Viewing entries tagged with 'internet safety'
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Fri
Jun 3, '11
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Not Reporting Potential Child Predators is Dangerous
Grooming is a process child predators use to desensitize potential victims and to eventually trick them into meeting in person. Grooming most often begins in a chat room. The predator often poses as someone who can better relate to the person (such as a teenager of the same age). Other times they are honest about their age but instead put on a show of sympathy about the child/teenager.
Net Nanny has a great tool whereby a parent can receive alerts if a child has an instant messaging or chat conversation in which a stranger uses grooming language. In fact, this tool recently helped a mother in New York discover that her teenage daughter was being sexually abused by an online predator. You can read about how Net Nanny helped catch a predator HERE.
Net Nanny provided this mother with incontrovertible proof that her daughter was being abused. Hence, she was quick to contact the police and take aggressive action. But, what if the proof wasn't so incontrovertible? What if, after viewing the Net Nanny alerts, she just had a hunch her daughter was being groomed? Where would she go? Who would she tell? Would the police give her the time of day? This ambivalence, which is common among unsure parents, can be dangerous. The following are two resources you can use to easily and quickly report a potential child predator.
Tool 1: Web Browser Pedophile Reporter Plugin
This web browser plugin can be easily installed in all the popular web browsers on Mac and Windows computers. When installed, it places a small button at the top right of your web browser. When you're on a profile page of the individual you think is grooming your child, you click the button and it sends the webpage to an investigator. It also opens up an email you can put additional information in to send on to the investigator. It is simple enough to use that you could teach your child how to use it, so they can send up an immediate report if they feel grooming is occurring.
Tool 2: The Child Predator CyberTipline
This tool, while not as easy to use as the web browser plugin mentioned above, is backed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It provides a very detailed reporting tool that forwards your tips on to law enforcement.
It is important to remember, that these reporting methods should only be used to report "potential" child predators. If you have any evidence that child grooming is occuring, you need to contact your local law enforcement immediately. If they don't take any action on your report, take it to a higher level and contact your local FBI offices. -
Thu
Mar 31, '11
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Learn To Cook With SPAM
As a lad, I had several opportunities to eat SPAM, most of which occurred on scout camps. I know, interesting how taking away your child's cell phone in today's world is child abuse and yet feeding children SPAM back in the day was not.
Because my experience with cooking SPAM is limited to dumping SPAM into a dutch oven with cream of mushroom soup and some green beans, I don't think I'm one to give any good advice on cooking with SPAM. If you did actually come to this blogpost hoping I'd make you a SPAM cooking connoisseur then I don't want you to go away un-fulfilled, so HERE's a link to some great SPAM recipes.
For those of you who'd like to figure out how you can decrease offers for discount Viagra and offers to claim your unknown Uncle Harry's jagnormous inheritance, read on. I'll attempt to teach you how to overcome that pesky spam problem that has overtaken your email box.
First off, we need to think like a spammer. Read this sentence three times: "I want to make a bunch of money for doing the least amount of work possible." If we can get a few million email addresses to send spam to, eventually we'll get some poor sap to click our link and give us their credit card number or bank account/SSN. Here are several cheap/easy ways we can harvest email addresses to send spam to:- Peddle porn. Porn is pervasively moving into homes across the nation. Never has it been so easy as it is now, with the recent release of the Interweb (side note - spammers are not the most educated folk... many of them probably do actually believe the Internet is called the 'Interweb' and that it was just released yesterday) to get pornographic images into the hands of unsuspecting men, women, and (agahst) even children. Because my cost to put up a website and offer porn on it is just a few bucks a year I'm going to put up 300 free porn sites. As individuals click on images I'm going to either a) infect their computer with a tiny software program that sends out spam to all their friends OR b) ask them to sign up with their email address to access the special "members only" section of my website. With 300 sites infecting computers and harvesting emails it's just a matter of months before I've got a few million emails addresses I can send to.
- Give away a free iPad for being the 1 millionth visitor of a website. There are still enough sheep out there that haven't heard of my crazy email stealing tactics that I can still offer free iPads (that I'll never actually send) to the 1 millionth website visitor (oh darn, looks like I didn't program this website correctly so it is somehow thinking every visitor is the 1 millionth) if they just enter their email address. I should be able to get a ton of email addresses from this too.
- Search the web for publicly visible email addresses. I'll just buy a cheap program to search through the web looking for email addresses that are publicly visible. This takes a little more effort but is sure to bring in a bunch of email addresses too.
- Post something of interest on Facebook. That's right... by simply posting something attention grabbing, such as "Wow, I can't believe Britney Spears is buying that new handbag" (yes, there are actually people out there who would find that interesting) and linking it to a fake Facebook page that harvests login credentials I can likely use those same login credentials to access other accounts of theirs - gaining more than just an email address, but also access to all the email addresses in their contact book.
- And the list goes on...
- Don't look at porn. Installing an Internet filter will greatly decrease the chance that someone in your household will visit a site that is infected with a virus or is harvesting email addresses. Even if you don't feel like shelling out a few bucks needed to get the advanced protection of Net Nanny, you should at least have something - take a look at some of the free Internet filtering solutions out there.
- If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Don't fall for it. If you want to take advantage of some offer that may sound too good to be true then use an old email address you are willing to receive spam in - and be extra attentive to NEVER give away any personal info to any site you do not know 100% as being legit.
- Don't put your email address online. Wonder why companies most often have "contact us" forms instead of just listing their email address? Because they don't want to get spammed. Never type your email address into forums, blog comments, social networking, etc. If you do, it will likely be made publicly viewable, and your email account will see a jump in spam.
- Be careful of what you click on. If you get an email from a friend's Facebook account with updates, or from your bank telling you about a new product be sure to not click links in the email to get to the offer. If it's a legitimate company you should be able to go straight to their site (via typing their web address in the url box at the top of your browser) and find the same offer or update.
- Protect yourself. Get Net Nanny.
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Mon
Mar 2, '09
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Australian ISP Filtering Faces Failure
Last month I blogged about how the Australian government's decision to drop the educational NetAlert program and move forward with mandatory ISP filtering would do little to help protect families down under from the dangers on the Internet.
To the surprise of many, including myself, it appears that the plan "has effectively been scuttled" according the the Sydney Morning Herald. The fallout appears to come from independent Senator Nick Xenophon's decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to get the scheme started.
"The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available online," the Morning Herald stated. On the heels of this, Senator Conroy still plans on moving ahead with the trial and even expanding it's scope outside of blocking illegal web site content. Senator Conroy recently said there was "a very strong case for blocking" other legal content that has been "refused classification." According to the classification code, this includes sites depicting drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence or "revolting and abhorrent phenomena" that "offend against the standards of morality".
Besides facing opposition from online consumers, lobby groups, ISPs, network administrators, some children's welfare groups, the Opposition, the Greens, NSW Young Labor and even the conservative Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who famously tried to censor the chef Gordon Ramsay's swearing on television, Senator Conroy faces the toughest battle against the families he believes he is protecting. A poll from 2 weeks ago found that only 5 per cent of Australians want ISPs to be responsible for protecting children online and only 4 per cent want Government to have this responsibility. Parents actuallly want to take responsibility for what content their children consume.
Parental control?
Imagine that. -
Wed
Jan 21, '09
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The Child Online Protection Act is Dead
Today, the Supreme Court said it won't consider reviving the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which lower federal courts struck down as unconstitutional in 2007 and 2008.COPA is a law in the U.S., passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of protecting minors from harmful sexual material on the Internet. COPA was enacted after the Supreme Court struck down a much broader law, the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The federal courts have since ruled that COPA is in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution, and therefore have blocked it from taking effect.COPA is not to be confused with Children's Online Privacy Protection Act(COPPA), which is a law that applies to the online collection of personal information by persons or entities under U.S. jurisdiction from children under 13 years of age. It details when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent or guardian, and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children's privacy and safety online including restrictions on the marketing to those under 13.The judges who have presided over the appeals, conclude that existing elective filtering technologies and parental controls are less restrictive to free speech than the 'ineffective' and 'overly broad' ban. I couldn’t agree more. If such a law was passed how would it be enforced? Who would enforce it? Who would determine what is ‘decent’ and what content is appropriate for what age?The answer is quite simple. Parents, care-givers, guardians, and teachers are the frontline when it comes to protecting kids online. They need the ‘three-legged stool’ of education, legislation and technology to assist them. Education about the safety issues, solid legislation that is forward thinking and effective, and powerful technology solutions that include filtering, blocking and monitoring of a child’s online activities.While it is important that we protect free speech in the U.S., it is equally important to take responsibility and protect children from harmful and inappropriate content as well. Net Nanny does both.
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