Today the Doctor Tech is going to talk about protecting your kids while they are online.
Many of you have new computers or just never gave it a thought before or just was not sure how to go about protecting your family.
What got me researching this subject is a friend of the family called me last week and wanted me to check out their new computer as they though they already had a spyware program installed on it.
So, whenever I see spyware installed on the system I will check out the History of the browser (Links to a PDF) as to where they may have picked up the little nasty program.
Well, she was shocked - There were searches for all kinds of adult related photos and topics. She said she didn't do these searches and I know her well enough that I didn't even think she was doing this - So, it must have been her son or his friends. We crossed checked out the times and it was times when he and his friends were over working on the new computer.
So, I installed some spyware removal tools and cleaned out the system.
But she asked me to help her stop the adult searches and anything else that her son and his friends should not be viewing while online.
This is where I did a little searching and found a program called Naomi - This is a free utility that hides in the system tray just waiting to see/analyze and filter what your son / daughter / husband is surfing on the internet.
Below are the features of Naomi - Internet Filter:
Naomi is an advanced internet filtering program, easy to use and totally free, intended for families, and kids in particular.
Naomi is able to constantly monitor all internet connections, protecting children from inappropriate online material - such as obscene or violent contents; pornography, pedophilia and erotism in the form of images or texts; sites that popularize drugs; gambling games; terrorism; hate propaganda; occultism; sects; blasphemy, etc.
Naomi does not rely on a simple list of banned sites; instead, it examines in real-time all the data being transmitted and received through any internet application - such as web browers, chat programs, news readers, etc.
The filtering technology employed in Naomi features:
- Heuristic analysis capable of recognizing new material automatically.
- Semantic analysis of web pages contents and analysis of their addresses and links.
- Recognizes all the major languages (10+).
- Recognizes ICRA labelling system.
- Monitoring is not limited to web sites, but covers the whole local internet traffic.
- Works with all service providers and software applications, and does not alter settings.
- Allows blocking of file-sharing applications.
- Password-protected (the password is chosen during the installation).
- Easy to use: does not require configuration.
- Can be used on slow connections (it does not perform any download in background).
Over the next few days her son complained that something was wrong and the Firefox browser because he said it kept closing while he was working on it (I made Firefox the default browser to prevent Active X controls from installing Spyware)
There were a few times that Naomi over stepped the boundries and closed even on something we thought was save - Example - She likes to crochet and a friend sent her a link to some patterns on About.com and Naomi closed the browser - it was from several of the ads on there linking to adult like sites and gambling sites.
At this point, I showed her how to Temporarily turn off the filtering to get to the pages that they needed and/or wanted to view.
This also allowed her to be more interactive in what her son was doing online. She told him that if he was looking for something legitimate and it closed she would work with him and temporarily turn off the filter - But this got her involved in watching what her son was doing and gave her a chance to talk and discuss why certain things were bad and why she didn't want to have him exposed to such items - especially when she was not there.
**NOTE** make sure you do not give your kids the password or use anything they may guess - MAKE IT HARD for them to guess - And I am sure they will try to figure out your password.
Mix it up with both Numbers and letters - and Naomi's password is Case Sensitive (capitol A is different from a lower case a).
A good example is the word TimeStamp (Use your own word that is easy to remember) But to make it more difficult to hack convert it to —> T1m3St@mp would be a execllent password - it is a word made up of both letters, numbers & Symbols and it still is easy to remember - I would advise against using this password but you get the idea. I used substitution for letter to the number equilivents like
a becomes @
i becomes 1
e becomes 3
t becomes 7
l becomes 7
you get the idea
Visit Radiance to download NAOMI Free
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