Until now, parents had to deal with a separate company or buy special equipment to track their children through their cell phones.
Sprint Nextel Corp. becomes the first U.S. wireless provider to sell its own product when the Family Locator Service rolls out Thursday.
Using the Global Positioning System, the service allows parents to track up to four cell phones over the Internet or on their own wireless device. Parents can periodically ask the service to find the child’s phone, and the location will be displayed on a road map.
Parents can also set alerts, automatically warning them if the child isn’t at a certain place, such as school or soccer practice, at a specific time.
The child’s phone also displays a text message, letting the child know they’ve been searched for and found.
The software, provided through WaveMarket Inc. for $9.99 per month, can be downloaded on 17 existing phones and can locate 28 GPS-enabled models.
Sprint officials insist their service isn’t a “Big Brother” tool.
“It’s not about tracking. It’s not about monitoring,” said Dan Gilmartin, Sprint’s marketing manager for location-based services. “It’s about giving parents and caregivers peace of mind that they’re able to find their children’s location.”
He added that the service could let adults keep track of elderly parents.
Don’t forget computer science: With all the recent talk about improving math and basic science education to keep the United States competitive, Chris Stephenson worries that a third piece of the educational picture is being forgotten: computer science.
Now Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, is hoping to overcome that somewhat by giving away free teaching resources for use in kindergarten through 12th-grade computer classes.
In conjunction with IBM Corp., the group has developed and tested lesson plans and other materials that help educators teach skills such as Web design and Java programming.
Other free resources for computer science teachers have been made available before, but Stephenson said those have tended to be slightly modified versions of training guides originally intended for professionals.
“This is really kind of a new approach,” she said. “The thing that computer science teachers say they want more than anything else is access to good resources. It is not exaggerating in any way to say they are really desperate for them.”
Don’t mess with “Crusher”: Carnegie Mellon University is about to unveil a new unmanned ground combat vehicle commissioned by the U.S. military.
“Crusher,” a 6.5-ton, six-wheeled robotic vehicle designed to negotiate harsh terrain, will be presented along with its predecessor, “Spinner,” at Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center on April 28, spokeswoman Anne Watzman said.
Crusher, funded by the Army and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is one of many robotic products being developed nationwide to cut the risk of casualties.
“It’s designed to help keep military personnel out of harm’s way,” Watzman said. “If these vehicles can get around and do things soldiers are doing now, there won’t be anybody there but a machine to get injured.”
Although Crusher is designed to carry weapons, the university has worked only on the machinery of the vehicle, Watzman said. “It would be up to the Army to decide about payloads,” she said.
China’s get-tough policy on Internet fraud falling short: Chinese police complain they have few legal tools to prosecute ballooning Internet fraud, despite the country’s fierce reputation for strictly controlling online content.
Officers investigated 20,000 allegations of Internet fraud last year, but relatively few resulted in prosecutions because China’s laws don’t sufficiently address cybercrime, officials said in comments reprinted Monday by the Xinhua News Agency.
“Because the laws are out of date, the degree to which we can attack is not very great,” said Xu Jianzhuo, deputy director of the Public Security Ministry’s Bureau of Internet Security.
That admission, first reported by Outlook magazine last week, contrasts sharply with China’s stringent restrictions on Internet speech, including harsh prison sentences for people who discuss sensitive political or social issues online.
While police can act against clear-cut cases of illegal pornography and gambling, they said they have few weapons against online criminals who steal bank account numbers and other personal information or cheat consumers with offers of phone sex or other fake services.
Of the 11,521 cases of alleged Internet crime brought before courts between 1997 and 2005, just 14 resulted in criminal convictions, Li Jingjing of the ministry’s Bureau of Security Solutions was quoted as saying. Others resulted merely in administrative punishments such as having business licenses withdrawn, Li said.
Internet Archive caught in copyright predicament: An ongoing lawsuit between a company and a popular archive of Web pages raises questions about whether the archive unavoidably violates copyright laws while providing a valuable service, experts say.
The nonprofit Internet Archive was created in 1996 to preserve Web pages that will eventually be deleted or changed. More than 55 billion pages are stored there.
A health care company claims the archive didn’t do enough to protect copyrighted information that a competing firm accessed to defend itself in a lawsuit.
That information didn’t factor into a judge’s decision to dismiss a trademark violation claim against the competing company, but the attorney for Healthcare Advocates Inc. of Philadelphia, which filed the trademark claim, is suing the Internet Archive anyway.
The archive “is just like a big vacuum cleaner, sucking up information and making it available” to anyone with a Web browser, said Scott S. Christie, an attorney representing Healthcare Advocates.
The company filed the lawsuit last year in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. Before the trademark claim was dismissed, the company learned that opposing attorneys had used the archive to access old versions of Healthcare Advocates’ Web site – presumably to help the competitor’s case.
Healthcare Advocates alleges the San Francisco-based archive failed to protect that information after the company asked how it could restrict access to certain files.
Stefani Shanberg, an attorney for the Internet Archive, said Web page owners can ask that information be removed from the archive and can keep the archives from grabbing it in the first place.
Nokia – the town – going mobile: The Finnish town of Nokia, left in the shadow of its more famous namesake company, is going mobile.
Nokia’s municipal workers will be given cellular handsets to replace their landline phones in a move aimed at improving communication, officials said.
“People will be able to call direct to officials’ mobile phones,” said Martin Andersson, the town’s project leader for information technology. “The main aim is to make employees more reachable.”
The town of 28,000 in southern Finland, where Nokia Corp. started 140 years ago as a wood-pulp mill, will provide 1,300 municipal employees with mobile handsets by June, when their landline numbers will automatically connect to cell phones.
Switching to mobile phones also will save landline phone costs and will not be more expensive for customers calling town officials, Andersson said.
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