A long awaited report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concludes that children and teens are less vulnerable to sexual predation than many have feared. The report also questions the efficacy and necessity of some commonly prescribed remedies designed to protect young people.
The task force was formed as a result of a joint agreement between MySpace and 49 state attorneys general. › Continue reading…
By Hemanshu Nigam
It’s New Year’s Eve, and your teen is all decked out and ready for a big party. She’s got her iPhone, BlackBerry, or some other cell phone with a camera in her pocketbook. And she’s ready to roll. You’re glad she’s got these gadgets so you can get in touch with her. You tell her to call to check in, to let you know she got there safely, to ask for permission to stay later. She agrees. You give her a quick hug and run upstairs to get ready for your own party to celebrate the arrival of a new beginning. You even remember to put the new digital camera you got for Christmas by your purse so you don’t forget it. › Continue reading…
Reposted from San Jose Mercury News
December 8, 2008
by Larry Magid
What Lori Drew allegedly did to Megan Meier was despicable, but it doesn’t justify her conviction late last month for violating federal laws designed to keep hackers from invading computer networks.
Two years ago, Megan, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself after her online friend “Josh Evans,” who had befriended her on MySpace, reportedly told her that he didn’t want to be friends with her and that the world would be better off without her. But Josh was in fact Drew, a 49-year-old mother of one of Megan’s former friends.
According to published reports, Megan had been mean to Drew’s daughter and Josh’s fake online relationship with Megan was a way for Drew to retaliate. › Continue reading…
News that Microsoft had to issue an emergency patch to fix a flaw in all versions of Internet Explorer reminds me how important it is for parents to make sure that all the computers in your household have up-to-date anti-malware software and the latest updates to the operating system.
While Windows PCs seems to attract a lot more attacks than Macs, the Apple Macintosh is not invulnerable to malicious software. That’s why Apple regularly updates its operating system as does Microsoft — and why some leading security software companies including Symantec and TrendMicro offer Macintosh security software.
The latest threat is a flaw in all versions of Internet Explorer that makes it possible for an attacker to take remote control of your PC, capture user names and passwords and log keystrokes. All you have to do to be exposed is to visit an infected ‘Web site, whether it is a site set up by a hacker or even a legitimate site that been injected with the malicious code. The Associated Press reports that “thousands of Web sites already have been compromised by criminals looking to exploit the flaw.” That’s because the flaw was disclosed about a week before Microsoft issued a fix.
Microsoft was expected to release a fix on Wednesday, December 16, which would be automatically applied to any machine that has automated updates turned on. To be sure, you can manually scan your computer to see if its security fixes are up-to-date by visiting WindowsUpdate.microsoft.com. For this particular site, you must use Internet Explorer (other browsers such as Google’s Chrome and Mozilla Firefox works with the vast majority of sites but not this one).Speaking of other browsers, only Internet Explorer is affected by this particular flaw but that doesn’t mean that Firefox and Chrome are exempt from other vulnerabilities.
PC security is a cat-and-mouse game. The good guys are always trying to catch up, but, with billions of dollars of ill-gotten gain at stake, the bad guys are always thinking up something new.
And parents, be sure your kids know not to download anything without your permission — and don’t you download anything unless you know it’s from a reputable site. Even then, make sure you have a good Internet security suite installed and that it’s up-to-date.
As a columnist and radio commentator, I avoided endorsing a candidate in the recent presidential election. But as an Internet safety advocate and co-director of ConnectSafely.org, I have to say how happy I am to see a setback for the politics of fear and rumor mongering.
I say this because over the past year or so, many of us in the Internet safety field have been retooling our messages to focus more on digital citizenship and civility as we realize that the fear of predators has been grossly exaggerated. In terms of numbers, the larger danger to both kids and adults is “cyberbullying,” harassment and defamation — often between people who know each other in the real world.
And that’s exactly what we saw during the campaign: fear mongering and defamation. It was especially sad to see this coming from Sarah Palin, the mother of five children, including three teenagers. Children learn from their parents and other adults including our leaders. › Continue reading…
Real Networks, the company behind the popular RealPlayer® and the Rhapsody music service, has just announced RealDVD, a program that lets you “legally” save the contents of protected DVDs to a PC hard drive.
Once movies have been copied to your PC, you can restrict access based on the MPAA rating such as PG-13, PG or G. With the ratings turned on, kids can only watch movies at or below their rating (kids allowed to watch PG-13 could also watch a G movie) but parents can watch whatever they want by entering a password.
This is the first DVD ripping program from a well known U.S. company that can handle protected commercial DVDs. Hollywood studies put encryption codes on almost all commercial movies to prevent copying and, until now, respected software companies avoided letting people get around those codes.
There have long been workarounds. For example, DVD X Copy from 321 Studios allowed PC users to make backup copies of DVDs. 321 was sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and ultimately closed up shop after its product was found to be in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). Similar programs are still floating aroudnd the Internet. PC Magazine recently did a round-up of DVD ripping programs.
I’ve been testing a pre-release of RealDVD and it pretty much works as advertised. I copied several movies from my DVD collection to my PC’s hard drive and, after putting the original DVDs back on my shelf, was able to play the movies on my PC. By recording to an external drive, I was able to watch the movies on both my desktop and laptop.
For families, having movies on a PC hard drive could be very convenient, especially if you have children who love to watch movies over and over. By putting them on the drive, your kids don’t have to fiddle with DVDs and you don’t have to worry about the discs being damaged. And the ability to restrict kids to certain ratings means that the adults in the family can still have age-appropriate movies in their collection while preventing kids from watching them.
by Larry Magid
Street view of home with bedroom window
As if the TV series “To Catch a Predator” wasn’t enough paranoia, now there’s a campaign to protect our children against predators who use Google Street View.
I admit, there may be some privacy concerns as a result of Google taking pictures of homes and businesses around the country but StopInternetPredators.org’s “campaign to highlight child safety concerns over Google’s ‘Street View’ strikes me as absurd. The organization, which is headed by Stacie D. Rumenap, former Deputy Director for the American Conservative Union, argues that Google Street View “can be misused by child predators to target children.”
In a video that appears on the site, Rumenap says that it’s “frighteningly simple” for anyone “to find out detailed photographic information about you and your family.” The video and accompanying text make it seems as if Google Street View is a predator’s best friend for targeting children for abuse. Rumenap calls it “an entirely new threat to our families and children” that “makes it simple to map the most likely route your child walks to school… view entrances to community parks and even find the location of your family’s bedroom windows.” She wants people to “urge local leaders to ban Street View in your neighborhood until the technology is safeguarded.” She does, however, admit that “banning Street View might not safeguard our children 100% from child predators.” › Continue reading…
by Larry Magid
You probably know about social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook and blogging services like Blogger.com and WordPress but have you heard of microblogging?
Services like Twitter and Plurk let people post very short messages (140 characters or less) to their friends and acquaintances. Founded in 2006, Twitter has attracted millions of users who keep people posted about what they’re doing and thinking. It can be as simple as “I’m standing in line at the grocery store” to as profound as a quick comment about a political candidate, a world event or a new book. There’s even a video spin-off of this concept called 12 Seconds that allows people to post video clips no longer than 12 seconds.
These sites aren’t nearly as popular with teens as MySpace and Facebook. Twitter says it’s only for people 18 and up — but it doesn’t ask your age when you set up an account. Plurk is aimed at people 13 and up.
While there is nothing inherently dangerous in the sites themselves, there is the risk that teens could use microblogs to reveal personal information or engage in a relationship with someone whose intentions are less than honorable. And like any other form of communication, the door is open for a teen to take risks such as talking about sex with strangers (albeit in relatively short bursts) or getting together with someone they meet through a microblog.
By default, Twitter messages can be seen by anyone, so if you want privacy you need to go into Settings and click “Protect my updates” to make sure only people you approve can see what you type. Otherwise anyone can “follow” you and see what you enter. You can always see a list of your followers and block anyone you wish. Likewise, you can only see posts from people you follow and can search for these people by name or location.
In some ways, microblogs are like chat rooms. What you type is posted instantaneously and it can be seen by anyone. But it also lingers so people can see it later, even when you’re offline — so always use common sense.
I use Twitter but, as with any public forum, I only post information that I’m comfortable anyone knowing. Click here to follow me (twitter.com/larrymagid) on Twitter.
by Larry Magid
I think I can say with a great deal of certainty that the overwhelming majority of parents don’t operate websites based in the Republic of Georgia. And I am also certain that you’re not malicious hackers. But before you ignore my story, consider the possibility that the PC in your house could have played a role in taking down the website of the President of Georgia.
Attacks against Georgian government sites, according to the New York Times, started “weeks before physical bombs started falling on Georgia,” and the Georgian president’s site was difficult or impossible to access on Tuesday afternoon, even though the site moved from the country of Georgia to an Internet service provider in the state of Georgia in the United States.
“This is a classic denial of service attack (DOS),” said Steve Gibson, president of Gibson Research and a leading security expert.
In an interview, Gibson said it has all the marks of a “zombie” or “botnet” type of attack. “Botnet” is a hacker term for a network of robots — machines that are surreptitiously recruited to attack other machines.
“Essentially what happens,” explained Gibson, “is a large number of computers that are under the control of some entities — presumably someone with a grudge — can be recast for various purposes.
“Sometimes they’re used to generate spam, sometimes to generate fake clicks on advertisements and sometimes they are told to simply flood a site with traffic,” said Gibson.
These zombie machines can bombard a server with enough requests in a short period of time to simply overwhelm it. It would be like putting thousands of cars on the freeway, making it impossible for normal traffic or emergency vehicles to get through.
Such tactics are sometimes referred to as distributed denial-of-service attacks because the computers used in the attacks are distributed all over the Internet. It’s often difficult for the attacked machine to distinguish between legitimate requests for service and the bogus request from the zombie machines.
DOS attacks can also be carried out by disrupting configuration data such as routing information so that traffic to a server is re-routed, or simply sent nowhere instead of the server that users are trying to reach.
The machines that wind up carrying out the attack “are typically owned by regular computer users who have no idea that their machine is now serving two masters,” said Gibson. “It’s serving them, and some remotely located criminal that is able to take the resources of their machine and their Internet connection for some malicious purpose.”
Malicious software to carry out these attacks can come from websites, via email or as part of spyware people inadvertently download to their computers. Most Internet security programs can protect PCs against being infected by such software, though security is — and has always been — a cat and mouse game between the good guys and the bad guys. That means there is always the possibility of botnet software slipping past the defenses of even up-to-date security software.
Still, if you use up-to-date security software, the chances of your machine being infected go way down. Also, security software such as Symantec’s Norton 360, TrendMicro’s Internet Security Pro, Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Security Suite and Kaspersky Lab’s Kaspersky Internet Security all do a good job at repairing infected computers along with preventing infections in the first place.
It’s also important to be sure that your operating system is up-to-date. For example, Microsoft issued updates Tuesday for various versions of Windows which fixed 26 flaws, including six what were considered critical. These flaws could put your computer at risk of being taken over by a hijacker who could use it for virtually any purpose — including attacking other computers or web servers.
You can learn more about how hackers can turn your computer into a malicious zombie in my CBS News podcast discussion with Steve Gibson.
For those who can afford it, it’s nearly time for families to gas up their cars and minivans for summer car trips. When I was a kid, that meant fighting over the car radio, but now there are lots of electronic options available to entertain the family as the miles pass.
Many cars these days have DVD screens in the backseat – some have two. And for those who don’t have a DVD player built-in, there’s always the possibility of watching movies on a laptop perched on the backseat.
But is keeping kids entertained the whole time really such a good idea?
When my kids were young, my wife and I didn’t allow them to watch movies when we took car trips. Patti argued that kids should spend their time looking out the window or engaging in conversation and I agreed.
We did allow our kids to listen to music, on CDs or their iPods, but they weren’t allowed to use headphones in the car. Instead, we played the iPod through the car’s audio system so that everyone could share the same music and same experience.
For one particularly long trip I created different playlists with the favorite music of various family members. Again, plugging it into the car stereo, we took turns listening to each other’s music. The whole idea of the car trip was to be together as a family and not have anyone isolate themselves with their earbuds.
Sharing music had its advantages and difficult moments. I’ll never forget when our 15-year-old daughter brought home one of rap artist Eminem’s CDs with some pretty disturbing lyrics. We didn’t ban the music but played it through the audio system for all to “enjoy.” Actually, I did like his voice and beat, but Patti and I objected to the way he objectified women and to some of his more explicit language. But rather than turning it off, we turned it into a teachable moment, asking our daughter what she found appealing about the songs and pointing out what we considered objectionable.
I remember one particular discussion about the “B Word” – the one that likens a human female to a female dog. My daughter thought it was fine, but we disagreed. Years later, she came around to our way of thinking, which goes to show that sometimes you do have an impact, even when you don’t see it in the moment!
