Photo courtesy of Clix
Protecting yourself and your Children on the Internet
In trying to raise Godly children, we seek to provide a home environment that is safe, warm and loving for them. Believe it or not, we get criticized for this on a regular basis – people think that we should open our house to worldly images and behaviors simply because they are so common in the outside world. “You shelter them too much”, these people say. But often we find that these comments come from people who just want an excuse for their own behaviors. We prefer the biblical approach of:
1 John 2:15-17 “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world, the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does, comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”
So, we want to be in the world, but not of the world. We don’t have TV infiltrating our home, and we only listen to K-Love on the radio, but we do need to protect our computers. After all, we make our living out of them, and the children use them for school work and entertainment. We want to make sure that anything we see has been cleaned as much as possible, and this article will explain how we do that cost-effectively and in ways that you can copy on your own machines.
Attacks on your computer (and sanity) come in several different ways, and so one product will never protect fully against them all – despite the advertising you may see.
On your computer you will need the following software;
- Antivirus
- AntiSpam
- Popup-blockers
- Parental / Accountability Controls
Antivirus
This is the one you will already be aware of. All new computers come with some sort of Antivirus software installed, and we recommend that you at least use the one that comes free with your machine. Take note of any messages that it pops up, because within about 90 days it will ask you to register for the next year; either do that, and pay the bill, or uninstall the Antivirus package and install a free one. NEVER operate a computer on the Internet without some sort of up-to-date Antivirus package. If you keep your definitions updated, you’ll be very unlucky to be hit with a virus.
AntiSpam
Spam often comprises the vast majority of email sent to mail boxes these days. It’s less harmful than a virus, but more of a nuisance, because you have to at least read the titles to work out if it’s a valid message to you or not. If you’re lucky, the Spam is only offering cheap Swiss watches, but often it’s more offensive, offering drugs, surgery, women.
Spam can overflow email boxes so much that we know people who change email addresses regularly just to keep the volume of spam down. But your new email address – especially if it’s with a big supplier like hotmail, yahoo or similar – will soon be found out.
So, how do you reduce the menace? We have two ways.
Firstly, there’s the company-wide method. We’d only recommend this if you run your own company, with its own domain name. You can have your email and website hosted at a server which provides email filtering, and any obviously Spam emails will never get delivered and you’ll never know about it. Anything borderline, and you’ll get an email asking what you want to do with it. This method is great for companies, as it can reduce the incoming email load by up to 90%, but it’s a little more involved and expensive, as you need to arrange for the transfer of your domain hosting. If you might be interested in this, give us a call on (801) 928-6953 to see what we can do for you – we provide hosting on servers using MailFoundry appliances, and see very little spam getting through to our mail packages.
The second way isn’t really suitable for large companies, but it’s great for individual users and families. It’s a package called Cloudmark, and it works differently from most Spam filters. The majority of spam filters out there use a set of rules to determine what mail is Spam and what isn’t; rules such as, “if it contains lots of images compared to text, it’s probably Spam”, or “if it contains mispelled generic drug names, it’s probably Spam”. The problem with these filters is that if there is a set of rules, the Spammers will also know the rules, and they’ll be looking for loopholes – and once they find one, Spam will get through again. And by having a set of rules, there is the potential for valid email to fail the rules and be marked as Spam.
Cloudmark is different, as it depends on real people determining what is Spam and what isn’t. If I see a piece of Spam, I block it; once a number of other people have blocked that same email, it’s marked as Spam at the server, and nobody else will see that email – it will never get delivered. Your own personal email will never get blocked, as nobody else will mark it as Spam, and the vast majority of Spam will already have been marked before it gets to you, so you’ll never have to worry about it. We think that it’s a great (and unobtrusive) solution, and very cost-effective at $40 a year. It’s available on a 15-day free trial at http://www.cloudmark.com, for most popular mail packages.
Pop-up Blocker
Pop-ups are those annoying adverts that spring to the front of your screen when you’re browsing the web. Fortunately, blocking them is free. If you use Internet Explorer 7, go to Tools, Pop-up Blocker. If the first menu item says “Turn On Pop-up Blocker”, do it! You’ll get rid of the vast majority of unwanted pop-ups.
Parental / Accountability Controls
Parental / Accountability Controls covers the large area of finding out what your children (and partners) are doing on the internet. We use them on all computers in our house (five at the moment) – not just to stop us from going to unsavory websites, but also to *prove* that we don’t go to unsavory websites.
Two programs we recommend for this purpose are NetNanny and Covenant Eyes. Choose one or the other – if you install both, your machine will never work (personal experience talking here!). We don’t recommend the use of free internal controls such as Parental Controls in Internet Explorer 7; they’re worse than useless, as they give you a false sense of security. NetNanny and Covenant Eyes block suspicious websites, and report your activity to one or more accountability partners. If you’re behaving yourself, you have nothing to worry about!
What if my PC has already gone wrong?!
It’s not too late! This is one of those things we do for a living; fix peoples PCs. We check the PC out for 15 minutes free, and then charge a flat rate of $60/hr to repair it, with a maximum charge of $180 plus parts. We keep the rate down so that it doesn’t outrun the cost of a new PC, and wherever possible we’ll retain all your existing data (yes, sometimes we can’t do that, but we try..). If in doubt, give us a call on 801 928 6953 – we don’t charge for short phone calls!
You can also reach by filling out the Contact Us form at KP Direction. Please do not hesitate to use the form for questions, comments or if you need additional information.
