Protecting your children from internet predators

In 2002 thirteen-year-old Christina Long, a Connecticut suburbanite, became the first confirmed murder in the U. S. by an Internet predator. Unfortunately she has not been the last. Fortunately, recent media attention is finally making parents aware of dangers linked to Internet use. A study performed by National Institute for Missing and Exploited Children concluded that in the past year one in five minors were subjected to sexual solicitation through chat rooms and instant messengers. 5% received aggressive sexual solicitation in the form of phone calls, mail, money, or gifts, as well as being asked to meet. Almost 70% of all solicitations occurred in the home, yet less then one-quarter of minors told a parent. Shockingly, by an average age of just eleven years most minors have been exposed to Internet pornography. Internet predation is an issue that cannot be ignored. The Long family did not realize their children were in peril until it was too late. We must learn from their loss and take action before more children suffer a similar fate. Amazingly, many responsible parents who wouldn’t dream of letting their children cross the street without teaching them to look both ways, or under the supervision of a crossing guard, will let their kids play on the Information Super-Highway without any safeguards! There are several excellent resources designed to provide education to both parents and children. One of the best is the National Institute for Missing and Exploited Children ( missingkids). Here you will learn how to identify dangers and how to effectively address them. As an example, one of the easiest changes that can be made is moving the family PC to a highly visible area, making it easier to watch for risky behavior. There are other valuable tips, such as how to pick chat room and instant messenger user names that draw less attention from predators and what type of chat rooms to avoid. The most important thing you must teach your children is that the Internet is not always a safe playground where they can let their guard down. Children often have a false sense of security on the Internet because they believe its anonymous nature will protect them, even from behavior that would make them run in real life. Children must be taught that behavior that would make them uncomfortable in person must not be tolerated online either. Most minors would be afraid of a stranger who starting talking to them with sexual innuendo or talking about their sexual fantasies, but fail to be afraid when they are approached online. In fact many children will even engage in conversations when approached, perhaps because the Internet gives the illusion of personal safety. Children must be taught that giving out personal information is extremely dangerous. Teach your children that even the smallest piece of information, such as what softball team they are on, is enough for a predator to find them. Also teach them that a stranger online is not always who they say they are. Predators will often masquerade as children themselves to obtain information they can use to identify and find victims. Your child may think they are talking to someone their own age, when in fact they may be talking to someone intent on doing them harm. In addition to education you must put in place parental controls and monitoring tools to add a second layer of defense. Even the best child will break the rules on occasion, and even the smartest child will fail to identify every dangerous situation. Quality parental control software should allow filtering of web sites and permit monitoring of which sites your children are visiting, allowing you to identify risky behavior before it is too late. Instant messenger controls that permit conversation monitoring, as well as permitting limits on which contacts your kids can have conversations with, are invaluable since predators often use these messengers to meet and entice their victims. Another option that is vital, although often overlooked, is a means of block peer-to-peer file sharing programs. These programs are typically used to download music, but can also serve as a portal for pornography, including the most insidious forms of child pornography. Finally, a quality monitoring tool to that allows you to watch everything your kids do will help identify and address risky behavior. The most typical tool for this is a keystroke logger, which logs every keystroke your child makes. Perhaps the greatest value of installing good parental controls and monitor tools is the positive effect it will have on your children’s behavior. They are less likely to break the rules if they know you are watching. Educate yourself, educate your children, and invest in the tools to make sure they’re safe. Don’t let your family be the next saying they never thought it could happen to them. Visit css-software for more resources and tools to help protect your children before it’s too late.

Allume systems is more than stuffit

If you own a Mac, you've probably heard of Allume Systems. Even if you don't know the name, you have probably used a version of Allume Systems' popular software StuffIt. StuffIt allows you to compress, send and expand files of any type on your computer. It even works with WinZip files and tar, gzip and bzip extensions. StuffIt Deluxe take the whole system a step farther by allowing you to compress jpeg photos up to 30 percent with no loss in quality. But there's a lot more to Allume Systems than StuffIt, it turns out. Allume Systems offers all sorts of programs for your computer at work and play. CheckIt is Allume Systems' repair and performance suite for Macs. This power package of programs includes Allume Systems' SpringCleaning, an uninstaller and cleanup utility that helps you get rid of unnecessary and redundant files; TechTool Platinum, a diagnostic and repair tool; and EMC Dantz Retrospect Express, a backup and restore program. All of the Allume Systems products are easy to use, quick to install and incredibly powerful and useful. Allume Systems offers even more great utilities for Mac users, including: DragStrip, a sort of combination dock and favorites file that gives you one-click access to your most accessed documents, web sites and more; ShrinkWrap, which makes byte-for-byte copies of any data; FlashBack, which lets you access old copies of a document like an endless undo key; Secure Delete, a digital document shredder; and iClean, which deletes cookies, your cache and history files. to protect your privacy and help you regain space. If PC users are feeling a little bit left out at this point, Allume Systems has PC versions of DragStrip and FlashBack, as well as a PC performance-improvement suite called BoostXP. And Allume Systems also has a version of StuffIt for Linux and Windows, so no matter what operating system you run, you can compress and expand files with ease. Allume Systems also has software that will help you get your creative juices flowing, control digital audio, even stay entertained with games for lovers of action or family fun games. And for those times when you just need to relax and look at something calming, Allume Systems has you covered there, too. Allume Systems is the maker of AquaZone, the ultimate three-dimensional computerized aquarium. This program, available for both Macintosh and Windows computers, features 40 different kinds of fish, sharks, turtles, jellyfish and more in a realistic-looking undersea world. You can feed the fish, zoom in on one fish and follow it around, choose backgrounds and more. If you're looking for ways to make your computer more powerful, run better and smarter or are just looking for a little fun, Allume Systems has all sorts of software options that will work for you.

Enterprise content management and enterprise reporting practices

: The ECM Association, AIIM, defines ECM as: "...the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists." The focus of the definition above is on tools and technologies. AIIM itself emphasizes that while tools are important, it is the way that they are used that is important. Content must be managed in a way that furthers the organization's goals. According to AIIM, the four primary areas in which ECM helps organization are: Compliance, Collaboration, Cost and Continuity. In each of the areas, you must have clear strategies and policies before you start using ECM tools. Strategies and policies are derived from organizational goals and your particular environment.

COMPLIANCE Compliance with regulatory requirements involves costs. The variety of regulations, and the ongoing legislation of new regulations and requirements, adds to the costs. Only a proactive strategy developed with the involvement of legal, technology and administrative personnel can help minimize these costs. This kind of a proactive approach will bring out possibilities for using ECM tools to ensure compliance with applicable regulations at a maximum of convenience and minimum of costs. COLLABORATION Collaboration helps people with different expertise to contribute to the overall business results. Overall business results are helped by finding faster ways to get your product or service to the market, reducing your operational costs and completing activities and processes quicker and in a more streamlined fashion. ECM provides tools like instant messaging, emails, online meetings and whiteboards to facilitate collaborative working. These tools make it possible to participate instantly, or at a time of your convenience. You can review the up-to-date status of a problem or solution, ask queries, make suggestions or presentations and get feedback. All these allow you to get involved and contribute meaningfully. COSTS When you start thinking of how ECM can help with costs, the first thing you might notice will be the cost of the ECM system itself - an addition to cost rather than a reduction. However, if you have a proper strategy in place, even tentatively, you will also be able to evaluate how ECM can help you achieve larger-scale business results at lower costs. The key is clarifying your objectives and their implications. Don't let existing information processing technology constraints limit your expectations in these matters. With ECM, information can be made available on tap by all those who need it (and are authorized to access it). This would include not only employees in your organization, but also suppliers, customers, and governments outside it. You won't have to spend most of your time actively contacting everybody and conveying your requirements or meeting theirs. The result will be not only savings in time, but also better quality results in all areas. You will soon begin to see how ECM can help you operate on a much higher scale and at much less relative costs. CONTINUITY Keeping your business going 24/7/365 is critical in today's global corporations, and even many smaller organizations. Natural or man-made disasters must not be allowed to disrupt operations too seriously. Achieving this objective will first involve developing clear strategies and policies. You will determine which content is business critical, how quickly each type of content must be restored, how such restoration is to be arranged for, and all the other incidentals involved. ECM, with its comprehensive range of capabilities, will then help you implement the strategies and policies. CONCLUSION ECM provides a great set of tools and technologies. It can help achieve great business results through increasing speed of marketing and other operations, mainly through faster access to relevant information. However, you need to sit down with your people and develop clear strategies and policies, un-constrained by present information system limitations, before you start implementing Enterprise Content Management Systems.

That s easy hacking pal

Yesterday I was talking about secrets hiding and cryptography. A friend of mine said he was able to crack any Word document in one day as a maximum. He said it was not a problem of password complexity: he knew how to strip Word protection away. As a proof, he took an old Word document and he was actually able to crack it in a few minutes. I said he was only lucky and that I was ready to bet a non trivial sum of money that he would not be able to crack a Word document encrypted by me. He laughed out loud, he said I just wanted to lose money... but he did not accept my bet. Then I sent the Word document encrypted by me to him anyway: he is still trying to crack it (a week is already passed... but I think the encryption will stand against his attacks for ten/fifteen years). I told you this little story as a metaphor of how things really go when talking about encryption: it is almost always a matter of process, and not tools. Word has an excellent encryption system, although it is limited by US key length limitation: if you just know how to do it, you can super-encrypt a Word document, and be sure that no-one (except, perhaps, CIA) will succeed in cracking it. The problem is that it is not easy to encrypt a Word document well: you must know a thing or two before doing it. Just pressing "Protect this document with a password" does not work (and makes people like my friend boast himself!) The story has morale: market lack of tools that make serious encryption easily. That’s one of encryption software house missions: to produce easy to use, but serious encryption tools (such as Folder Crypt). Secondarily, that it is often heard of people cracking programs, software barriers, ciphered documents and this makes the casual Internet user think that no real security is possible on Internet. Again, this happens because encryption processes and policies are often weak, when not at all bugged. On the contrary, data encrypted following secure processes and using encryption standard tools remain secret. Oh, by the way: to safely encrypt a Word document just follow these steps: 1. Start Word. 2. Select File | Save as. 3. Select the Tools extended menu option. 4. Select Security Options from the drop-down list. 5. Click the Advanced button. 6. From the Encryption Type dialog, copy the name of the encryption type name and encryption algorithm from the Choose an encryption type list. 7. RC4, Microsoft enhanced RSA and AES Cryptographic provider 8. Set maximum key length to 128