It's red for AIDS awareness, pink for breast-cancer research—cause-related ribbons have become fashion statements for the '90s. But what's with this blue ribbon that has been popping up as an icon on sites all over the Web? "It means you're for constitutionally protected free speech being no more restricted online than in any other medium," says Stanton McCandlish of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group dedicated to promoting free speech on the Net. The EFF began the blue-ribbon campaign in February to protest the recently enacted 1996 Telecommunications law intended to limit "indecent" content online. Lawyers for the ribbon coalition are now contesting the new law, arguing that individuals, not government, should have the right to decide what material they consider indecent. In the meantime, the EFF reports that its Web site (http://www.eff.org) has been getting 1 million hits a day from concerned Netizens eager to download ribbon icons for their own Sites.
PRETEEN SURFER
Wandering the Web is child's play these days, thanks to Yahooligans, a new addition to the popular Yahoo guide especially designed for 8-to 14-year-olds. We asked Lindsay Kaplan, 12, of Englewood, N.J., daughter of PEOPLE reporter Gail Nussbaum, to try it out. Here's what she found.
In general, I thought there were many good things to choose from, lots-of topics and good graphics. Yahooligans was easy to use; it was organized in a way that you could find stuff even if you weren't that used to computers. The material is geared to kids like me, but sometimes it's limited. I tried to look up information about Cuba for a homework project, but I didn't find anything. When I tried using the grown-up Yahoo browser, I came up with lots of material, but most was too hard for me.
Not everything is purely educational. There was a fun section of comics (Peanuts is my favorite) and magazines you could read online. The magazines were only so-so, with an odd mixture of stuff like The Web Page of "Weird Al" Yankovic and one called CyberTeens and another called Edge. I liked the movie section better. At the Ace Ventura site, you could click on Jim Carrey and hear him say, "All righty then!" I liked that so much, I downloaded it into my computer.
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