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Internet
Safety
Internet
Filtering is Not Perfect
Its
important to remember when you are installing internet
filters that some good or informational sites may be blocked
from view. For instance if you have an internet filter on
your computer, your young student might not be able to
access a site about breast cancer because it uses the term,
"breast." Of course, there are many other ways to conduct
research on a topic and for the most part, your internet
filtering software will merely prevent your child from
seeing sites that might be potentially damaging or
dangerous.
The
Power of the Pornographic Industry
Pornography is incredibly prevalent on the web today and
this is a direct result of the power of the porn industry.
Recent studies show that there is over 10 billion dollars
spent on pornographic materials each year. There are over 2
million known pornographic web sites with over 2500 new
sites being developed each week. A lot of the websites and
companies are overseas and are therefore not regulated by US
law. All of this is readily available to any internet user
unless you are using a porn blocker. The software is
available, so you should consider protecting your children
from internet porn today.
Popups
in Adware
Not all
pop-ups come from clicking on a web page. That´s right ...
many parasites, adware enabled software downloads and P2P
files will create pop-ups. They do this for various reasons
including trying to entice you into purchasing some other
type software such pop-up blockers, internet filters,
internet filters, or "IE cleaners". They can also pass
sensitive information from your computer to a third party
without your knowledge. A good firewall can prevent this
information from leaving your computer.
Internet
Filter Reporting
One way
to supervise the computer use in your home is to install an
internet filter and then to review the reporting it
provides. These internet filtering reports, which should be
tamper proof, offer a glimpse of the sites being blocked and
why. It will also show you any sites that users attempted to
view and were blocked. It will show the percentage of time
spent on various sites and will show you a snapshot of the
"types" of websites your family is visiting the most.
Laws
Against Spam
Spam is
the subject of a number of state laws that form a different
kind of “spam filter”. In September 2003, legislation was
approved in California that made it the second state (after
Delaware) to adopt an opt-in rule for e-mail advertising.
Under this legislation, it is illegal to send unsolicited
commercial e-mail from California or to a California e-mail
address. The law applies to senders as well as to
advertisers on whose behalf messages are sent. It also
includes less restrictive rules from which the broad
prohibition may be severed in the event that it is struck
down as unconstitutional.
What
is an Internet Filter?
An
internet filter program or service does exactly what it says
- it filters your internet content according to your
selected parameters.
The internet makes all information available to everyone,
even when it is dangerous or inappropriate. Therefore,
younger children and impressionable teenagers have access to
more and more of this information without the benefit of
adult direction and explanation.
Internet filtering has become more and more attractive to
parents and schools and helps you, as a parent, guardian or
teacher; introduce your child or teenager to the world and
its potential perils in a more appropriate way.
How do
Computer Viruses Work?
Virus
programs are not a threat to your information security or
computer security until the you run the program containing
it. When you execute program code that’s infected by a
virus, the virus code will also run and try to infect other
programs, either on the same computer or on other computers
connected to it over a network. And the newly infected
programs will compromise internet security as they try to
infect yet more programs.
Password
Creativity
To
ensure your email security is creative in your password
choice. Here are some other ways to create a good password.
Choose a line or two from a song or poem, and use the first
letter of each word. For example, "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
a stately pleasure dome decree" becomes "IXdKKaspdd." Or,
alternate between one consonant and one or two vowels, up to
eight characters. This provides nonsense words that are
usually pronounceable, and thus easily remembered. Examples
include "routboo," "quadpop," and so on. Choose two short
words and concatenate them together with a punctuation
character between them. For example: "dog;rain," "book+mug,"
"kid?goat."
Keeping
Computer Viruses Out
Virus
programmers and makers of internet security anti-virus
software are in a constant battle for supremacy. Current
virus have grown quite sophisticated. A multipartite virus
is a virus composed of several parts. Every part of a
multipartite virus needs to be cleaned away, to give
assurance of non-infection. A polymorphic virus changes
itself (mutates) as it passes through host files, making
disinfection a serious challenge. Then there are Stealth
viruses that hides themselves by intercepting disk access
requests. When an internet security software anti-virus
program tries to read files or boot sectors to find the
virus, the stealth virus feeds the anti-virus program a
clean image of file or boot sector. To make sure you have
maximum protection, you need virus software that is
frequently updated to track and remove the latest viruses.
The
Meaning of Spam
Today,
the word "spam" has mutated from a form of canned meat to a
form of abusing the internet. There is both the noun, "My
mailbox is full of spam", and the verb: "The hackers were
spamming the company database with useless data". Although
the word was part of the computer expert’s nomenclature
years before, it entered popular usage in 1994 after a
couple of Phoenix lawyers sent an unsolicited advertisement
to USENET, which is a massive collection of message boards
on every topic imaginable. The word "spam" was used to
identify this unwanted traffic. The name stuck. Today an
entire industry exists to create spam filters, spam blockers
and email spam filters.
Common
Sense Computer Security
We all
want easy solutions to our internet and computer security.
The easiest thing you can do to ensure that you don’t lose
all of your precious computer data is as old as computers
themselves - make a backup copy. This is just a common
sense, but so few people take a few minutes each month to
back up their computer. Some viruses and Trojan horse
programs will erase or corrupt files on your hard drive and
a recent backup may be the only way to recover your data and
ensure data security. Additionally, if you have a power
failure or surge and your surge protector fails, your hard
drive make be fried and everything lost. Do yourself a
favor, back up those files and maintain your information
security!
What is
a Computer Virus?
What is
a computer virus? A computer virus is a program designed to
compromise computer security and spread itself by first
infecting executable files or the system areas of hard and
floppy disks and then making copies of itself. Viruses
usually operate without the knowledge or desire of the
computer user and are a threat to data security. They also
may slow down your pc or may corrupt specific files. Viruses
often come through email messages but can also come from
software installation or just from clicking on a website.
What
Will a Computer Virus do to my Computer?
Note
that viruses can’t do any damage to hardware: they won’t
melt down your CPU, burn out your hard drive, cause your
monitor to explode, etc. Warnings about viruses that will
physically destroy your computer are usually hoaxes, not
legitimate virus warnings. You don’t risk your computer
security by ignoring these warnings.
Why Use
a Porn Blocker
According to a survey conducted by the London School of
economics is 2002, 9 out of 10 school aged children have
viewed pornographic material on the internet. As anyone can
tell you, many of these sites target innocent search terms
and keywords and most children will click on a URL in search
results not knowing what they will see then the site loads.
For reasons like this a porn filter becomes an obvious
investment for your home computer.
Getting
a Virus through Email
You
can’t get a virus just by reading a plain-text E-mail
message or Usenet post. What you have to watch out for are
encoded messages containing embedded executable code (i.e.,
JavaScript in an HTML message) or messages that include an
executable file attachment such as an encoded program file
or a Word document containing macros.
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