More information about OnlineFamily.Norton

Kids’ Top 100 Searches of 2009

• YouTube, Google, and Facebook top the list
• Sex and Porn round out the top 5
• Kids spend most of their time searching for music related topics (30%), then TV/movie related topics (12%).
• The most popular celebrity kids searched for was Michael Jackson. Taylor Swift came in second.
• Team Jacob won over Team Edward, with Taylor Lautner coming in at #80 and Robert Pattinson being nonexistent in the top 100.
• Other top celebs on kids’ list of searches include Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Lil Wayne, Megan Fox, Eminem, Beyonce, Britney Spears, Demi Lovato, Black Eyed Peas, Jonas Brothers, Rihanna, and Chris Brown.
• Kids are searching for shopping sites like eBay, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy.

Top Searches of 2009 – Boys vs. Girls

• YouTube, Google, and Facebook show up in the top three of both boys’ and girls’ search terms.
• Boys’ #4 search term was Sex while girls’ #4 search term was Taylor Swift. Girls were still interested in Sex, though, with the term coming it at #5.
• Boys’ most popular celebrity search term was Michael Jackson.
• Boys’ top 25 search terms were mainly comprised of social networking sites, various websites, shopping sites, inappropriate terms, and games.
• Girls’ top 25 search terms were main comprised of social networking sites, as well as music and entertainment/celebrity terms.
• Both boys’ and girls’ most popular search terms were related to music, though it was higher in terms of percentages for girls at 42% compared to boys at 22%.
• Boys search more adult topics compared to girls (13% vs. 2%).

Top Searches of 2009 – By Age Group

• Youtube, Facebook, and Google comprise the top 3 search terms for kids.
• Sex comes in at #4 for teens and tweens while porn comes in #4 for kids 7 and under.
• Taylor Swift was the top searched for term among teens. For tweens and kids 7 and under, it was Michael Jackson.
• Teens and tweens spend most of their search time online on music related subjects (34% and 27%).
• Kids under the age of seven spend most of their search time online on games (23%).
• Kids under the age of seven are conducting searches for P2P sites like Limewire and Mininova.

…

OnlineFamily.Norton surveyed a whole lot of parents and put a great deal of thought into the core features needed to provide a robust communication-based tool that aims to bring you and your family closer together as you work to manage your online lifestyles.

Key features of OnlineFamily.Norton include:

Personal Profiles

Your child is unique. You can manage, update, and adjust each profile based on their individual ages, tastes, and interests. This way OnlineFamily.Norton can grow with your children.

Web Monitoring

With OnlineFamily.Norton, you can view the sites that your children visit. This lets you know if they’ve been exposed to inappropriate or potentially harmful material. You can also block sites or types of sites that you think are inappropriate.

Chat Monitoring

With chat monitoring, you can ensure that your child’s friends online are people you know and trust.

Social Network Monitoring

You can learn how your child represents him or herself online, view the social networking sites that they belong to, and see which sites they visit most.

Time Limits

Tailor your child’s time allowance for computer use. You can set the total time limits for specific hours, or days of the week. So you can set curfews for school days vs. weekends.

Custom Alerts

Which alerts do you want? You decide which activities are most important to you, and which you don’t need to know about right away. So your alerts are tailored to your priorities.

Get Started With OnlineFamily.Norton

Author and columnist, Rebecca Hagelin has written a wonderful article for http://townhall.com.

Our teenagers are more sexually active than any generation of youth before them. They also are consuming more pornography and compromising basic moral standards more often. It seems that many of them have lost not only their innocence, but their conscience, too.

The plethora of negative and immoral behaviors glorified by a media world that’s gone stark raving mad — combined with graphic, non-judgmental sex education and a highly sexualized culture in general — causes many of them to lose understanding of what is wrong and what is right.

When a young child’s sensibilities are constantly violated, and he begins to ignore the natural pangs of guilt after yielding to cultural pressures, he can end up being miserable, and begins to develop a hard heart and weak spirit.

If we as parents blindly turn our own hearts away from them because we’re scared of confrontation, or because we’re too lazy to do “the hard stuff” like fight for their integrity, we have a hand in dooming their young spirits to inner torment. And, ultimately, if the pattern continues, to the loss of basic decency and sensitivity to evil.

In chapter 32, the Psalmist reflects on the misery that comes with ignoring a guilty conscience:

“When I kept things to myself, I felt weak deep inside me. I moaned all day long. Day and night you punished me, my strength was gone as in the summer heat.”

Do you really want your child to live that way?

It’s critical as a parent to take control and do everything in your power to make certain that the culture does not molest your child’s young mind. Setting standards for media consumption can help avoid a lot of regrets, especially when it comes to the evil of pornography. But since we are all sinners, we also need to learn to recognize when our children might be feeling uncomfortable and guilty — and offer them hope and a way out of their despair.

Talk often about God’s miracles of forgiveness, redemption and restoration. These concepts are foreign to our modern world, yet they are as transformational today as they were for the Pslamist and when God offered his forgiveness to a sinful world as he sent his son to atone for the sins of all who would accept him.

I John 1:9 promises: “When we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Our children experience the beautiful gifts of wisdom and grace when we help them develop their conscience and teach them how to respond to feelings of guilt. We need to be bold about sharing with them the life-giving power and joy that comes with confession. Tears of repentance over wrongs done makes our hearts strong, yet maleable in the hands of a a loving God. Ignoring our sins turns us into desperate, weak souls with hearts of stone.

In Psalm 32, the author actually begins the passage with what we can look forward to when we confess our sins to the loving and merciful God:

“Happy is the person whose sins are forgiven, whose wrongs have been pardoned. Happy is the person whom the Lord does not consider guilty, and in whom there is nothing false.”

The forgiveness and joy that comes with sincere repentance is the best news mankind has ever heard! Have your own children heard it?

The original article can be found here:
The Death of Conscience

Please take a look at Rebecca’s website here:
30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family

You can find her book on Amazon here:
30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family

It is my opinion that in general people are becoming more aware of Internet threats and identity theft. Most of my associates would never have considered downloading and running something called checkmeout.exe, and I think that this cautious attitude is becoming more prevalent. Of course, this takes away a prime attack vector from hackers trying to build networks of botnets – so they have to be more creative.

Today I read an article talking about hackers targeting Neopets users. The idea is that they offer a rare item for virtually nothing (it’s not free – that might raise too much suspicion). The unsuspecting user downloads this program that allows them to create whatever “paintbrush” they want and *boom* the computer is owned by the hacker. Read the whole article here:

Hackers Target Neopets Users

What is particularly insidious is that the Neopets demographic is children. As adults have become more wary the bad guys are targeting naive and trusting children. Of course, the black hats don’t care how the computer is compromised – it has your data on it and they’ll use whatever they can to get to it.

So, how do you prevent you and your family from being victimized? First, educate your kids. There are some good resources online that I will be highlighting in future posts that teach about safe surfing. Secondly, institute some ground rules for your computer. At my home the kids know they are never under any circumstances to click a button labeled: yes, save, download, etc. If they are confronted with such a choice they have to get me or their mother to come and finish. This prevents them from being suckered by things that smell fishy or are shareware trash may toast the pc. Once I instituted this, the kids were actually pretty compliant. Even my tech-savvy 13yo still calls me into the room when installing software and has me complete it. We always take the opportunity to talk about what it is installing and what it could do so that he can make educated judgments later when I give him more autonomy (and he has his own computer on the line).

My advice is to institute a similar policy in your home.

OpenDNS is the leading provider of free security services that make the Internet safer for your home, school, or business by integrating Web content filtering, anti-phishing and Domain Name Service (DNS).

Apart from being free, OpenDNS provides a simple yet powerful interface that allows parents to customize the Internet for their family.

OpenDNS provides more than 50 filtering categories to choose from. Create your filters by simply checking the boxes of the categories you want to block.

Have you ever had a problem connecting to the Internet? More times than not, these problems are the result of a DNS Server outage at your ISP. OpenDNS has designed their system to provide you with the fastest and most reliable Internet experience you have had. You don’t have to change your ISP, just change your DNS.

OpenDNS’s industry-leading anti-phishing service will keep your family safe from fraudulent sites trying to get your personal information.

OpenDNS Guide provides useful information and recommendations when you mistype a URL or try to visit a site that’s down. Additionally, you can customize error pages with your own images and custom messages to personalize the feel of OpenDNS for your family network.

You can also create easy-to-remember terms for your favorite Web sites with OpenDNS Shortcuts.

OpenDNS provides free email support and useful, step-by-step instructions for easily setting up OpenDNS on your computers and wireless router.

The most effective way to increase DNS reliability and safety for all of the computers in your home is to configure your router. You can find the instructions at: Configure OpenDNS on Your Router

Or you easily change your DNS settings on each computer by clicking here: Configure OpenDNS on Your Computer

If you do choose to configure your router to use OpenDNS, you may want to configure your laptops to use OpenDNS if they will be used outside of your home.

Practice Safe Computing.

I have five children, aged from 5 to 13.  They are all pretty tech savvy and we have several computers in our home that they use.  One day some type of paper came home from school that was advertising KidZui.  It mentioned that it was free to try and my wife and I had been talking about something to put onto the computers to exert some parental control so we decided to go to their website and check it out.

As you will learn about me from subsequent posts, I am fine with a high tech solution and KidZui seemed a little simple to me.  This simplicity appealed to my wife, however, and so we quickly had the program downloaded and installed on the two main family computers.  I will leave it to you to go to their website and read about all of the features, but I do want to highlight the two basic things it does for us:

- Provide a safe environment for the kids to just explore online.  They can search for anything, find appropriate online games and videos, etc.  It is also possible to make it automatically launch and require a parental password to exit.
- Notifies us as parents where our children went, how long they were there, etc via e-mail.

My younger kids are very high on this.  My 13-year-old and 12-year-old are less enthusiastic since the interface is a little cartoon-like.  In the end we did upgrade from the free version to the premium one and my recollection is that it wasn’t too expensive.  I let my sister know about it for her four sons; she tried it and eventually updated to the premium as well.

The software is not perfect.  Based on the way that it is implemented someone who is a little tech-savvy can easily bypass it (no, I won’t be giving that information away here).  It is also limited by the fact that it won’t work with an authenticated proxy server, which I would ideally use in my home network.  The last thing that limits it is that it takes full-screen control to keep the kids sand-boxed in the application so older kids can’t use it along with a word processor to do school reports and such.  For kids aged 2 to 9 who just want to watch videos and play online it is PERFECT.

Take a look at http://www.kidzui.com

I promise that most of my subsequent posts will not refer to commercial enterprises, but this is the first thing that comes to mind when friends and neighbors ask me the easiest way to let their kids surf without encountering a bunch of garbage.

Pete Cashmore from Mashable is reporting that some Facebook users are receiving messages with links to goldbase.be and other .be websites with the subject line of “Look at This”.

DO NOT click the links to any of these sites:

goldbase.be
greenbuddy.be
silvertag.be
picoband.be

According to Mashable, if you receive any of these Facebook messages you should delete the message, clear your browser cookies, change your Facebook password and verify that your antivirus software is up to date and run a full system scan.

Also, help spread the word by warning your Facebook friends.

Thanks for the information Pete.

Practice safe computing.

Blue Coat offers K9 Web Protection, a commercial-grade parental control and internet filtering package, free of charge.

K9 Web Protection helps parents protect their children online by preventing access to pornography, gambling, violence, and other dangerous content. It also monitors the sites that your children visit.

You can find out more information about K9 Web Protection at:

http://www1.k9webprotection.com/

You can download K9 Web Protection and get the free license at:

http://www1.k9webprotection.com/getk9/download-software.php

You can find answers to questions and support at:

http://www1.k9webprotection.com/support/index.php

Practice Safe Computing!