NCSAM: Kids and the Internet (Part 1)

10-10-2008 National:

If you are a parent, then you likely have one of two things, a child already on the Internet, or one who soon will be on the Internet. It’s a scary thought if all you know about kids and the Internet is what you learned by watching Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series. In this article, continuing the National Cyber Security Awareness Month coverage, The Tech Herald will look at some of the stats surrounding Kids on the Internet and one tool that is hands down one of the best for houses with kids online.

Statistical information: do the numbers lie to you?

To kick some things off, here are some statistics you might not know. These facts come from a PowerPoint presentation by PEW Internet in 2008.

Thirty-three percent of teens online have been contacted by a stranger. Of those contacted by a stranger, 23 percent of those teens were made to feel uncomfortable by the experience. Twenty-five percent of youth who have regular Internet access have had one or more unwanted exposures to sexual pictures within the past year. Of that 25 percent, 27 percent said the exposure was during IM sessions or e-mail and seventy-three percent said it happened while surfing.

Do those facts bother you as a parent? Did they scare you? Did they disturb you in some way? Before you get out a hammer and remove the Internet from your home think of this, according to Symantec, 19 percent of all Spam sent in October related to porn or medical treatments.

Male enhancement drugs, which often use graphic images, are the most common. Outright porn advertisements are severely graphic, and would expose kids online to images and acts often not taught in Sex-Ed at school. Now, look back at the earlier stats.

Remember those 25 percent of youth who have regular Internet access, and how 27 percent of them have seen sexually explicit pictures in IM or email? Think rationally. What are the odds that most of those contacts came from IM Spam or e-mail Spam? The odds are high, that most of the contact comes from Spam.

What about the 73 percent who saw the explicit images while surfing? Again, think logically about this, where were they surfing? What sites were they on and what were they doing online at the time they were exposed? The answers to those questions will not be found in any statistical report.

If you want an example, use something simple like Google Images search. When you search for an image, you will notice a link under the search bar that says Moderate SafeSearch is on. This means search terms are filtered. Search for "Georgia peaches" with no quotes, and notice the innocent image results.

Now, "Georgia peaches" is a rather random term, and not sexual in nature for the most part. Next, click the Moderate SafeSearch is on link and disable it. Search for the same thing again. This time you get some different results.

The point is to show you that by even using something as innocent as “Georgia peaches” as a search term, and simply removing search filtering, you can be exposed to sexual images. Anyone can access the search options in Google Images, even a teen wanting to expand search results. How relevant are those stats from earlier now?

Do you remember the 33 percent of teens online who earned attention from a stranger? How do we know if the 23 percent of teens who said they were uncomfortable by the experience, didnt simply tell the person who made contact to piss off, and placed them on ignore in their IM client?

We don’t know the questions teens are asked in most cases, all we see are the stats and answers given. In this case, the teen could have been uncomfortable simply because that was the only option given to them when asked about random contacts from strangers.

Another report from PEW Internet says that, “Some 93% of youth are online and 94% of their parents are online.” So the teens online are often in the same house as an Internet using parent. What this means is that as a parent, you shouldn’t take most of the stats you see with complete gospel.

Question the stats, and use your own online experience as a judge as well. Remember, they are your children, so you know them better than anyone. Talk to them; get interested what they are doing online. Also, as a parent you have to regulate the rules, but more on that in part two.

One tool to rule them all

There are dozens and dozens of parental control applications online for parents to use to protect their children. One tool is often left out of parental control reviews. Everyone knows of NetNanny, yet how many parents can recall K9, when talking about parental software?

K9 Web Protection is developed by Blue Coat. The program is free, and offers excellent control for your children. The content filtering aspect offers a continuously updated category list of over fifty categories. The content filter is more than “Keyword” based; it uses AI to determine a Web page’s content on the fly.

You can allow or deny access to the Internet based on time of day, the day of the week, or both. There are options for you to allow sites, and block select ones, without blocking an entire category.

Now, like other parental control applications, K9 can be defeated. It can be hard, but it can be defeated.

No, there will be no tricks listed here to explain this. Suffice to say, protecting your children online requires trust. K9 should be used as a tool to help protect children from wandering off the beaten path into a Malware laced Internet. It should not be used as a method of “big brother” monitoring.

However, some parents do restrict access to the point of “big brother,” and for that there is a report in K9’s admin panel that shows every URL visited.

If you are using K9 in a restrictive fashion, then you need to take other steps to lock down the computer that the child has access to. These methods can differ from one operating system to another, but the basics listed below are all the same. You can also find help with these lockdowns online and in the user manual for your operating system.

Restrict the account your child has access to. When you create their account in Windows, ensure that it has only the basic permissions, and is what is called a “limited account”

Use passwords, which the child cannot guess, on your accounts as well as the Administrator account. (Yes there is a user known as Administrator on most systems, and often the password is P4ssw0rd, password, or the field is left blank.)

Deny access to system services, limited accounts will cover most of them but double check them.

Prevent boot from USB.

Another method comes from a Microsoft created tool, which you can get here. ..News Source.. by Steve Ragan