The Pew Internet and American Life Project study revealed that most parents report setting limits on their childrens' Internet activity, keeping tabs on how often their kid logs on and 54 percent have installed filtering software, especially to shield middle school-age children.

But the survey also reported that "81 percent of parents of online teens say that teens aren't careful enough when giving out information about themselves online and 79 percent of online teens agree with this."

Actually, the teen Internet use survey is only part of the findings available at the Pew Web site, (www.pewinternet.org/). Launched in 1999 by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew research center, the site has findings on how the 'Net has influenced politics, family life, community interaction, health care, education, civics and the workplace.

A decade after it became a household item, the Internet has transformed how we inform, entertain, communicate, shop and stay in touch. As of December 2004, about 70 million Americans log on daily for everything from buying a book to booking a flight.

So many of us are spending more time in cyberspace, we may forget we're still Web surfing in a frontier town. The law hasn't really caught up to those cyber rustlers clever enough to manipulate Internet technology to scale firewalls, rifle our bank accounts and sully our good name and credit rating via identity theft.

That battle has just escalated in the cyber outlaws' favor with the advent of wireless - "WiFi" - technology. According to the Friday edition of the New York Times, 10 million Americans now own this wireless computer technology, but few know how much easier it has made life for cyber criminals who can tap into "open networks" for criminal activity ranging from child porn to identity theft and fraud.

Unwary wireless users are making it easier for them. Although the technology has safeguards, the Times report warned that most users "never turn on any of the features, available in almost all Wi-Fi routers, that change the system's default settings, conceal the connection from others and encrypt the data sent over it. Failure to secure the network in those ways can allow anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled computer within about 200 feet to tap into the base station's Internet connection, typically a digital subscriber line or a cable modem.technology."

That leaves one pending question: How can we create technology that is simultaneously universally accessible, and universally protected from hackers? The response to that query so far comes back "unable to locate."