One of my co-workers gave me a pretty hard time when I bought computers for my kids. What prompted this was that even though I had their login on my wife’s machine locked down and had employed a significant anti-virus and anti-spyware protection to the machine. Little kids and mouse clicking go hand in hand.
I had visited the majority of the sites that they liked to visit and deemed them kid safe and had configured those sites for ready access. They had a half dozen more for me to look at last time and I went thru them rather quickly before giving the ok to them.
Well these damn kid sites are chocked full of spyware and they lure the kids in by presenting them a popup window and bing kids hit ok and they have effectively gaven permission to be spied on.
I found that no matter how hard I tried withing a couple of weeks I was deleting there user account and spending some time cleaning the machine up. Not wanting to waste time anymore I bought the computers for the kids setup the firewalls so they cannot touch any of the other computers in the inner circle of the firewall and used Norton’s Ghost on the hard-drives so I could quickly recover them when the time came. No my wife’s computer is spyware free and the kids machines get slicked and re-loaded twice a month.
Having seen several articles in recent days that talk about this very issue I thought that I would pass this on to those of you whose kids are using the same computer as you are. My biggest piece of advice if you are not able to afford a separate machine for the kids is to 1st, keep all data that is vital to you and that you could not afford to loose on separated media. 2nd insure that you are using Microsoft restore and that you have a clean baseline restore point. 3rd use a product like Norton Ghost or similar program to build a image file of your current install so you can recover the machine when it gets blasted. [Infoworld] [Windley.com]
This is very good info!
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Hmm, if you’re under 18, you can’t legally consent to jack-stink. Maybe this could be a whole new legal angle for the anti-spyware activist scene to check into. Deceptively luring children into potentially offensive or pornographic spyware or weblinks may mean that bubba’s new fiance is a spammer or spyware author.
Use a proxy like The Proxomitron and your kids won’t even see the ads. I haven’t seen an ad in ages by using the Proxomitron and Mozilla
brian
I do agree that kids when using the internet are a magnet for all sorts of spy-ware & junk software on your PC if given the chance.
I don’t necessesarily agree that the only way around this is to buy the kids their own PC and then waste time wiping it regularly…
What I’m getting at… is why not just hide away Internet Explorer & MSN Messenger etc. and only give them access to some of the more secure & free alternatives out there that isn’t going to ‘Install on Demand’ every bit of intrusive junk with a cartoon face on it.
Just use the right tools and you’ll be able to save your geekiness till another day.
Vin (nethomehelp.co.uk)
Unless you run into someone stubborn, like my sister, who insists on NOT using Mozilla, because she doesn’t understand that the slowness is because we are on dialup, and most of the pages she visits are probably using FunkPage extensions so they load better/faster in IE.
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Killer info thanks again. I bookmarked this blog
What is Spy ware?
The term spy ware refers to software programs made by unscrupulous marketing companies that allow them to snoop on your browsing activity, see what you purchase, and cause pop-up ads to appear on your computer.