Europe and Asia.

Text messaging started catching on with teens in the U.S. a couple of years ago and today it’s pretty common to see kids thumbing their way through multiple messages wherever they are. Texting is also starting to catch on with American adults, though mostly young adults. It seems that the majority of mature Americans don’t feel like learning yet another way to type.
› Continue reading…

 Becoming a victim of sexual predators on the Web is not a result of being online. It is, very often, a result of online and offline behavior that can be risky.

We were again given a chance to learn that lesson as Alicia Kozakiewicz, now 19 years old, went to Washington and on Oct. 16th, told the House Judiciary Committee about a horrific ordeal at the hands of a sadistic rapist she met in an Internet chat room six years ago.

The story, which was heavily reported on TV, radio and some newspapers, is indeed tragic. According to some press accounts, Kozakiewicz unknowingly stepped into danger when she struck up an online friendship with a person she thought was another young girl.

Legally, the ordeal that ultimately developed for Kozakiewicz was considered to be a case of abduction, because she was held against her will.
But the then 13-year-old victim was not snatched away from her home. Like almost all victims of online predators, she was groomed over a period of time before finally agreeing to an in-person meeting. › Continue reading…

by Larry Magid

I don’t prepare my own tax return, but I do create a report for my accountant (who happens to be my brother). That means gathering all sorts of records about earnings and expenses. Fortunately, practically every bank on the planet now offers online bill paying, which, in addition to paying your bills, keeps an online record of your payments. That can be very handy at tax time.

Most credit cards also come with online access, which lets you view, print and in some cases even download your credit card usage records to import into Excel, Quicken or Microsoft Money. The trouble is that these services typically keep your data for only 90 days, which could be a problem at tax time.

If any entrepreneurs out there are looking for an idea for a new business, how about a Web service that scrapes all that data and stores it indefinitely for a small fee or for looking at ads?

One solution I’ve been using for years is Paytrust. › Continue reading…

I’ve recently been playing with two new Blackberries from Research in Motion (RIM) and have concluded that, when it comes to changing Blackberry’s winning formula, less is more. The BlackBerry Bold, whose user interface is a lot like many other Blackberries, is a great addition to the line. But BlackBerry Storm, which sort-of mimics the iPhone’s touch screen, is awkward to use. The Bold is available from AT&T for $299 while the Storm can be purchased from Verizon Wireless for $199 both with a two year contract.

Unlike all previous Blackberries, the Storm doesn’t have a QWERTY keyboard. Instead it has a touch-screen reminiscent of the iPhone with icons for launching applications and letters and numbers for typing or dialing the phone. But there’s an interesting twist. When you touch an onscreen icon, letter or number it simply highlights it. To make anything happen you have to firmly press down on the screen. When I first heard about this technology, I assumed that RIM had found some clever way to imbed lots of little switches to enable users to type on the screen but the screen is actually one big switch. All you’re really doing when you press it is confirming that you really wanted to click on the highlighted key. It does have one advantage over the iPhone’s touch screen in that you’re less likely to accidentally issue the wrong command simply because you touched an icon. That physical feedback is fine when it comes to launching programs but when trying to type an email, I found it tedious and tiring. I’m not a big iPhone touch-key fan, but I do find it easier to use than the Storm.

To its credit, the Storm copies the iPhone’s ability to automatically know if you’re holding it in portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) mode but it’s very slow to respond when you turn it on its side. And it’s not the only sluggish part of this phone. There is a brief but noticeable delay when you launch applications though it is fast when you type phone numbers and messages. What’s more, if you to type an email while holding the Storm in landscape mode you get an onscreen QWERTY keyboard but if you hold it in portrait mode you get this wacky “SureType” keyboard with two letters on each key. If you’re typing words, the software is reasonably good at figuring out your intentions but if you’re typing a web or email address its guesses are often wrong.

One thing missing in the Storm is WiFi. It does use Verizon’s relatively high-speed 3G phone network but that’s not as fast as a good WiFi network. The iPhone and the Blackberry Bold both support WiFi.

The Storm comes with a relatively generous 8 gigabytes of memory which should be adequate if you use it for music but not too much video but it does work with larger optional memory cards. Unlike the iPhone it has a removable battery, which is a good thing and it has a better than average web browser. It lacks the iPhone’s ability to resize images by pinching with two fingers but it does let you use one finger to move around the screen or tap twice to zoom in.

One thing I like about the Storm is Verizon’s excellent cellular network. Even though most Verizon phones don’t work overseas, the Storm will because it has an GSM SIM card that can be used in most other countries, albeit at a very high roaming rate.

What I don’t like is its user interface. Aside from the touch screen, I just find it confusing to use.

I have mostly good things to say about the Blackberry Bold. If you liked earlier Blackberries, you’ll probably love the Bold. It has all the familiar Blackberry features including a decent-size keyboard and a trackball. It also has a terrific (480 x 320) screen, WiFi connectivity and, like the Storm, a still and video camera, a media player and GPS. Other nice touches include a very sharp screen and both the Storm and the Bold also have a standard (3.5 mm) headphone jack so you can use any headphone. But, for a portable device, the Bold also has a surprisingly good built-in speaker.

With only 1 gigabyte, the Bold doesn’t have nearly as much memory as the Storm but it does allow you to install an optional microSD card for up to 16 gigabytes of memory — comparable to the $299 iPhone.

The phone doesn’t have an award winning design but it does have fake leather back which actually looks and feels kind of nice. The phone — and its keyboard — are a bit bigger than the Blackberry Curve but it still fits nicely in a pocket.

Because it uses the AT&T network GSM network it can be used overseas.

Most of all, the Bold is a tried and true Blackberry. It’s what happens when a company sticks to its knitting, making subtle improvements on what it does well rather than trying to imitate what others have done. It’s innovative but Blackberry users will find it familiar. But one thing they could do to improve it would be to add a touch screen without taking away the keyboard.

I’m on a Virgin America flight about an hour west of Washington DC as I chat with a friend via instant messaging, update my Facebook page, send little notes on Twitter, watch streaming web video and update my blog. I’m even filing this column from the air.

This is the first time I’ve surfed the web from the air which, I guess, makes me a Virgin in-flight WiFi user.

The cost is $9.95 for the entire flight and the service is great. Considering that this is a six hour flight, I could stream 3 movies before reaching San Francisco.

The service is offered by GoGo which is also on American flights between NY and San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami as well as some Delta flights. Unlike live TV programming on Virgin, JetBlue and a few other airlines, the internet service uses ground stations across the continental United States. According to the company’s website, “with nothing but air between these towers and your plane, you’re always getting the best connection” and so-far that seems to be true.

I’m getting 1.5 mbps download speed which is better than many DSL services. The bandwidth is good enough for me to have sampled some news videos on CBSNews.com, a movie on NetFlix.com and the Colbert Report on Hulu.com. It’s fast enough for Skype but, according to GoGo’s website, voice calls are not allowed. I tried Skype (before reading about the prohibition) and the person I called could hear me but his voice was garbled. I did this as an experiment but even if it worked, I’d avoid it for all but very short and urgent calls because it would distract fellow passengers.

Speaking of distracting, there are some etiquette “rules” that GoGo suggests passengers follow. They ask you to mute the sound or use headphones, avoid voice calls and “be an angel” and not to visit sites that might shock your neighbor. In other words, don’t risk exposing others to porn. Bloomberg has reported that American Airlines flight attendants have asked their employee to filter porn from the service. As far as I can tell, the service is not currently blocking any content on Virgin America but – via a live chat from the air – a Gogo representative .on the ground told me they are now filtering content on American Ailrines.

So far, this has been a first-class experience even though I’m stuffed into an economy seat. Mostly, it’s a way to make time fly on what would otherwise be a pretty boring trek across the continental United States.

This is an extremely interesting observation by researcher David Finklehor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center. What it implies is that we might be teaching teens and children the wrong things when it comes to giving out personal information. I’ll have more on this in an upcoming post. Follow the link to BlogSafety.com (in the post) to read the rest and discuss it with others.

Data suggest change in Internet safety strategy

We had a paper published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine this week that I think has some very important findings that suggest the need for a somewhat different approach to Internet safety education. It finds that giving out personal information online (one of the key prevention strategies emphasized in safety education) does not really increase a youth’s risk for sexual solicitation. Rather risk is related to making a lot of online acquaintances and talking with them about sex.

You can read the rest of this post and discuss it at BlogSafety.com

David Finkelhor
Director
Crimes against Children Research Center
University of New Hampshire