Keeping Kids Safe Online::

Kids are turning to the internet for everything from hanging out with friends to shopping, making it harder to keep track of all your kids’ online activities. That’s why most Internet Service Providers (such as Verizon, AOL, and Comcast) provide free blockers, filers, and trackers designed to help you keep track of and manager your kids’ online activities.

If your child has internet access that’s mobile (such as on a cell phone or a laptop computer), it will be more difficult to monitor and control your child’s internet use.

Content blockers and filters are great tools to use with younger kids. They allow you more control over where they go and what they do online. A content blocker blocks sites with explicit material or limits a child’s search to a predetermined set of sites. A content filter scans sites and images and blocks those that contain certain words, key phrases, or content.

Keep in mind that content blockers may sometimes block sites that are just fine for your kids. That’s why tracking software may be more effective; remember, though, that you need to take time on a regular basis to check on your child’s internet activity.

Consider tracking software for older teenagers. This software enables you to see which sites your children have visited, tracking their path online. This tool gives young people more freedom to explore the Web, but it also allows you to verify that they are using the internet responsibly. Let your teenagers know that you trust them, but that you will be periodically verifying that they are visiting appropriate sites online.

Even if you use content blockers, filters, and trackers, know that a lot of kids figure out ways to get around these, so it’s important to remain vigilant.

Remember that not all adult sites post an industry rating that can be identified by blocker, filter, or tracker software. That’s why it’s important to talk to your kids about what to do when something inappropriate or scary pops up.

Nothing can replace involvement and supervision by adults. Keep monitoring how your kids use the internet on a regular basis without getting into the role of internet traffic cop.

Your home computer or your child’s laptop, even though there are so many other options, will be a primary point of access to the internet. Fortunately, there are many options for controlling what your kids see on their computers. If you aren’t already using one, start today and talk to your kids about it.

David Carr New York Times

I can remember when I first thought seriously about Twitter. Last March, I was at the SXSW conference, a conclave in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed up and re-imagined, and, not so coincidentally, where Twitter first rolled out in 2007. As someone who was oversubscribed on Facebook, overwhelmed by the computer-generated RSS feeds of news that came flying at me, and swamped by incoming e-mail messages, the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion into my life.

And then there was the name. Twitter.

In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, “to tweet” is even more embarrassing.

Beyond the dippy lingo, the idea that something intelligent, something worthy of mindshare, might occur in the space of 140 characters — Twitter’s parameters were set by what would fit in a text message on a phone — seems unlikely.

But it was clear that at the conference, the primary news platform was Twitter, with real-time annotation of the panels on stage and critical updates about what was happening elsewhere at a very hectic convention. At 52, I succumbed, partly out of professional necessity.

AP-NEW YORK — Vonage Holdings Corp., a pioneer in Internet-based home phone service, is launching applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry that undercut the international calling rates of major wireless carriers.

The free programs let users place calls that are routed over Vonage’s network, at least for the international leg.
The calls are placed as local wireless calls, using up minutes on the cell phone plan, although the iPhone will use Wi-Fi instead if that’s available. (That works as well on the iPhone’s sibling, the iPod Touch, which goes online only with Wi-Fi.) Vonage then carries the calls to their overseas destination.

The fact that the Vonage app for the iPhone can use the cellular voice channel is unusual. Several other voice-over-Internet Protocol, or VoIP, apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch can already place calls over Wi-Fi. But Google Inc.’s Voice application, which is designed to use the cellular network, has not been approved.

Google says its Voice program was rejected by Apple for duplicating the built-in functions of the phone, and the Web search company implies that Apple is protecting the revenue stream of iPhone carriers like AT&T Inc. by not approving the application. Like Vonage’s application, Google Voice provides low international calling rates.
Apple says the Google Voice app hasn’t been rejected, but is still being reviewed for inclusion in the App Store. The Federal Communications Commission is probing the disagreement.

Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said the company considers Vonage’s application to be in the same category as other VoIP apps that have already been approved for the iPhone. She would not elaborate on whether Apple considers there to be significant differences between Vonage’s program and Google Voice.

As an example of its prices, Vonage will carry a call to Colombia for 5 cents per minute. AT&T charges $2.19 per minute, or 17 cents per minute if the caller has signed up for a $3.99-per-month international calling plan.

Vonage is the largest of the independent companies that supply their subscribers with adapters that let them plug their home phones into their broadband connections. The new applications for mobile phones have no direct tie to that business — subscribers to Vonage’s home phones will pay the same rates as other users of the apps.

A few years ago, Vonage added hundreds of thousands of customers per quarter, thanks in part to its offer of unlimited domestic calling for a flat monthly rate. But growth tapered off as Vonage battled patent lawsuits, while cable and phone companies countered with their own unlimited-calling plans. Subscriber numbers are now slowly shrinking, to about 2.5 million at the end of June. That makes it the eighth-largest landline phone company in the U.S.

Vonage’s stock was in danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange for being less than $1, but the shares shot up in late August after the company announced that it would bundle free calls to 60 countries in its new basic home plan. On Monday morning, the shares rose 17 cents, or 13 percent, to $1.49.

Have you received an email for a social network claiming that someone you know has posted pictures for you to see? Then you click on the link and fill out the account info just to find out there never were any pictures… You begin to think to yourself, hmmmm. Then the phone calls and emails of your friends start pouring in asking you about the pictures you just set them. “What pictures?”After all the confusion, you figure it out.

An e-mail message inviting people to join The Tagged.com website says it’s from a friend, but looks suspicious. Sometimes it’s a private message or photos, but this trick is not a new one. It will ask you to supply an e-mail address and a password, and if you do, it can access your entire address book and send e-mails to your contacts — doing the same thing to them.

Fortunately, I haven’t been targeted by this spam virus yet. But here are a few ways to protect yourself.

1. Be Smart. If the email doesn’t look familiar, DO NOT OPEN IT! If it is from one of your friends, they will contact you to find out if you received it or not.

2. Proxy Email Address. Speaking from experience, set up an email address with no contacts that you can use to register sites with. Then set up a gmail account under a different name to forward the first account to. This way, if you really want to open that strange email you can do it in the proxy account and delete it from your gmail and protect your contacts.

3. Protect Your Personal Information. Before you give out any personal information over the phone or via the Internet, contact the supposed sender to make sure you know who you’re dealing with. Make sure the website you use to verify identification is legitimate. Do NOT just copy and paste a URL given to you in a suspicious e-mail into your browser!

I was opening a new soundclould.com account the other day, filling out the necessary information until I came to the most frequntly asked question besides your first and last name. The Secret Question. Everyone has answered it. “What’s your grade school teacher’s name?” “What’s your favorite pet’s name?” How about “What’s you mother’s maiden name?”

These question are supposed to protect your accounts from hackers breaking into your vitals and doing unmentionables to you. But I found out through a New Scientist Study that it is not as safe as we would like to believe. So Stuart Schechter and Rob Reeder of Microsoft has a new idea that could be safer. Check it out and let me know what you think.

- By Steve Aquino – April 02, 2009 – Mother Jones

A new bill would give the President emergency authority to halt web traffic and access private data. – Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency?

Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Virginia) (202) 224-6472 – and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) (202) 224-5344 – think so. – On Wednesday they introduced a bill to establish the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor–an arm of the executive branch that would have vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against threats to critical cyber infrastructure. That broad power is rattling some civil libertarians.

To Read More Click The Link Below….
http://www.treehuggersofamerica.org/Should_Obama_Control_Internet.php

April 8th 2009
International spies have penetrated the U.S. power grid, leaving software that could be used to further disrupt the nation’s infrastructure, FOX News confirmed Wednesday.

U.S. officials believe the culprits are be spies from a number of countries including Russia and China, though the Washington embassies for both nations deny any state involvement. “The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” a senior intelligence official told the Wall Street Journal. “So have the Russians.”

Intrusions of this nature have been occurring over the past few years. Spies have infiltrated not only the electrical power system, but the water and sewage systems as well. There is concern that other critical systems could be compromised at a later date.

“Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told lawmakers. “A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.”

By John Markoff of The NY Times
The Conficker worm is scheduled to activate on April 1, and the unanswered question is: Will it prove to be the world’s biggest April Fool’s joke or is it the Information Age equivalent of Herman Kahn’s legendary 1962 treatise about nuclear war, “Thinking About the Unthinkable”?

Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software have spread widely around the globe since October, mostly outside the United States because there are more unpatched, pirated Windows computers overseas. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based computers.)

An estimated 12 million or more machines have been infected. However, many have also been disinfected, so a precise census is difficult to obtain.

It is possible to detect and remove Conficker using commercial anti-virus tools offered by many companies. However, the most recent version of the program has a dramatically improved capacity to remove commercial anti-virus software and to turn off Microsoft’s security update service. It can also block communications with Web services provided by security companies to update their products. It even systematically opens holes in firewalls in an effort to improve its communication with other infected computers.

Given the sophisticated nature of the worm, the question remains: What is the purpose of Conficker, which could possibly become the world’s most powerful parallel computer on April 1? That is when the worm will generate 50,000 domain names and systematically attempt to communicate with each one. The authors then only need to register one of the domain names in order to take control of the millions of zombie computers that have been created.

Speculation about Conficker’s purpose ranges from the benign — an April Fool’s Day prank — to far darker notions. One likely possibility is that the program will be used in the “rent-a-computer-crook” business, something that has been tried previously by the computer underground. Just like Amazon.com offers computing time on its network for rent, the Conficker team might rent access to its “network” for nefarious purposes like spamming.

The most intriguing clue about the purpose of Conficker lies in the intricate design of the peer-to-peer logic of the latest version of the program that security researchers are still attempting to completely decode.

According to a research addendum to be added Thursday to an earlier paper by researchers at SRI International, in the Conficker C version of the program, the infected computers can act both as clients and servers and share files in both directions. The peer-to-peer design is also highly distributed, making it more difficult for security teams to defeat the system by disabling so called “super-nodes.”

Conficker’s authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet, the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship of documents impossible.

Or perhaps the Conficker botnet’s masters have something more Machiavellian in mind. One researcher, University of California at San Diego computer scientist Stefan Savage, has suggested the idea of a “Dark Google.” What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers? Malware already does this on a focused basis using a variety of schemes that are referred to as “spear phishing,” in a reference to the widespread use of social engineering tricks on the Net.

But to do something like that on a massive scale? That would be a dragnet — and a genuine horror story.