Duck and Moose

Professional Youth Worker

2009-02-24T10:44:00.000-05:00

Discussions of professionalism always happen when youth workers gather. It's an inevitability.

As I was reading my blogs this morning, I came across a blog from Ian, a British youth minister.

In a forum he was reading, someone posted the definition of profession. So good, I'm re-posting here.

Looking at the 'roots' of such things ... from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary, we find:
Main Entry: pro·fes·sion
Pronunciation: \prə-ˈfe-shən\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English professioun, from Anglo-French profession, from Late Latin & Latin; Late Latin profession-, professio, from Latin, public declaration, from profitēri
Date: 13th century
1: the act of taking the vows of a religious community
2: an act of openly declaring or publicly claiming a belief, faith, or opinion : protestation
3: an avowed religious faith
4 a: a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation b: a principal calling, vocation, or employment c: the whole body of persons engaged in a calling

Thanks to Ian! Go read his blog. He's one of my favorites.

Survey Says . . .

2008-11-29T12:43:00.002-05:00

We have completed gathering data for the Online Gaming Survey. We are currently "crunching" the numbers and will begin to post results sometime in December of 2008.

Thanks to all who participated in the survey.

Not all Parental Controls are Equal

2008-08-02T21:44:00.000-04:00

Recently my son figured out a way to get around the Norton Parental Controls by using a proxy. Not only did this violate our agreement about computer use, but he used a "free" proxy that allowed him to go to sites that Norton Parental Controls would not allow him to go, but it also uploaded some malware that was trying to mine personal information. Because I have other programs on the computer he uses, the attempted malware was stopped before it could do any harm as well as locked the computer until I could enter my administrative password.

I mentioned this because I want to remind everyone not to depend on just one protection for your computer or your home network. It is also a reminder that we need to keep an eye on our kids when they are on the computer. In the ten minutes that I was not in the room where the computer is located, he was able to attempt the work around which he learned about from another child a few days earlier.

For more information about using proxies, begin by clicking here.

For more information about internet safety produces, begin by clicking here.

Spend some time learning by doing your own research, and remember to examine different review sites.

BTW - His attempt to get around the Parental Controls earned him a grounding until school starts at the end of August.

New Wizard101 MMORPG

2008-07-11T21:36:00.000-04:00

Wizard101 has begun its beta testing on their new MMORPG game. The game appears to be designed for kids and the developers are keeping safety in mind with limited chat functions according to your age as well as word and phase filters for older teens and adults. However, a game is only safe when parents monitor their children and their internet usage.

The game even has an information page for parents. You can begin viewing the material by clicking here.

June is Internet Safety Month

2008-06-04T21:29:00.000-04:00

This month is Internet Safety Month and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace has a lot of information for you. While some of this information is out of date, it also has some good advice.

For more information go to the NCJRS site.

Boy Scouts have new Internet Safety Requirements

2008-05-01T21:22:00.000-04:00

The new 2008 revisions to the Tenderfoot through First Class requirements include new safety awareness requirements. The First Class require includes being aware of internet safety and knowing what forms cyberbullying can take.

See the new requirements here.

Virginia First State to Require Internet Safety lessons

2008-04-08T21:04:00.000-04:00

Virginia has become the first state to require Internet Safety to be taught in public schools. According to the Attorney General, Bob McDonnell, this requirement has come about due to concerns about sexual offender cases in Virginia as well as an increase in internet-base crime. It was also noted that more than half of the world's internet traffic flows through Virginia since companies such as AOL and MCI have large operations based in that state.

For more information see Virginia's Handbook.

IBM launches new, free, MMO

2008-03-06T17:36:00.000-05:00

PowerUP is the newest Massive Multi-player Online game to hit the internet. This free game was launched in mid-February by IBM and challenges players to save a planet from ecological disaster. This MMO is part of the company’s educational initiative.

The game took almost a year and a half to be developed with the help from teenagers at the Connecticut Innovation Academy. The TryScience team at the New York Hall of Science worked with The Tech Museum in San Jose, California and the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the activities and game content.

There are currently nine missions to solve by solo players or teams. The game is accompanied by classroom lesson plans associated with the topics presented in the online experience, and also includes an interactive module to educate kids on 3D technologies used in virtual world building.

Don’t let the fact that the term “educational” keeps getting throw into the descriptions of this game. The handful of youth that I talked to who have played the game state that it is fun and challenging. By virtue of using phase based communication in game between platers, the safety aspect of the game is a little higher than many other MMO’s.

More information about the game can be found at powerupthegame.org

U.S. Intelligence to Use Virtual Worlds to Fight Terrorism

2008-02-28T08:37:00.004-05:00

According to a report on data mining put out by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence dated February 15, 2008, a program has been started to identify possible criminals, especially terrorist, in virtual worlds. This program, known as Reynard, is an “effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games . . .”

It is the goal of this program to profile online gaming behavior with the goal of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world. Some of the functions of this program are to automatically identify faces, events and objects in video. There will also be a surveillance system with a threat warning system and a databases to find patterns of bad behavior. Apparently it will begin to link in-game players with blog postings, emails and other information gain through different data mining techniques.

This raises many questions, both practical and ethical. How will this eventually affect game play? Who will have access to this data and how will it be stored? What will happen to information concerning minors (not miners)? Does this mean groups such as the “Second Life Liberation Army” will be more closely watched that a raider guild on a player verse player (PvP) server? Are huge economic alliances such as Band of Brothers (BoB) going to be carefully watched to see if their strong arm in-game tactics show up in the real world? Will gold farming be seen as a type of terrorism?

This is an issue that bears watching for many reasons, but most of all for the online safety concerns. We have heard too many reports in the last couple of years about government data being stolen or lost.

This government report can be found at http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/datamining.pdf

Gold Farming is Not Only Cheating but it Hurts the Game as Well

2008-02-26T17:34:00.002-05:00

Gold farming is a term in Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) for the act of acquiring items of value within a game by exploiting repetitive elements of the game's mechanics and then usually selling these virtual items for real money. For example, waiting in the area that a monster who carries a certain item or amount of gold reappears within a known time cycle after it has been “killed” in game to repeatedly kill it in order to harvest the desired item. Some gold farmers use programs to do this for them

According to a New York Times article, there are over 100 thousand people in China who are employed as gold farmers. Many games activity work to rid themselves of gold farmers. Blizzard, the company that owns and operates World or Warcraft, settled a lawsuit on February 8, 2008 virtually banning one of the larger gold farming companies from its game and websites.

But the issues are deeper than just the ethics of cheating and being an in game nuisance. It also cost the game companies money through credit card fraud and chargebacks. According to an interview with John Smedley, CEO of Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), by Michael Zenke at Massively.com, these gold farmers use stolen credit cards or cal the credit card companies to charge back the account at the end of a month.

In the interview Mr. Smedley stated, “A lot of these farmers are essentially stealing from us. What they do is they charge us back all the time. They use a credit card –sometimes stolen, sometimes not – to buy an account key. They use the account for a month, and then they call the credit card company and charge it back. We have suffered nearly a million dollars just in fines over the past six months; it's getting extremely expensive for us. What's happening is that when they do this all the time, the credit card companies come back to us and say "You have a higher than normal chargeback rate, therefore we'll charge you fines on top of that."

When Smedley was asked about fighting the chargebacks, he answered that they really can not fight the credit card company. He continued, “Visa and MasterCard have these rules about chargebacks, and I personally think they're antiqued. Digital delivery isn't covered by their rules very well. So if you order something from Amazon and pay thirty bucks for a book, if it doesn't show up at your house you can fight it because you can say "I never received that thing." They do not cover that with digital delivery. In my opinion the world has changed a lot and I think that needs to be addressed.” It is estimated that Blizzard has had to pay over half a million dollars in fines to do having a high rate of chargebacks.

You also have to watch out when you buy items from these gold farms. Many of them use stolen credit cards, obtained by unsuspecting users who give them credit card numbers to make their purchases. Your credit card is absolutely not safe in their hands.

What this boils down to is the fact that there is no way for a digital company, such as an online game or content provider, to prove to the credit card companies satisfaction that the provider did deliver the paid for produce. Apparently the consumer’s word is honored above that of a company.

Information about Blizzard’s lawsuit banning a group of gold farmers can be found at http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/02/01/peons4hire-blizzard-injunction/

The Quoted article from the New York Times can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/technology/09gaming.html?ex=1291784400&en=a723d0f8592dff2e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

The full interview with John Smedley, CEO of Sony Online Entertainment is in two parts on massively.com . Here is the link to the first part.
http://www.massively.com/2008/01/14/a-ces-interview-with-soe-ceo-john-smedley-pt-1/

Facebook Users Hit with Scam

2008-02-15T16:39:00.000-05:00

The social networking site, Facebook, is often thought of as being safer than Myspace. That is changing after a phishing scam hit Facebook users by in January 2008.

Many Facebook users who check their email in the early days of the new year found a posting on their wall from one of their friends that said, "lol I can't believe these pics got posted.... it's going to be BADDDD when her boyfriend sees these." The post then appeared to have a valid Facebook link. However, the link lead to a fake Facebook login page hosted on a Chinese .cn domain. The fake page actually logs the victims into Facebook, but also keeps a copy of their user names and passwords.

Armed with this information, the hackers then posted messages containing the same URL on the public "walls" of the users' friends. The technique is a powerful phishing scam, because the link seems to be coming from a trusted friend.

This is just one example of how hackers are using phishing to gain access to people’s financial account information. This is due to the fact than many people use the same user names and passwords to do online banking or access their credit card accounts. For those of us who can pat ourselves on the back for using completely different user names and password accounts for our finances, we may be using the same login information for our Facebook or Myspace accounts as we do on Ebay, Amazon or other retail sites that have our credit card information stored.

Users who fall prey to phishing scams should log in and change their passwords immediately, and do the same to their e-mail and shopping accounts if they used the same password for those services.

To avoid a great amount of damage by these scams, have a different login and password for each site. This might sound like a great inconvenience, but there are solutions. There are programs that you can have on your computer that stores the login information for you and all you have to do is remember your master password. One that you do not use anywhere else. Or, you can do something along the lines of what I do with my desktop computer at home - I have the list of sites and login information on the side of my monitor.

Information for article taken from various internet sources (including my own Facebook page).
See http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/01/facebook_phish for a full article.

New Online Gaming Survey

2008-01-01T10:51:00.000-05:00

Survey underway to assess Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG)
Study includes examining internet safety within MMORPG’s

A new survey exploring the gaming habits of those who identify themselves as Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) players is designed to determine the differences, if any, of internet usage between those who play online games and those who do not. Unlike any academic survey before, this survey is particularly focused on those who play MMORPG’s.

According to a recent survey, one in four internet users play online games, with the average online gamer visiting game sites nine (9) times a month.* However, that survey does not distinguish between those who play online board or card games and those who play MMORPG’s. Nor does it explore internet safety issues that arise during games. This new survey designed by internet safety consultants, Anita Smallin and Robert L. Lewis. Jr., focuses on the internet habits of those who participate in MMORPG’s.

There are several consulting teams and web sites that focus on internet safety. However, according to Robert Lewis there is very little information concerning safety within games on the internet. According to the information that is released with these reports, it does not seem that online gaming sites, MMORPG’s or otherwise, are being examined by those writing these reports.

“We are inviting anyone who uses the internet to plays games to participate in the survey.” Robert Lewis continues, “It does not matter if you play tradition board games online or MMORPG’s, everyone who plays games online are invited to participate in the survey. The more people who take the survey, the stronger the evidence to report outcomes.”

The link to the survey can be found in the Moose Tracks on he left-hand side of the blog screen. survey.

Once the data is compiled, information will be posted here.

For more information contact us.

*Source: comScore World Metrix: July 10, 2007