mardi 17 mai 2011

Safety Tools For The Internet Users In Your Family

By Owen Jones


Do you want to make sure that people, especially children, in your family are protected whilst they are surfing the Net? If you regard this as one of your responsibilities, then there are a couple of steps that you ought to think about taking.

The difficulty for young kids surfing is the risk of meeting, or worse still trusting, a bad person. Insults and email bullying are bad enough, but there is much worse that can take place. Therefore, you should educate the children in your supervision regarding the dangers of the Net. It is easy to get these dangers out of proportion. They are very rare occurrences in fact, but they do happen in spite of all that.

There are precautions that every surfer ought to take, no matter what age the people concerned are. The sickos who prey on users of the Internet are called predators by the majority of surfers.

Besides common sense, there are also Internet safety tools that you can make use of to keep your friends and family safe. These tools can be nebulous, as in software, or material, as in hardware.

The first line of defence should be provided before the signal gets into your house. In other words, your Internet Service Provider ought to be jamming known junk and problem emails from arriving at your inbox. If they are not providing this very basic degree of service, then enquire of them why they do not or swap your ISP.

You should never see any ads about Viagra, Cialis, penis or breast enlargement unless you type the query into a search engine. Those days have gone and good riddance.

The next degree of security ought to be your firewall. If you are using a router, then there will normally be a firewall built into it. If there is not, do not purchase it. However, there ought to be a firewall built into your browser. MS Windows XP and Windows 7 have efficient firewalls, but you can also purchase one.

The third degree is that of parental control switches. However, children learn how to turn these off. Windows has such controls or you can buy even more powerful controls. If you remain with Windows, check your kids' computer settings at least each and every week while they are at school.

Next, you can block web sites and email addresses one by one. This is accomplished by 'black listing' web sites. This is also to be seen in the communication software like Outlook, Outlook Express and Explorer, but do not be complacent, kids know how to reverse these blocks as well.

You can also install a 'Keyword Tracker'. this piece of software will tell you, upon request, which are the foremost keywords used on that computer. This can be a real eye-opener and can be a very effective manner of knowing what your computer is being used for.

However, maybe the safest method of regulating what your kids are using the Internet for is to have the computer situated in your living room. You might think that it is a shame that it has to come to that, but, hey!, better safe than sorry, or not?




About the Author:



Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire