Internet Safety - Parents Guide

We’ve all heard it. Limit our children’s time on the internet. Have the computer in the main room, not their bedroom. Make sure they don’t reveal personal information whether it is on MySpace, face book, IM, Email. “Know where they are going”. All of it is great advice. Most are common sense. And we all do that as a matter of course (OK Tongue and cheek on that one). The problem is if you are one of the thousands of parent soldiers out there who like all of us, work, sometimes multiple jobs, clean, cook etc…. It is hard enough just trying to keep an eye on your children’s homework and school activities. If you are a single parent, that complicates it even further. I can tell you that I have a hard enough time with the school work, forget about trying to “monitor” internet usage. Going on school websites, making sure they have assignments in, trying to figure out the “new methods” of doing math. Isn’t that wonderful? Everything you learned as a kid in school, throw out the window. “We have a new way of teaching”! Having said that, this is a great way to monitor internet usage. It is easy to use, affordable and something I would recommend. PC Tattletale!

There are also boundary’s we are afraid to cross. How much “snooping around” constitutes invading your children’s privacy? Remember, Internet safety it the most important thing here. Personally I say there are very few lines you shouldn’t cross as a parent. That is why I wrote this Internet Safety Parent’s guide.The old Ronald Reagan statement comes to mind, “Trust but Verify”. When your children were small, and wanted to touch fire because it looked so cool, did you let them get burnt, or did you watch what they were doing and prevent them from being harmed? They had absolutely no idea that fire would burn them. Just as toddlers don’t have a clue that fire may burn them, pre-teens and teens think that the internet can’t “burn” them. I think all of us as parents know this is not the case. There are many ways to get burnt on the internet.

For many parents, particularly those of us who have not “grown up” on the computer, it seems like a daunting task to try and understand the various social networking sites. IM and email, ok that’s easy, you send someone a message. Although, let’s take a closer look at messaging and email. When your son or daughter sends an IM or email, who are they sending it to? What is their screen name? Are there any revealing aspects of the screen name? Is it dsmith3695@yah.com? Or AOL or any other IM or email site? Immediately, someone knows they are Dave, Don, Danielle Smith etc…..Additionally they probably have surmised that 3695 is their birthday. What do they know so far? Well, they know he or she is 13 and their last name is Smith. What can or will they do with that information? I don’t know, probably nothing. My point is while the vast majority of the time there is probably nothing to worry about, but taking a simple step to ensure that there are no revealing traits in a screen name is prudent. The same goes for any screen name, whether on IM, Email, Face book, MySpace.

Okay, admittedly the last section would qualify for one of those common sense things I discussed in my opening statements. However, I really do believe this is important, and I also believe it is very common to see screen names with personal information in them. Again, personal information on the social networking sites is extremely important. It is literally out there for the word to see. It is very easy to post something on a networking site that you are excited or proud of. “We just won the High School league championship for baseball in St. Louis. Our team the Blue Rays beat the Pirates 10 to 7. Jack Smith our pitcher almost had a shutout.” Seems very innocent, and it IS! However, just by taking out the St. Louis reference and referring to the pitcher as only our pitcher takes out anything that could reveal names and locations.

Now that I have either bored you to tears or made you feel like you are in the middle of a horror movie, lets look at some things that we can all do as parents, which are neither time consuming or too intrusive. First and foremost talk to your kids and whenever possible glance over and take a mental note of what sites they are on. When they are not around look at their history in Internet Explorer or whatever browser they are using. You may find that they have a link in history to a webpage on one of the social networking sites. Look at it. Determine if there is anything inappropriate or revealing. I should also note that there are many personal sites that may cyber bully or taunt other children. This is becoming an increasingly dangerous issue. We have all heard on the news over the last few years of students being harassed and taunted on these sites. It can have serious consequences. There have been suicides, beatings, etc… as the result of these sites that pick on or single out someone. You may come across someone else’s webpage in the history that has derogatory statements about your child. This means that your child is aware of it, and you need to address this immediately. Some kids may be smart enough to clear their history. This is not a problem. While some kids figure out that by clearing the history allows them some privacy, most do not know that you can look at their temporary internet files. These are called cookies. There will also be cached pages or stored pages. You can click on them and see the stored pages. The cookies are text files. There are various types of cookies. Many sites use them to identify an individual who came to their site. If you go into Internet Explorer and click on tools and select internet options you will get a dialog box that comes up. On the General tab select settings and when it opens select view files. You will see a folder of all of the cookies and cached pages as well as pictures etc… These cookies will have the name of the site that they visited. This is one way to determine what sites your kids have been on.

Another method of gathering information is to go into their yahoo or AOL IM application. In Yahoo, you turn on archiving. You will then be able to see who they have been talking to and what they were talking about. Most times the application is set to automatically logon. Logon with their account and under preferences turn on Archiving. You can then go to view archives in the future to see the messages. Yes I UNDERSTAND! Sounds sneaky right? Maybe it is. Maybe I am old fashion. The more we know about where are kids are going, the easier to identify the potential dangers. In AOL I believe they have a setting which turns on logging. It is essentially the same thing, however, if memory serves me, you can actually specify the directory you want the log files saved in. For instance My Documents on your account is a great place to store them. You simply browse to C:\documents and settings\username\documents

Next let’s talk about an area that is not specific to children or adults, Antivirus, antispyware, and Firewall applications. As a network engineer (Computer Geek), I cannot tell you how many times computers are compromised because of either the lack of these types of programs, or the fact that they have not been updated. None of us want to pay costly subscriptions for the software updates. I will be following up on this, with a list of these programs that are absolutely free! If you have a firewall program installed and running, I would encourage you to view the statistics. Most programs will allow you to see how many times intruders were blocked from your computer. I PROMISE you, this will be an eye opener. You will be amazed at how many times in an hour, that other computers on the internet try and access your computer. They do what are called “pings”. They have automated programs that send a packet to a vast number of computers. Some of the computers “respond” or reply if you will to these packets. If you have a firewall running, they will block those packets so your computer never sees them, thus will never respond to them. If you don’t have a firewall running I would suggest Zone Alarm
Keep Evil Away From Your Computer Responding to a ping is not harmful, however, when some of these malicious hackers do get a response, they assume you have no firewall running and will attempt to hack into your system. If they do this, they can install any number of nasty little programs. Some will log your keystrokes, and obtain anything from credit card numbers, to passwords, to other personal information. It is crucial to have these applications running. They sometimes install a program which will then turn your computer into a robot for them. Once this is done, they can use your computer to infect many other computers. Enough said. Install Antivirus, Spyware, and a Firewall. If you are in the unfortunate position of having your computer compromised, and are still able to logon either normally or in safe mode, an excellent tool on the internet which is free is called House call by Trend Micro. Go to www.trendmicro.com and you will find a link to house call. This will analyze your computer and remove any viruses, Trojans or spyware on your computer. This program may take several hours, but it is worth it. I have used this tool many times, and it has literally saved my customers hundreds of dollars, as well as the headache of losing data, and having to reinstall all of their programs.

Back to the kiddies’! I would suggest that either you have only one account on the computer or at the very least, do not allow your kid’s accounts to be password protected. I would also tell them you will allow them to go online and have an IM screen name, providing you know the passwords to whatever accounts they have. They may protest, but be strong. Tell them you trust them, however, there are a lot of dangers on the internet and you need to protect them. Tell them it is your job as a parent to keep them safe. They will hate it! LOL. You will find though, that given the choice of access to the internet or no access will be determined based on these conditions, that your child will gladly give up the goods and allow you to know what their passwords are!

In closing, I have literally only scratched the surface on what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones and by so doing provide a good and safe online experience. I plan on posting another blog on additional ways to make your computer as safe as possible. I will also provide links to many of what I consider to be good reputable software programs and websites. Some of them will be free, some will cost money.

About me: My name is David Gerke, I have been in computers and networking for about 12 years. I started off by getting a certification called A+. I then worked at a local computer company building computers from scratch. Over the years I have obtained many certifications for everything from Microsoft to IBM and other network hardware manufacturers. I also do consulting to individuals and businesses for their computing needs. I don’t claim to be a “guru” however; I have many years of practical experience and application of different technologies. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. If I do not know the answer, I will get you the answer. Please feel free to comment on this information. Now go out there and get snooping!

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