By Elizabeth Flock

Dozens of American Web sites went dark today in protest against the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), which critics believe would kill freedom of expression and allow the government to censor the Web.

But SOPA-style Web control isn’t just an American affair.

In democracies and authoritarian countries alike, efforts have been made by governments around the world to shut down Web sites, silence bloggers, filter out certain words or censor negative information. Our roundup of web censorship in 2011:

India:

In the world’s largest democracy, the government tried to get Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google to screen and remove offensive content related to political leaders and religious figures. The Web sites refused to do so.

Syria:

Amid a growing uprising in the country, the Syrian government banned the iPhone in an attempt to stop the constant flow of images and video that anti-government protesters shared online.

Egypt:

A number of bloggers were arrested over the past year in Egypt. Most often these bloggers had spoken out negatively about the country’s military leadership.

Australia:

When the government failed to introduce a mandatory filtering scheme, several Australian Internet service providers decided to do the filtering on their own, blocking access to 500 sites.

Turkey:

YouTube and WordPress are blocked in Turkey, among other sites, because the content is insulting to “Turkishness.” “Escort,” “gay” and “marriageable” are among the 138 words no longer allowed on the Internet.

Iran:

A crackdown on Internet expression in Iran included new surveillance in cyber cafes and a proposed national, “halal” Internet that would prohibit users from using an international search engine such as Google.

Belarus:

The country’s government outlawed browsing foreign Web sites, making the visiting of those sites a misdemeanor.

China:

One of many examples of online censorship in China this year came after a July train crash, when government censors forced the media to stop aggressively reporting online about what had gone wrong.

Brazil:

During the fall 2010 election period, court orders mandating removal of content related to political campaigns rose exponentially.

Denmark:

Danish police last year proposed abolishing all anonymous Internet access, arguing that they could more effectively fight terrorism if they had data from every person who accessed the Internet.

The current IE6Countdown.com numbers indicate that worldwide use of Internet Explorer 6 has decreased by almost 6 percent since the previous year.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Known in the past for taking a soft touch when it comes to forcing users to update their browsers, Microsoft’s pulling off the kid gloves and going for a bullet to the head.

Come January, the company will start forcing people to update from older versions of Internet Explorer. If you have Automatic Updates enabled in Windows Update, Microsoft says that the update will occur in a seamless, Chrome-like experience.

The company already provides security updates to Internet Explorer through Windows Update, but this means that legacy browser users will see a full-point jump. Windows XP users on Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 will be upgraded to version 8, and Windows Vista users will be pushed up the stairs to Internet Explorer 9. IE9 doesn’t work on Windows XP.

“As we’ve talked to our customers about our approach [to upgrading,] everyone benefits from an up-to-date browser,” said Ryan Gavin, Senior Director of Internet Explorer for Microsoft. “But from a security perspective alone this is important. Ninety percent of infections that were attributable to a security vendor had a patch out for more than a year,” he added.

Security problems are a tough stair to climb for legacy browsers. The latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is just the latest in a long line of papers indicating that socially engineered malware is the biggest kind of threat facing computer users today, and that the malware often goes after security holes in browsers. These findings are based on data collected from more than 600 million computer systems in more than 100 countries. It’s neither easy nor cheap to keep a team of dedicated security researchers and coders on a legacy browser.

“The security mitigations for newer versions of IE have proven to deliver consistent security improvements. Starting with IE8 and continuing with IE9, every new version of Microsoft’s browsers has delivered a more secure browsing experience. We’ll all be happier and more secure when we don’t have to depend on users to install the most recent patches,” said Andrew Storms, director of Information Technology at nCircle Network Security.

“As we’ve talked to our customers about our approach [to upgrading,] everyone benefits from an up-to-date browser,” said Ryan Gavin, Senior Director of Internet Explorer for Microsoft. “But from a security perspective alone this is important. Ninety percent of infections that were attributable to a security vendor had a patch out for more than a year,” he added.

Security problems are a tough stair to climb for legacy browsers. The latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is just the latest in a long line of papers indicating that socially engineered malware is the biggest kind of threat facing computer users today, and that the malware often goes after security holes in browsers. These findings are based on data collected from more than 600 million computer systems in more than 100 countries. It’s neither easy nor cheap to keep a team of dedicated security researchers and coders on a legacy browser.

“The security mitigations for newer versions of IE have proven to deliver consistent security improvements. Starting with IE8 and continuing with IE9, every new version of Microsoft’s browsers has delivered a more secure browsing experience. We’ll all be happier and more secure when we don’t have to depend on users to install the most recent patches,” said Andrew Storms, director of Information Technology at nCircle Network Security.

One project that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time is to create my own NAS box.

Network Accessible Storage is an easy way to store files remotely for users, especially if they do no use dedicated machines or do not want to commit storage to a particular machine because of hard drive space.

The first time I hear the term NAS was at my old job.  Everyone referred to one of the mainframes that used telnet servers as the NAS, which I later found out that it was a misnomer because the database sat on a corporate NAS server.  Too funny.

I will not be covering hardware in this article, but I highly recommend recycling old equipment.  I mean, for a home or small business NAS server you don’t really need a powerful server at all.  Hopefully you have a motherboard with at least two open SCUSI ports, but even IDE will work, and two or three spare hard drives to use in this box.

The OS that we’re using today is Xubuntu which is the light XFCE desktop version of the famous Ubuntu linux operating system.  This version of Linux is so small that you could easily run it from a USB key or Compact Flash drive instead of wasting a hard drive or more to the point not wasting a hard drive space that would be an addition to your NAS storage drives.

If you don’t know how to use Linux, don’t worry… it’s not like you were born knowing how to use Windows.

After completing the basic installation of Xubuntu and hooking up all the hard drives that you plan on using, update your software in Synaptic Package manager.  You may have to reboot your PC once this is completed.

If you are behind the proxy, feel free to use our guides Behind The Proxy 1 and Behind The Proxy 2.  The only difference is that since we’re using XFCE instead of GNOME you won’t have GEDIT at your disposal and will have to use MOUSEPAD instead.  Also, if you need to save space, just uninstall Open Office and GIMP from Synaptic.

Now on to installing LVM or the Linux Volume Manager.  In our example, we are using a 15G hard drive for our OS, and three 10G hard drives for our storage.  Of course this is ridiculous but it works for our example.  Now even though SCSI is faster than IDE, the whole point is storage.  Use whatever you’ve got and mix and match if you have to.

First thing you need to do is find the designations for your available hard drives by opening the terminal and executing   sudo fdisk -l and you will see a screen like the following.

As you see the three hard drives we are going to use are /dev/sdb1,  /dev/sdc1,  and /dev/sdd1

Now that we know what the names of our hard drives are, it’s time to start baking the LVM cake.

Before we continue, you will need to install lvm2 in synaptic along with all of it’s dependencies.

Refer to the following chart for a visual reference showing what layer we are working on.

The first layer to create is the Physical Volumes layer

Next we add the physical volumes into the volume group

Now create a logical volume from the volume group.  The only thing to note is that your logical volume must be slightly smaller than the volume group.  I usually make mine 1G smaller, but you can experiment with smaller margins if you want.

Next you must make a file system.  I use NTFS since I’m making a NAS for an almost exclusive Windows environment.

This may take a while… and my may I mean this WILL take a LONG while.

Now we need to make a directory to hold our LVM storage.

finally we mount the directory

In the next part we will show how to share this directory, set up remote management and an FTP server.

So the Doctor’s Internet Donor has decided to add a password to their router and I was temporarily off the Internet.

In the meantime I’ve had time to reflect on what may have gone wrong and this was my observations…

1.  I named my attack computer MRSWHITE so as to not give away personal information and to seem innocent enough.  I mean who wants to kick little old MRSWHITE off the network?  She’s probably getting recipes for baking cookies anyway.

2.  Perhaps I should have named the computer _  or Windows  or Microsoft.  This way I could hide as a “fluke” in the system that would probably have gone unnoticed.

3.  I wondered if there was a way that my computer wouldn’t have shown up at all.

In suggestion 1 and 2 these are called social engineering.  Social engineering, popularized by Kevin Mitnick, is the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information.  An example is chatting up someone at the bar and asking if they are from around here?  When they answer no i’m from “Chicago” and you answer me too you have gained their trust and have probably obtained one of the four most popular security answers from them which is “what town were you born in”.  With a follow up question of “what street did you live on” and they answer “64th street”, you have just obtained another one.  If you next ask them what there last name was you can get the answer to “what is your mothers maiden name” and finally ask them if they like dogs you can probably get the answer to “what is your pets name”.

My manipulation is much simpler.  MRSWHITE sounds like an elderly lady that probably just wants to check her e-mail.  Or to see an additional computer with a name of _ doesn’t make sense so it must be a fluke.  Or to see a name of Windows or Microsoft then it’s probably part of my operating system…  stupid microsoft…  hate them anyway.

And now for my final trick of the day.  Drum roll please!!!

What if you could hide your computer virtually all together?  Now this next procedure does have some limitations which I will go over, but here it is in a nutshell…

Starting with Windows Longhorn and Blackcomb (Vista and 7), there is a new toy called LLTD or Link Layer Topology Discovery.  In a nutshell this is a program that polls devices on the network so it can be displayed in a discovery map inside windows.  Turn this off and you won’t be seen in LLTD.  This doesn’t work if the victim is using Windows XP or older, Macintosh or Linux computers, but since a huge market share of computer users will have either Windows Vista or Windows 7, I’ll take them odds.

In either Windows Vista or Windows 7 click on your start button.

Next type   cmd   in the search box

Look for the cmd program in the left hand column and right click on it.

Choose to run as admin

Now in the black box (terminal or command console) type the following line of text

Net config server /hidden:yes

And now you are hidden on the network.  This does not hide you from network scanning tools, or make your computer inaccessible but it will keep Joe 6-pack from finding you.

Microsoft wants firmware to only start authorized OSes

By John Leyden

By now many of you have heard about a communications company by the name of LightSquared.  We’ve heard of possible greasing of political palms, leaking of military testimonies to corporate officials, even possible undue influence by the president of the United States.

But what do we really know about LightSquared?  An excerpt from their webpage states…

LightSquared is building a state-of-the-art open wireless broadband network. This open network will unleash the full power of the mobile Internet, driving innovation in devices, applications, and services. LightSquared will offer network capacity on a wholesale-only basis to a variety of business partners.

LightSquared will deploy an open wireless broadband network using a technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE), the most widely adopted 4G standard in the world. Its LTE network will be combined with one of the largest commercial satellites ever launched, to provide coverage of the entire United States. This integrated LTE-satellite network is a world first.

LightSquared will complement all existing and emerging players in the wireless market by operating on a wholesale basis exclusively, thereby avoiding any conflict of interest. This allows LightSquared to focus on developing individual, tailored, and cost-effective solutions for its business partners—LightSquared will be only as successful as they are. In turn, end users can enjoy the benefits of innovation and increasing competition.

Built from the ground up, the LightSquared network is designed to support present-day and emerging wireless devices without restrictions. Its open wireless ecosystem removes existing barriers to the development of innovative applications and services in the mobile Internet space.

LightSquared will build out its own nationwide wireless network of base stations. The deployment and management of the LightSquared network is anticipated to generate more than 15,000 direct and indirect private sector jobs each year through 2015. As stated in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, “Broadband can and must serve as a foundation for long-term economic growth, ongoing investment, and enduring job creation.” The LightSquared network will demonstrate the reality of that policy goal.

Its integrated LTE-satellite network will serve critical public sector needs such as emergency preparedness and seamless communications in times of crisis.

LightSquared will revolutionize the way Americans connect with each other and with the world. LightSquared will offer people the value, freedom of movement, and excitement of connectivity, wherever they are in the United States. On the LightSquared network, Americans will be able to count on reliable wireless connections to strengthen bonds, share culture, educate and entertain themselves, and realize their dreams.

LightSquared fully supports the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. Its goal is to bring broadband to all Americans.

But I’m Torn…

As a consumer advocate and a proponent of new technology I am always interested in a new innovator that will open a new market or expand an existing market, and this is exactly what LightSquared does…

• Brings high speed 4G wireless network to many communities who do not have an affordable high speed option
• Brings competition to existing cellular companies 4G offerings
• Enables better coverage for emerging wireless devices
• Provides a backbone for new mobile devices still in concept phase

But as a political watchdog, something doesn’t smell quite right here.  Just on the heels of the Solyndra bankruptcy where Obama’s green technology initiative superseded sound financial decisions costing the American tax payers $535 million dollars, we hear that a high rolling Democrat is behind funding of the promising communications company and that opponents, namely Four Star General William Shelton of The Air Force Space Command, was pressured to give a false report in his findings of the probable interference with current GPS navigational system already in place.

Whenever Politicians try their hand at picking business winners everyone looses.

What is the GPS contentions anyway?  From 2002 through 2010 LightSquared has worked withing the FCC governance, applying for bandwidth and power increases which not only didn’t receive any objections from the GPS community, but actually received their approval.  Not until mid 2011 was any objection made by the military.  Now I’m all for the security of our country, but at what point did the white coats whip out their slide calculators and decide that this may be a problem?

Let me break this down for you.  This is like applying for a building permit for a new house, laying the foundation, putting up walls, electrical, plumbing and then when it comes time to do the roof you’re told that there is a problem and you have to stop.  You would freak out on a government out of control.

So what do you think?  Is this a case government cronyism or the victim of  a short sited FCC / Military / GPS community?

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Medicare is now better able to screen providers to make sure they’re living up to their responsibilities and not cheating the system.

Over $4 billion was recovered last year in false billings and fraudulent amounts charged to Medicare. John Hammarlund, a regional administrator for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says the federal health care reform law provides new ways of detecting fraud.

“We now are employing very sophisticated computer-based tools, predictive analytics, pattern modeling, etc., the sort of computer tools that credit card companies use, for example.”

Hammarlund says the computer analytics allow them to find fraud in many more instances.

“We can detect some of these things that simply can’t be. You can’t have one patient receiving the same medical procedure in two different cities at the same time.”

According to Hammarlund, the Affordable Care Act has allowed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to use other new technologies as well to block fraud.

“That law – otherwise known in some circles as health care reform – actually gave our agency additional tools and resources that we didn’t have before to try to prevent fraud from happening in the first place.”

He says Medicare fraud is rampant.

“Last year alone, our agency recovered over $4 billion – that’s with a “B” – dollars in false billings and fraudulent amounts that were charged to Medicare.”

Hammarlund says Medicare recipients can also help control fraud by looking over their statements and reporting any discrepancies to 1-800-Medicare.

The Doctors Continuing Rant…

As many of my readers know, I am a database guru and find redundant entering of data insane.

For example, Joe well aged 6-pack calls his doctor because he has a sinus infection… here is what he has to go through

1.  Call doctor and give all his information to the receptionist

2.  Get an appointment time

3.  Show up 45 minutes early to the doctor and fill out paper forms on everything that was said in step 1 and give information about medical insurance or medicare or both.

4.  Wait for appointment which will be one hour after appointment was set for

5.  Talk to physicians assistant because Doctor doesn’t have time to see most of his patients today and tell them everything that was covered in step 1 and 3

6.  Get prescription written out on paper in exam room

7.  Go back to receptionist and asked to take a seat

8.  Wait for receptionist to get done doing steps 1 on the phone and steps 3 with new patients and wait for other patients to get done with step 9.

9.  Make co-payment and ask receptionist to phone in prescription to local pharmacy

10.  Drive across town to local pharmacy and show prescription

11.  Be questioned like a local drug dealer and be questioned if step 9 ever really happened.

12.  Call receptionist and go over step 1 and 9 and ask if they can call in the perscription

13.  Repeat step 11 once or twice

14.  Have pharmacy try step 12 for you

15.  Get prescription and see if label matches what physicians assistant wrote on paper

16.  Pray to God that you never get sick ever again.

Why do we bother with this antique mode of working within the medical community?  When we go to the Department of Motor Vehicles they look up our name in a computer and have everything including our picture.  When we go to the library we show our library card.  When we go to work we scan our id card.

Why can’t there be a central database that we can use to link our Doctor(s), Insurance companies, Pharmacies, and be accessible nationwide.

We could eliminate wasted time, miscommunication, potentially lethal drug interactions, and eliminate insurance fraud.

Banking on emerging markets like India, China and Brazil to drive continued growth in sales of PCs, technology giant Intel said “the new kid on the block”, Ultrabooks, would herald a transformation in the market.

Ultrabooks, touted by the world’s largest chip-maker as as a sleeker, thinner and faster version of laptops at an affordable price and the next big thing in the computing market, will be launched by different PC manufacturers toward the end of this year.

Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2011 here, Intel Vice-President and PC Client Group General Manager Mooly Eden said the Ultrabooks would make PCs “personal” again and give users the power of “creativity”, making them “personal creativity” computing devices.

Eden said that Ultrabooks were set to bring about a revolution in the market and this transformation would be complete by 2013, when Ultrabooks would be available with Intel’s next-generation Haswell microprocessors.

The Haswell chips would reduce power usage in computers by more than 20 times, as well as enhance other capabilities, he added.

Dismissing conjecture that the personal computer era was nearing its end, Eden said that growth was far from over in the PC market and more than one million PCs were being sold every day, with over 1.5 billion PCs in use today.

In this regard, he asserted that emerging markets were “on fire” and driving growth. Eden said that China has in fact overtaken the US in terms of PC sales and Brazil has grown bigger than Germany in this business.

Growth in PC sales was high in markets like India as well, as per a presentation given by Eden at the IDF.

Eden said that growing personal income levels in these emerging markets would drive the growth in the PC market, which has gone through several transformations in decades past.

“The PC has changed itself several times… first in 1995, there was a transformation from enterprise usage to consumers, when PCs emerged as a major multimedia device. Then, in 2003, the notebooks or laptops brought in the mobility factor,” Eden said.

He said that eight years down the line, the Ultrabook was now bringing in the next transformation. These devices are “beyond thin and light”, would come at a price that works and have been designed for the best user experience, he added.

“We will bring ‘personal’ back into the PC,” Eden said, adding that the Ultrabooks would make PCs a device of “personal creativity”.

Eden said the Ultrabook was an industry-wide effort and would be rolled out in three phases.

Phase 1 is underway and would culminate in the launch of the first Ultrabook devices with Intel’s second-generation Core processors in the market this holiday season, followed by the Phase 2, when Intel would launch its third generation Core processor ‘Ivy Bridge’ in the first half of 2012.

The third phase of transition to Ultrabook devices would mark the introduction of Intel’s next-generation, 22-nanometer processor, Haswell.

These processors would help the computer give the users 10 days of connected standby battery life and the “the most complete and satisfying computing experience.”

Eden said Intel was working hard on the next generation of processors, even as its second-generation Core processor, launched earlier this year, has emerged as a major success.

“Till date, Intel has shipped 75 million 2nd generation Intel Core processors, making it the fastest-shipping processor in the company’s history,” he noted.

While The Computer Doctor is usually all about freedom and personal liberty, I do not play games when it comes to my children.  Parents can not do enough to protect their children from threats to their education, safety and mental well being.

Let me give you the run down on what I do at my home to keep my kids safe on the internet…

1. Keep the “family” computer out in the open in an area of high traffic.  People are curious by nature and will venture into questionable areas if their is a level or privacy afforded.  As a dad, I AM NOT DOWN WITH THAT.  You can have your privacy when you’re a grown adult and have your own place to live and your own computer.
2. Monitor website that your children are on.  If they are visiting sites that you don’t approve of you must express your concern and talk to your children about that and lay down some rules on where they can and can’t go.
3. Use a filter.  There are pay to use filters that automatically filter based on set guidelines and there are free proxy filters like Open DNS
4. Express your love for your child and explain clearly what rules you have for the internet.
5. Avoid social media or have the username and password so you can view your childs account.

Now all of that is fine and dandy, except the people besides being curious are disobedient liars at their core.  This may come as a surprise in a post Doctor Spock era where were are told that humans are basically good by nature, and that we shouldn’t discipline our children lest we damage their psyches but The Computer Doctor remembers when he was a child and has two children of his own,

so all you child psychologists can stick that in your candy coated pipes and smoke it. 

So the last thing that I want to talk about is spying on your kids.  Spying seems to be such a dirty thing, but ask yourself this…

“have I ever asked my child to do something and they promised that they would, but decided to do something different anyway?”

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, when given the opportunity to do as their told or do what they want our lovely children will choose to do what they want about 70% of the time with a 5% margin of error depending on the severity of the punishment they might get.

With more and more inappropriate content that can be found on the Internet, taking control of their kids’s computer and monitoring their internet activities is becoming more and more important for most of parents. From blocking obscene materials and Websites with inappropriate language, we give several easy but feasible options for parents wishing to monitor their child’s Internet and computer use.

• Use a spyware program. Spyware programs provide such features as screen capturing, keystroke recording, software monitoring, and Website tracking. These and other features allow parents to monitor Website traffic, and they allow parents to block inappropriate content. Parents can also receive email notifications for search engine activity and download content.
• Monitor Internet activity. Hold down “CTRL” and “H” to obtain the history of all Internet activity. You can search for recent, 2-week, and up to 3 month histories for easy viewing. Click on unknown Websites to verify that the content is appropriate for your child.
• Check the desktop and other folders for materials that may be inappropriate. To view files in the desktop, log on. View the file names for strange content and unfamiliar downloads. Be sure to check private folders and other drives. Materials may be saved in less obvious locations.

I recommend using iSafe All In One keylogger to help you keep an eye on your kids computer.  iSafe Keylogger has been selected as Editor’s Choice at PC Magazine for being the best computer monitoring software for keeping an eye on your kids while they are online.

iSafe Keylogger is the world’s best selling internet monitoring software for monitoring kids. Every detail of PC and Internet activity – ideal to monitor kids im, chat, and internet use.With iSafe keyloggeryou can do:* All-in-one-Record all computer activities, including:keystrokes,screenshots,websites surfed,Facebook,Myspace,clipboard,application used,USB Drive(Disk),CDRom,Printer,Documents used,2-Direction IM chatting(MSN,ICQ,AIM,Yahoo Messenger,Skype Incoming-and-Outgoing messages)…

* Stealth-Work in completely Stealth(invisible,secretly) mode

* Secret-Completely self-hide. Not listed in Task Manager,Taskbar,Uninstall list and Start menu.Can not be detected by Registry clean or optimization tools or Windows’ msconfig.exe

* Live-Send logs timely to your E-mail address in background

The Free download will give you a free 7 day trial and the purchase price for a single computer is only $59 but multi computer packages are also available.

For many years I have said that the best way to protect children on the Internet is to develop the filter that runs in the computer between their ears and, based on a recent survey commissioned by the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), a lot of parents apparently agree.

For the most part, parents do have a clue when it comes to helping their kids stay safe online.

FOSI commissioned Hart Research Associates to interview 702 parents of children eight to 17. The study, which has a margin of error of plus/minus 3.7%, found that “Nearly all parents surveyed (96%) say they have had a conversation with their child about what to do and not to do online.”

Controls have their place

But that’s not to say parental controls tools don’t have their place. Just over half the parents (53%) said that they do use some type of tool to control or monitor their child’s online behavior using products ranging from filtering programs on their PC that limit what sites a child can visit to services that monitor children’s activities online or on mobile devices.

Even though 47% of parents don’t use these tools, 87% of them are aware that such tools are available for personal computers, but parents are less likely to use and be aware of parental control tools on other devices that kids use to go online. For example, while 75% of parents feel very or somewhat comfortable about monitoring their kids’ online use, awareness of parental controls drops to 37% for game consoles (44% among parents whose kids use consoles to access the Internet). Just over a third (35%) of parents say they are “aware of parental controls offered by wireless companies” and only 39% of parents whose child uses a smartphone to access the Internet “say they know of parental control technologies,” according to the study. Just over half (51%) of parents said that their child uses something other than a computer to access the Internet.

Parents set rules

It’s good news that 93% of parents say they have set rules or limits on their children’s online with nearly eight out of 10 (79%) saying that they only allow kids to use a computer in a common area of the house rather than a bedroom. Of course, in an era when many kids are using laptops or even tablets and phones to go online, I’m not sure if parents can easily enforce that rule, but at least they’re thinking about it.

Three quarters of the parents (75%) have rules for how much time or the time of day their kids can be online but as kids get older, parents become more relaxed about these rules. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on the child. Many teens have pretty well developed internal “filters between their ears,” but there are some who actually take more risks than younger children. While monitoring teen behavior is always trickier than monitoring behavior of young children, it’s sometimes even more necessary, though often an occasional conversation is all that’s needed.

Family ‘Online Safety Contract‘

Ten percent of the parents said they have signed a “family online safety contract” that outlines rules and expectations. Several years ago I created separate online safety pledges for kids and parents.

(Source: Family Online Safety Institute)

The fact that nearly half parents sampled don’t use parental control tools isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When asked why, the most common reason was that they’re not necessary, “either because of rules and limits already in place (60%), and/or because they trust their child to be safe (30%).”

I completely understand where these parents were coming from. Even though I was one of the first people on the planet to test out parental controls in the nineties when my kids were young (and testified as to their efficacy in a federal court trial), my wife and I elected not to use them at our house because we preferred more old fashioned “tools” like frequent conversations with our kids and placing computers in public areas of the house.

Parental controls can’t replace old-fashioned parenting

Filters and monitoring tools can be a valuable resource and I urge parents to at least think about including them in their vast arsenal of parenting tools, but I also urge parents to never rely on them as the only safeguard. The best way to protect your kids online is to talk with them about their Internet use and anything else on their minds. Have dinner together as a family, ask your kids what’s going on in their lives and be as non-judgmental as appropriate so your kids trust you and confide in you. Studies have shown that – despite outward appearances – children and even teenagers heavily rely on their parents for advice and guidance.

Besides, with any luck your kid will someday grow up and move somewhere where there are no filters, no monitoring programs and no parents over their shoulder. Let’s just hope that, by then, that filter between their ears is well developed.

For more on internet safety visit Larry’s SafeKids.com blog and ConnectSafely.org