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The right knowledge of computer along with internet use can better make it easier to safeguard yourself as well as your laptop or computer.  Are you aware that the web browser like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera etc. which comes standard, has Internet safety control features that just needs to be activated?  A couple of simple steps and you can have specific websites blocked which might have harmful or malicious code.  However, you will not understand this if you do not know all that you may learn about the computer or the internet.

Now you are aware the significance of staying prepared about the internet safety and a computer in general, you may be curious about tips on how to start to do so.  Thankfully, there are a number of ways which you can learn all you’ll want to find out computer and internet use.  Some of these approaches are discussed below for your benefit.

An easy way to learn about Internet safety and about your computer is to teach yourself. In fact, what better way is there than to jump on your computer and open Google to look for resources to educate yourself. Most of the companies like Microsoft are providing information online to protect users online.

Friends, colleagues and relatives are another way to learn about Internet safety. Look for persons you feel who are good at computers and online world. Take advice and tips from them, meet them to learn how to enable Internet safety settings on.

You can take a course on computers and Internet. These courses are sometimes offered freely or for an very affordable fee by computer institutes in your locality. Look for classified in your newspaper to know such kind of courses.

We can not avoid to use Internet, so better to keep yourself updated to avoid becoming victim of cyber threat. We will be posting more tips and article related to online safety. Post your comment to share your thoughts and ideas on Internet safety.

Since you are reading this article, it means you are already using internet, and probably you might be using broadband or you might be using modem attached with your telephone line which is popularly known as Dial-up connection.

Whether you are looking for a new Internet connection or want to upgrade your internet connection for better speed, it is good you use broadband connection.

Broadband equipments looks very similar to Dial up equipments. It also has modem, but it does not keep your phone line engaged like Dial up.

Whether you want to watch videos clips and listen to music online, even live broadcasts, download music, software, film trailers, want to play games online and want to do everything you just much more quickly, broadband is the answer.

As it was previously stated, numerous situations can develop online that contain the potential to be risky. One particular situations is when sensitive information is exchanged with a stranger. Has your youngster recently given away your phone number, address, or their email address to someone who they don’t really know?

If so, be sure to change as much information as possible. This may involve changing your home phone number or your child’s cell phone number or email address. Be sure to take additional safety steps, for instance always being aware of your surroundings, locking your home and car, and you may also want to contact your local authorities. Be sure to talk to your kids about the risks of changing personal data online.

In keeping with exchanging personal data online, your kid may end up talking to an adult, thinking that they are another teenager or close to their age. If that is the case, your child is likely dealing with an internet predator, who can be old enough to be a parent or a grandparent.

If your kid has made contact, intentionally or unintentionally, with an older person online, has any personal information been exchanged? If so, change that information, like your child’s email address, cell phone, or even if your home phone number. Make sure that the contact stops immediately. Contact the authorities, school officials, and make sure that all family members know. Get as much information you can about the real person behind the computer. The police may be able to help you do so.

Many school and junior school students use social networking websites, like Orkut, bigadda, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace etc.. Unluckily, many also mistakenly believe that it is a good idea to try to look cool, online and at any cost. Your youngster may post pictures or videos of themselves online doing illegal activities, like smoking or drinking underage, stealing, or doing drugs.

If this is something that your kid has done, be sure to remove the pictures or videos right away. If your child’s pictures or videos have been viewed by school officials or authorities, they may be facing punishment. A lawyer should be called if your child is arrested. If your son or daughter is suspended from school or extra curricular activities, speak to school officials. What can be done by both you, the parent, and your kid?

Online harassment is another common problem that kids, namely junior school and high school kids face. This harassment can be done by a complete stranger, an online friend, or a friend right at school. When friends have a falling out or even just a simple disagreement, many turn to the internet to seek revenge, as it is possible to hide behind a computer.

If your youngster finds themselves a victim of online harassment, the authorities should be contacted. This is particularly important if your son or daughter does not actually know, personally, the person who is making threats or spreading harmful rumors. If the average person doing so is a former friend or another individual at school, there are a number of steps that you can take. If you know the child and their moms and dads, consider arranging a meeting, but be aware and use your best judgment. Alternatives involve contacting the authorities or the school.

Essentially, there are many of eye opening and very dangerous situations that your youngster can find themselves in online. Just ensure that you, as the parent, make a move to help and protect your child.

The game, created by a Japanese firm, Illusion, has become a hotpick in the grey market. The game is freely available in the grey markets of Chennai and also Delhi, including the infamous Palika Bazar.

The copies are mostly pirated, which are made from original, which is smuggled in from Japan or purchased online. Most popular online stores had made it a point to have it removed from their online shelves, after concerns were raised on it.

Most of these games come under the category of hentai(japanese porn) which can be mostly downloaded from the internet.To quote Narayana Reddy, an eminent sexologist, “”Young people addicted to these games may start seeing violence as an integral part of sex. While films make children emulate characters, such games where the player is the character can make them act it out.”

Strangely enought, the authorities dont seem to be taking a stock of the situation. The central crime branch police says that they are yet to come across such games in raids.

Cert-In(Computer Emergency Reaction Team of the IT ministry) senior director BJ Srinath says “Our primary job is to prevent cyber crimes that threaten the national security. When such offensive websites are hosted in other countries, there is little we can do.”

This makes the families take charge themselves and they have to place their trust in parent control softwares installed in their computers.

If charge is not taken now to take steps to curb the menace, this might have effects which might end up being beyond control. A few directives that one, as a parent can follow are:

• use software, that helps you monitor the time spent by your kid on various sites.
• kid safe browsers like kidzui and kidrocket can also help.
• make sure everyone can see the monitor all the time.
• find out your child’s monitoring at browsing centres which end up becoming the homing ground for such games and adult material.

The best approach is being subtle, yet stern about the issue. Using too much force might make your child want to indulge in these things without your knowledge. Use your judgement to the best of your abilities.

P.S.- More on speeds and ways of choosing the correct broadband coming soon. Stay tuned!

Most internet connections in our country run through a variety of methods. This includes your connection as well. Your connection could be a dialup, through the cable guy or through your mobile connection service provider. Needless to say, most internet connections in our country are quite slow in comparison to international internet standards.The question is, how do you find out, if your internet connection is fast or slow?

One easy way to figure it out is by opening the search engine Google and search for a term or phrase. If the search result page opens up instantly, your internet speed is passable. If it actually takes between a few seconds to a few minutes to load, you might want to reconsider your internet connection. Also, a search on Google takes less than one-fifth of a second in most cases. If you are sitting for more than a few seconds, waiting for your search results to appear on it, you should consider using a better internet connection, instead of cursing Google for being slow!

What is a fast way to surf the internet? The answer to this question is broadband. Though most of us hear this word being bounced around most of the time, most of us really dont know what the term actually means. Broadband in short can be described as a method of connecting to the internet. It is known as broadband, due to its high speeds of internet connectivity,without putting your phone on engage. The older varieties were mostly known as narrowbands, owing to their speed of connection.

Why is it good? This question can be sufficiently answered by saying that the advantage of broadband mostly lies in its speed of connection. As I mentioned earlier, webpages on slower connections can take upto over 10 seconds to open, while downloading mails could take a few minutes. With broadband, all this becomes so much faster! One of the prime advantages of broadband is that it allows you to work on multiple tabs with almost negligible loss of speed.It is fast enough to allow several people to use the same internet connection if they are all networked together!

Higher speeds make sure that you enjoy a lot more of feature rich areas on the internet, namely live TV and Radio. Broadband opens up a different side of the internet which you cannot possibly know with a slower connection.

If you are an online gamer, you would find the difference in response immediatly. Besides, it also enables the internet to become a wholesome experience for you. If you are still thinking of giving broadband a shot, I would suggest you to stop thinking. Go for it!

P.S.- More on speeds and ways of choosing the correct broadband coming soon. Stay tuned!

On the topic of email fraud, The Wikipedia says

email fraud relies on naive individuals who put their confidence in get rich-quick schemes such as too good to be true investments or offers to sell popular items at impossibly low prices.

Ironically, a lot of people have lost their life savings due to such frauds.In a series of articles, we are going to look at the  various types of frauds that might be doing the rounds this festive season. Make sure you hang around, if you want your festive season to be full of joy and giving, and not spent in repenting for having fallen for that the irresistible offer.

The holiday season is here and so are the phishing scams! Its time to warn you against this type of scam. During the festive season, the hackers take advantage of your generosity, by sending you christmas cards which look like they are from legitimate charitable organisations.

Be aware, these are not from a charitable organisation. By donating to these people you would not educate a child, make a child happier or some old people feel homely. The bitter truth is these are fake websites which are designed to steal donations, credit card details and identities of the people who are donating. Be cautious now, don’t say that we never warned you!

This is the beginning of a series of articles on the various types of scams that are may be practiced this festive season. Stay around, for there is a lot more to come!

If you are an active Internet user, and use an active email ID, you might already be aware of what I am talking about. An email lottery scam can be broadly described as a malicious mail which informs you that you have won a huge amount of money in a lottery and asks you to deposit a certain percentage of that amount into a remote account, as processing fee. Once you have done this, the sender may ask you to deposit simultaneous fees amounts in different accounts. Post this, you would never hear from the senders. On a lot of occasions, it becomes difficult to trace the offenders, considering that the money is asked to be deposited in an overseas account and scamsters are from abroad.

A case in point would be mumbai internet lottery scam. The recent case in our very own Mumbai is enough to set alarm bells ringing, but you, as a reader of this article can be easily safe by practicing a small series of steps. In this case, the victim, received a mail informing her that she had won a lottery to the tune of millions and asked to deposit “processing fees” repeatedly. Once she did this, the scamster decamped with the money, but were thankfully caught, thanks to the alertness of the police. Here the scamsters were from the same city, which helped solve matters. What if they belonged to some remote location and moved base before the police reached them?
That is where our series of simple steps would come into use. They are broadly given below:

• NEVER treat a mail which claims that you have won a lottery, some large amount of money, with importance. Do NOT open it, considering it might have a worm or a virus which might try to hack into your computer system and steal all your precious data. The same rule applies if someone is claiming to give you a lot of “free downloads” without any fees or verification.
• You can NEVER win a lottery if you haven’t taken part in one. Most mails that come across to you would often claim that you won the lottery through a RANDOM draw of IP addresses or something on these lines. Such claims are NEVER true.The mail which is making you so happy, might also be putting a similar false smile across thousands of other faces worldwide.
• NEVER give out your account number to unidentified senders on the internet. Your bank wouldNEVER ask you for your pin verification OR your account number online through your personal email,because they were the ones who gave it to you in the first place, remember? Someone claimingthat they need your account number to transfer huge amounts of money from someplace to theother is not telling you the truth because such a person DOES NOT have that sum of money. Instead,he or she might have a good mind to empty your account in case you are sweet enough to share youryour account!

I shall share examples of what these emails look like in another of my post. In the meanwhile, the pointers above shall be more than sufficient to keep you safe from most email scam threatsonline. With a little alertness and care, the internet can be a great place to hang out or be used as a treasure trove of knowledge. The ground rule is NEVER TRUST. Don’t lose your sleep over this, just be a little careful.

In a previous post , I had talked about how to identify if your child is in trouble online, or might be getting stressed due to his or her lifestyle on the internet.

We might want to believe that the Internet is as safe a place as can be, but for children, or far that matter, the less learned, it can turn out to be quite a nuisance. Here, we talk about what should one do incase, inspite all the precautions, your child has run into trouble online.

In the previous article about your child addiction to the Internet, I had stated that there could be various situations where your child could get caught in. One of them was sharing personal information with strangers on the internet. Has your child recently given away your adress, email or postal, or your phone number to someone he doesn’t know?

Make it a point to talk to your child about dangers of exchanging information online. If your child has made contact, intentionally or otherwise, has any personal information  been exchanged? If so, change all means of communication and make sure that all contact stops immediatly. Contact school officials, authorities and make sure all family members know.

For school children, posting of videos where they are doing daring things, like taking drugs or alchohol could be posted online, as a part of looking cool. If you find out about any such thing, make sure you take it off the internet immediatly and get in touch with a lawyer if your child is arrested.

Another common problem is online harassment or better known as cyber bullying. This could be done by a stanger, an acquaintance, or someone right from school with whom your child may have had a fallout. The reason for this is simple; it becomes very easy to hide behind a computer.

If your child finds themselves as a victim, its time to contact the authorities. This becomes more important when your child does not know the person making threats. If the person is a former friend or someone from school, there are a number of things that you can do. You could arrange a meeting, be cautious and use your judgement. An alternative could be getting in touch with school authorities.

As one can see, the internet could turn out to be anything but safe for your child. Your duty as a parent is to make sure that you take steps and keep your child safe online.