Safe and Secure

After plenty of coverage about how its Bing search engine makes it all too easy for kids to find and view porn, Microsoft has made some changes that will make it easier for parents to block or monitor what their kids are viewing on the site.

In a blog post, Microsoft announced that it is making two changes the company thinks will help address the issue.

According to the post, "explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain, which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be."

With this change, parents should be able to use parental control tools to block that domain and therefore block the images and videos. Almost all third-party filtering tools can be configured to block specific domains or sites, as can the parental controls in Microsoft Vista and Mac OS X.

Microsoft will also return the "source URL" information of specific images and videos, so if a filtering program blocks that site, it will prevent the video or image from being viewed within Bing. For example, if there is a video playing at Playboy.com, a filtering program that blocks Playboy would also prevent someone from viewing the content from inside Bing.

I tested this by right-clicking on a thumbnail of an explicit video in Bing and looking at properties. The URL of the image began with "ts3.explicit.bing.net." When I right-clicked on a sexual photograph, it contained "ts1.explicit.bing.net."

In an e-mail, Microsoft spokesman David Burt said the company has reached out to more than 25 filtering and security vendors to work with them to provide a solution for filtering explicit content while using Bing.

Bing raised the ire of some Internet safety advocates when it was discovered that all you have to do to watch an explicit video or view an image was to hover your mouse over its thumbnail within a Bing search. Although Bing's default settings would not bring up sexually explicit content, it did display an invitation saying "to view these videos, turn off safe search." One click later, the videos would start to play.

Microsoft's changes are likely to silence some--but not all--critics. Cris Clapp from the Internet safety group Enough is Enough said that "the steps they've taken are good," but added "it's important for them to make it more intuitive to guide parents to change filter settings."

These new features should also make it easier for schools and businesses to filter student or employee access to explicit content.

I'm pleased that Microsoft responded relatively quickly to concerns about how easy it was for kids to find and view porn. But even with these changes, parents still need to stay in close touch with how their kids are using Bing or any other Internet site. Not all families will want to use Internet filters. I didn't when my kids were younger but instead had frequent conversations with them about appropriate Internet use. But these changes should be welcome news for those parents who do choose to use tools to filter or monitor their kids' access. Without filters in place, it will still be easy for kids to access porn from within Bing, but at least parents will soon be able to block it if that's what they want to do.

Microsoft's new Bing search engine has a highly touted feature that some parents may find troublesome. Bing's video search tool has a preview mode that lets you view and listen to part of a video simply by hovering over it with your mouse. Trouble is, it works with porn as well as "family friendly" videos.

I tested this feature quickly and with great caution on board a Virgin America WiFi equipped flight, being careful to shield the screen from fellow passengers and crew.

When I searched for a word that was sure to bring up porn, I was first warned that it "may return explicit adult content" and told that "to view these videos, turn off safe search." One click later, safe search was off and I was looking a page of naughty thumbnails. And, as advertised, hovering the mouse over a thumbnail started the video and audio. Even when playing in a small thumbnail, it was unmistakably hard core porn.

Of course, kids don't need Bing to find and view porn. You can find it with Google and other search engines, and even though Google has a filtered search option, there's nothing to stop someone from turning that off. But Microsoft makes it a little too easy. If moderate or strict filtering is on and you search for a filtered term, the site simply instructs you to click a link to "change your SafeSearch setting." If you configure Google for "strict filtering," a user who searches for a filtered term on Google simply sees that the word or phrase "did not match any documents." Of course a kid can always go in and change Google's settings but they have to know how to do it and bother doing it. Microsoft makes it all too easy.

I don't know if Microsoft plans to do deal with this issue in any updates, but regardless of whether your kid uses Bing, Google, or Yahoo, or just knows the URLs of porn sites, the only ways to protect your kids from accessing porn is either to watch them, educate them, or filter them.

Watching them might work with very young children but it's not exactly practical for teens or even pre-teens. I recommend that kids under eight be supervised when using a device with Internet access. Education will work with many kids but not all. Parents certainly have the right to set rules and guidelines and impose consequences if their kids access forbidden sites. But, let's face it, hormones, curiosity, and just plain interest in things sexual can have a strong pull on kids, especially teenage boys. Besides, some younger kids could stumble on porn if they use any unfiltered search engine, even if they're just looking for innocuous terms like "Barbie."

Filtering programs (or the parental controls built into Vista and Mac OS X) will block most porn sites, but it's not yet entirely clear which ones will prevent Bing from previewing such sites. Safe Eyes filtering software "blocks all pornographic content on Bing and Google searches out of the box," according to a post on its company blog. From my perch in the sky, I wasn't able to check with other filtering companies, but I'm betting some will and some won't.

Coincidentally, I'm writing this post on the way to Washington, D.C. for the first meeting of the Commerce Department's NTIA Internet Safety Working Group, which I serve on. I have a feeling this will come up at Thursday's meeting. As one of my fellow working group members, Internet Keep Safe Coalition President Marsali Hancock, said by e-mail, "as new technologies release it is critical that industry and child health advocates explore the potential impact on young developing minds and quickly respond to health and safety concerns."

I'm going to keep on top of this issue with Microsoft and the filtering companies and will report back as this story unfolds.

If you're feeling adventuresome, you can get a jump on the rest of the world by being one of the first to try out Windows 7, the next version of Windows. I've tested out the beta version for the last few months and, so far, my experience has been quite positive.

Microsoft still hasn't announced the date of the final commercial version of the upcoming operating system, though it's widely expected to be out by the end of this year. But Microsoft is allowing anyone to download and install a free copy of the operating system so it can be tested on a wide range of machines. Windows 7 RC, as it's called, was made available for public testing May 4threlease candidate and will be available for free "at least through July" to those willing to go through a few hurdles.

Getting set up
Microsoft is recommending that you install Windows 7 on a dedicated test PC, admonishing users not to test it on your primary home or business PC. I have a confession. I ignored that advice and tested the first beta and the release candidate on the machine I mainly use for work. Having said that, I'm a very experienced PC user, I back up my data daily, and I have other machines I can rely on if there is a problem. Installing any new operating system--especially one that's not officially released or supported--can be risky, so if you do install Windows 7, be sure you have a complete backup of your system; back up your data regularly and have a plan of action should something fail.

First you have to download a 2.36-gigabyte file, which could take a considerable amount of time depending on your Internet speed and how busy the download servers are at the time. What you download is an ISO file that must be burned to a DVD before you can install it on a machine, so be sure your PC has a DVD burner and you have a blank DVD handy. Microsoft says your machine will need a 1 GHz or faster CPU, at least 1 GB of RAM (I recommended at least 2 GB), and at least 16 GB of available disk space (more is better). The 64-bit version has higher requirements.

You can install Windows 7 over Vista but not earlier versions of Windows. For best performance, I recommend a "clean install," which requires that you re-install all your software when you're done. In theory this can be done without destroying the data on your disk, but I would never dream of installing an operating system without first backing up all of my data.

The installation process went very smoothly for me and, when it was done, most of my hardware worked properly thanks to Windows 7's built-in drivers. Most simply installed automatically. I had to manually install my printer drivers, but even they were included with the operating system. It discovered my Brother laser printer on my network and installed it without my having to download any new drivers. It also recognized my keyboard and dual monitors. The built-in Windows driver for the IDT sound adapter on my Intel motherboard installed basic features but didn't give me as much control over settings as Intel's drivers. However, I was able to download and install them from Intel's Web site.

So far, all of the programs I've tested work. There were a few that gave me a bit of trouble at first but right-clicking on a program's icon brings up the Windows 7 "troubleshoot compatibility" tool that usually takes care of things. The one big problem I had was installing the plug-in to watch videos on ABC.com. Before it would let me download the software, it kept telling me that I had to upgrade my operating system to XP or Vista. It saw that I wasn't using an approved operating system and refused to let me try. But I solved that problem by downloading it to another (Vista) PC and copying the file over to my Windows 7 machine where it installed just fine.

First impressions
My favorite feature in Windows 7 is the taskbar, which not only displays running programs but lets you "pin" frequently used programs so you can run or switch to them with a single click. When you hover your mouse over an icon of a program that's running, you see thumbnails of all the open windows for that program. If you move the mouse into the thumbnail, it grows much larger. Click on that larger window and you're in the program. This feature makes it a lot easier to navigate between documents or Web sites. With Firefox, you only see one tab per window, but Internet Explorer shows all the tabs, which is quite nice. In fact, that feature caused me to start using Internet Explorer 8 (which comes with Windows 7) and I'm starting to like it a lot more. I read the reviews that say Firefox 3 is faster than Explorer 8, but with my cable modem connection I don't see any noticeable difference, and Internet Explorer seems to be a less prone to crashes.

I'm also liking the Libraries feature that you can access from the navigation pane in any folder. Libraries are virtual folders that, by default, provide access to documents, photos, and other media files without having to navigate through a hierarchy of folders. You can use this to add links to additional folders on your machine, a network server, or another machine on the network. For instructions on how to use libraries, see this post on Windows Live.

Although an improvement over previous versions, it still retains some of Windows' annoying attributes. For one thing, it will slow down over time. My brand new RC installation is quite fast but by the time I used the beta for a few months, it was starting to get a bit sluggish (that's called "windows rot"). That's been the case with every version of Windows so far, and Windows 7 doesn't seem to be an exception. Still, it's noticeably faster than Vista which is at least a step in the right direction. Also, as with earlier versions, it sometimes doesn't properly close programs that have crashed. There have been times when I've had to turn off the PC to recover from a program's crash.

For a lot more details on Windows see Ed Bott's excellent write-up on ZDNet.

Edited to include reference to Brian Cooley's 2008 video on BMW's in-car Internet

As CNET's Cartech blog reported last week, Ford Motor and Opera Software have announced a collaboration to add Web browsing to the Internet-enabled in-dash computers that Ford is installing in some of its trucks and work vans.

Ford says it's the first vehicle manufacturer in North America to offer an installed Internet device, though there are several in-dash aftermarket devices and, of course, it's long been possible to use an Internet-connected laptop in a vehicle. A year ago CNET's Brian Cooley filed a video report about BMW's in-car Internet access

The built-in Ford Work Solutions computer, which is being marketed to contractors, farmers, construction workers and business owners, is equipped with Microsoft Auto, a version of the Windows CE operating system.

In addition to accessing the Web through the Opera browser, the computer can run LogMeIn to enable remote access to office and home PCs. The computer also includes Garmin GPS navigation and is integrated with the vehicle cell phone. Internet access, through Sprint's 3G network is available for $25 a month for a 25-megabyte plan or $50 for up to 5 gigabytes of data, which should be more than enough for the vast majority of users.

The computer costs $1,125. It has a 6.5-inch screen and comes with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard. Ford sells an optional wireless Hewlett-Packard printer. The device also has an AM/FM radio and a CD player.

You can use the radio, CD, navigation system, and phone while driving, but for safety reasons, the computer and Internet access work only while the vehicle is parked. Also, the system does not allow you to stream Internet audio or video, even while stationary.

It makes a lot of sense for Ford to offer this to its business customers, many of whom spend the better part of their day in and around their vehicles. Before the economy put a damper on construction, it wasn't uncommon to see contractors and construction foremen pull out a laptop to get or send information vital to the job.

And having a Web browser makes sense, given the vast amount of resources it makes available. The Ford device also lets users send and receive e-mail and text messages. A message from the office with an address of a job, for example, can be pasted into the GPS application, making navigation a bit easier.

Internet equipped car computers inevitable
As someone who doesn't own a truck and probably never will, I'm not a potential customer for this system. But I'm sure Ford and other U.S. automakers have considered a consumer version for passenger cars.

If they do offer one--and I'm sure it's inevitable--I hope they include a media player with the ability to stream audio while the car is in motion. I support not allowing the driver to surf the Web or watch video while driving, but I see no harm in enabling it for passengers.

Drivers can now listen to Internet radio on an iPhone plugged into a car audio system using iPhone apps such as Pandora, Tuner, and AOL Radio. Shortly after the iPhone 3G came out, I drove around Silicon Valley listening live to East Coast stations and overseas radio and streaming music via Pandora.

While it worked, there are some problems with the iPhone solution. Not only are the phone and service expensive, the device is not designed to be used safely in the car. It's OK to listen but not safe to tune-in a station while driving, even though I'm sure people do it. It would be equally dangerous to use a Web browser to tune into Internet radio while driving.

Pandora for the road?
But it would be nice if future versions of products like this let you use the browser to configure your preferred stations while stationary or from home or work and put up a push-button interface on the screen that lets you tune into your favorite online stations as your car radio now let you access AM, FM, and satellite stations.

I think Internet radio could strike a deathblow to satellite radio and present challenges to terrestrial radio stations and networks, including those of CBS (which owns CNET). Of course, broadcasters are already streaming their programming online (most CBS stations are now available on the iPhone through AOL Radio). But in an online world, they will have to compete with anyone who invests as little as a few hundred dollars in a PC, some audio gear, and a Web site. Today, people get live audio in their cars by listening to terrestrial stations that have FCC licenses and expensive transmitters, or to satellite radio with really expensive satellites floating around in space. Competition will be good for consumers as it pressures stations and networks to be more competitive.

Aside from building Internet media players in the dash, the auto industry needs to persuade cellular carriers to lower the cost of data plans. Sprint's $50 plan, which is $10 less than the plan offered for laptops, is a good start. But I'd like to see prices come down further--perhaps to $19.95 a month.

Like millions of other people, I watched Katie Couric's interview with President Barack Obama from the comfort of my living room couch. But instead of watching it on TV. I was tuned into CBSNews.com. I watched Katie and the president on my 52-inch high-definition TV connected to a Windows PC.

It's long been possible to connect a PC to a TV, but doing it in 2009 is bucking the trend. Unlike previous years, we heard almost nothing about plugging PCs into TVs at last month's Consumer Electronics Show. Instead, companies were talking about a variety of devices that would stream Internet video directly to TVs. There were even sets from Samsung and Toshiba with built-in Internet connectors that won't require a set-top box. And even before CES, we saw a number of Internet-to-TV products like Apple TV and the Roku digital video player, which streams Netflix programming to TVs.

There was a time when the PC industry lobbied hard to get consumers to put PCs in their living rooms. Microsoft, Intel, and a variety of companies have showed off Windows XP Media Center Edition and various other schemes designed to integrate the PC into a home entertainment center.

There are plenty of reasons why none of these schemes took off. For one thing, until the last couple of years, very few people had high-definition flat-screen TVs. Though you can hook a PC up to a tube TV, the experience isn't nearly as good as what you get from a flat-screen set, which is basically a computer monitor with speakers and a tuner.

Another reason the technology never took off is because of a dearth of content. For most people, surfing the Web and sending e-mail isn't reason enough to hook up a PC to a TV. But now there's tons of content, including thousands of online movies, TV shows, news clips, and YouTube videos.

Also, PCs never made it into the living room because they are too complicated to set up and use. That's still largely true but recent developments are beginning to solve these issues.

The big advantage to a PC over dedicated boxes, or even the built-in Internet connected TVs, is there are no limits to what you can watch. Every dedicated system that I'm aware of has some limitation.

The Roku box--for now at least--only works with Netflix. Xbox Live, which lets you stream video from any PC in the house to a connected TV, only works with programs supported by Windows Media Center. Apple TV only works with programs that are compatible with iTunes. Yes, it includes YouTube, and you can purchase TV shows from NBC Universal and other content providers, but you can't use it to watch shows from Hulu.com or live streams from CNN.

Even as these vendors rush to sign up more content providers, they'll never have as many as are available on the Internet as a whole. With a device like a PC that has a full Web browser, there are no limits to what site you can visit and what media you can view.

In addition to streaming live video, I used the PC and TV to watch downloaded videos on Apple TV and movies that were copied from a DVD.

Of course, there are other advantages of having a PC connected to a TV, including being able to visit Web sites like Internet Movie Database to find out what other movie that actor on the screen played in. And, just to prove I could do it, I wrote part of this column in Word from my living room couch looking at text that is easy to read, even though the TV is several feet away.

There are PCs you can buy that are equipped to hook up to a TV, but I opted to have a custom-PC built around an Intel DG45ID motherboard . The board has all the usual PC-centric features plus a built-in HDMI port that allows me to plug the PC directly into my TV with a single cable that carries both high-definition video and high-quality audio.

It works well with both Windows Vista Premium Home Edition and a beta copy of the upcoming Windows 7, which actually recognized the model number of my TV as the monitor.

In addition to the motherboard, which costs approximately $120, you'll need a CPU, memory, DVD/CD drive, a hard drive, a case and necessary cables. That puts the total cost of a system like mine at about $450, plus the cost of Windows ($109 for Vista Home Premium) and any labor involved, along with an additional $50 or so for a wireless mouse and keyboard. But if you think building your own PC saves money, consider that you can buy an equivalent PC from Dell for $509.

Building and configuring the PC was easy compared to the task ahead. The hard part will be convincing my wife, Patti, to let me keep the PC in the living room. She already vetoed the laptop in the bedroom.

I don't know why it took so long, but Microsoft has finally fixed Vista. Only it isn't calling it Vista. Instead the company is working on what it's calling a new version of Windows, Windows 7. The operating system isn't commercially available, but is likely to be out by the end of the year.

I don't know how much Microsoft plans to charge for the upgrade once it's officially available, but the company should give it away free to anyone who bought Vista or a PC with Vista preinstalled. Even though there are some new features, Windows 7 strikes me mostly as a bug fix. It speeds up Windows and fixes one of its most annoying "features" and makes one particularly useful change to the user interface. It seems to me that anyone who paid for Vista is entitled to this upgrade.

Microsoft has launched a free, public, beta test of the software, but to participate you must download it by Feb. 10. It's not for everyone. Microsoft strongly recommends that "only experienced computer users sign up" for the beta program. Displayed on the screen is the caveat, "For testing purposes only." The beta will expire in August, but should be replaced by a newer beta or the real product. If you're game, you can download the beta test of Windows 7 at Microsoft's Web site

I installed it on two machines, a brand new desktop and an older notebook PC. The notebook installation was an upgrade of an old copy of Vista that I've had for a couple of years. As is often the case with Windows, the OS on that machine got pretty slow after two years of use. But Windows 7 sped it up. Until now, every new version of Windows was slower than the one it replaced.

... Read more

Microsoft is letting the public preview Windows 7, the successor to its Vista operating system. Anyone can download and try out the new software between now and February 10. Microsoft strongly recommends "that only experienced computer users sign up" for the beta program.

CBS News' Larry Magid talks about Windows 7 with CNET News' Ina Fried, who has tried it on several computers.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

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As my way of celebrating the Mac's 25th birthday last week, I posted my review from 1984 where I referred to Steve Jobs as "Apple's young chairman." Jobs, who personally supervised much of the Mac's development effort, isn't quite so young anymore, but he's just as creative and even more influential.

Jobs' genius is not that he creates cutting-edge technology. Instead, he and others at Apple take advantage of the innovative technology around them by creating products that delight people by their elegance and, in some cases, seeming simplicity.

Apple didn't invent the mouse or the graphical user interface. But it was the first company to put them into an affordable, elegant and easy-to-use computer. Apple's pioneering efforts helped create the demand that Bill Gates took full advantage of by morphing his own operating system from its MS-DOS command-line roots to various versions of Microsoft Windows.

Even though Windows always outsells the Mac, its mass market appeal never translated into the type of user enthusiasm that Apple enjoys. The Mac always seemed to be just a bit more reliable, a little easier to use and a tad sexier. Those "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials get it kind of right. The PC is functional--the Mac is cool. For what it's worth, when I go to industry events, I notice that a pretty high percentage of the tech industry's movers and shakers carry Macs. Based on what I see at conferences and the product placement I see in TV shows and movies, one would think Apple had closer to 90 percent market share instead of the other way around. And by the way, I'm writing this post on a PC running Vista.

Fast-forward to October 23, 2001, when Jobs introduced the iPod. Again, Apple didn't invent the storage, battery, and compression technology that made the device possible nor was it even the first company to market a digital music player. But once again, it did it in such an elegant way that it defined the genre. The same can be said of the iPhone that revolutionized the smart-phone industry and remains the gold standard by which other smart-phones are judged.

But what about Jobs?
It is sadly ironic that Jobs is on medical leave as we look back on Macs first 25 years. And it's not the first time he stepped away. In 1985, the Apple board of directors forced him to leave the company. After his first departure the company started to lose its luster with a decline in creativity and a dearth of interesting products that lasted until Jobs returned in 1997. If he does leave the company again, he'll be an extremely hard act to follow.

While I hope for his speedy recovery and return to Apple's helm, there is certainly a possibility that he might not be able to return. And if he does, there will be a time--perhaps 25 years from now--when Apple will have to carry on without him.

I hope that Steve Jobs gets to enjoy the 26th anniversary in good health from the CEO office at Apple.