It might seem simple enough to those of us who use computers or texting a lot, but for those of us who don’t, it can be confusing. And the hardest part is, new acronyms are created everyday. There are whole websites created just to help those of us who aren’t “in the know” figure out what is really being said. Most acronyms used in chat are just shorter ways to type common phrases. For example, BRB is be right back. But how many of you know what “IKR” is?

When I was in college, a friend of mine spent a lot of time chatting with her boyfriend over the Internet. He was often away and at that time, it was cheaper to chat online than it was to call long distance. She had a code phrase for her significant other that would let him know she wasn’t alone. She created their secret phrase to help keep their conversations private. While both of these individuals were adults, you probably wouldn’t be comfortable with the same thing happening with your twelve-year-old daughter or your ten-year-old son. It’s hard the draw the line between allowing their chat to be private and being aware when something that is being shared is inappropriate.

As a parent, it’s important to know what’s being said in email, online chat and even text messages. So here’s a few steps to help you decode what is really being said.

First, if you find that your child is hiding messages or minimizing the screen when you’re around, you may want to dig a little deeper. It could be that they just want their privacy, but it’s worth being safe to find out who they’re talking to and taking a quick glance at what’s being said. Second, respect your child’s privacy. They may be a child, but they still want to feel like they can express themselves without an adult being involved. Kids will feel the need to express their emotions, and it’s important to remember when reading these communications that they intended for them to be private. And finally, if you find that you can’t understand what’s being said, use a chat decoder like this one: http://www.zoobuh.com/tools/chatdecoder/. If you find that a particular acronym or phrase is popping up a lot and you can’t seem to find it online, then it may be one your child created with their friend. If you’re concerned that this may be an inappropriate communication, speak with your child. Discuss the acronym or phrase and take appropriate action if needed.

When it comes to non-verbal communication, you can never be too careful. Knowledge is your strongest defense.

Now my comments aren’t going to duplicate anything said in this article, however, some similarities exist.   Something so small can be so destructive.  My thoughts are directed to a corporate environment, but can be applied at home just as well.

Imagine yourself walking through the parking lot of where you are employed.  You notice on the ground, a thumb drive (otherwise known as a flash drive).  The first thing that comes to mind is, “cool, a free drive.”  Maybe you’re thinking, “Gee I wonder what’s on it?”  So you pick it up, take it into the office and plug it into your computer (or home computer.)  Depending on your computer’s settings, you may have just had it “autorun” whatever was on this drive.  It ran a virus/trojan/spyware/etc., completely transparent to you.   It may have even been disguised as a picture or music file (e.g. FurryDog.jpg.exe, or Justin Beiber.mp3.exe).  Some operating systems such as Windows will hide the .exe part, so it just looks like a .mp3 file.  Either way let’s pretend you ran it.  Before you decide whether it doesn’t work and to reformat and reuse it, it has already wormed its way into your computer.    It is now monitoring all of your keystrokes and form submissions.  Any credit card, social security number, passwords are all now being transmitted to someone else.

People get so caught up in worrying about what they are downloading from the Internet, they forget about the easy things.  They become careless.

Will this happen to you?

As a parent, you may have several questions in regards to cyberbullying and your child. First, how do you know when your child is being cyberbullied? As always, it’s important that you have an open communication with your child. Anytime your child is using any social technology such as the internet, social websites, cell phones and multiple other mediums, you should be aware and involved in their activities. It is important that prior to their use of such devices, they should understand that anytime anything that makes them feel uncomfortable happens, they should report such occurrences to you. Be aware of what types of websites your child is visiting and who is able to contact them through such sites. Check in on your child and watch for warning signs of undesirable behavior.

Second, what do you do when your child is being cyberbullied? Unfortunately, because every instance is different, each situation must be handled differently as well. There is no cookie-cutter answer to this difficult problem. First, be advised to not ignore instances of cyberbullying. Unlike bullying that takes place physically, cyberbullying can follow your child everywhere they go and has no ends to the number of individuals who can take part in such bullying. At the same time, it is important to not over-react. Probably the best thing you can do for your child is to create a support system. Keep teachers, guidance counselors, therapists, family doctors, religious figures, adult role models and even friends of your child on hand to help support your child and to make sure that the bullying does not escalate into something more serious. It is important to note that children have committed suicide and even killed other children after cyberbullying incidences. So this is not something that should be overlooked!

And finally, remember, you are not alone. There are multiple resources available to you. As a parent, you must take cyberbullying seriously and evaluate your child’s needs. The best things you can do for your child is be there for support and use all of your resources to prevent the cyberbullying from continuing. Please remember that is never okay to take the law into your own hands. Taking action against a child who is cyberbullying your child will only make matters worse for you and your child and make the cyberbully the victim.

Below are lists of some websites that are full of information that can help you as a parent understand, prevent, and see the signs of cyberbullying.

http://www.stopcyberbullying.org
http://www.cyberbullying.org/
http://www.ncpc.org/cyberbullying

A dictionary attack sounds like it’s limited to words from a dictionary.  It can be, but it goes a lot deeper than that.  For starters, it sounds logical that if I use the word “love”, it falls into this category.    A dictionary isn’t where an actual dictionary like Webster’s is used. It’s more like a list or index of words that it’s being compared to.   Someone could have a huge database of words which it can rule out by comparing each entry with your password.

Adding additional characters decreases the likelihood of your password ending up in somebody’s dictionary.  The regular U.S. English alphabet has 26 characters; a-z.  Most systems recognize the difference between lower and upper case.  So now we have A-Z and a-z.  Adding numbers, adds 10 more, and adding various combinations of symbols … well you get the point.

Educating people about passwords help… a lot!  However, while we are confident that we have chosen our unbreakable password, we can’t forget about the often overlooked hacking technique:  Social Engineering.   What is this?  Simply put, I will try to find your password by asking you random questions, looking for sticky notes under your keyboard, or in your drawer.  It’s the process of using communication and good ol’ fashioned detective work.   I think most people understand that the name of your pet, or spouse is NOT a good password.  How easy is it to find out your mother’s maiden name, a dog’s name or your first born?  You would be surprised at how many people have their password on a sticky note applied to the bottom of their keyboard.  Also, another thing that’s not uncommon is a password that is visible while sitting at the computer, e.g., brand of monitor or keyboard, a word on a poster or calendar.  Overlooked things like this make it possible for people to gain access to your computer or websites you’re registered on.

Back to the subject.  What makes a good password?  We know eventually all passwords can be broken.  That is no secret.  Changing it often helps.  Here are some tips:

• Use at least 7 characters.  Some say 8, but 7 is sufficient for most things in my opinion if you use a good variation.
• Do not include your name, username, company name
• Do not use “123″ just to satisfy the rule of using numbers.  E.g. mygirl123
• Use a combination of upper and lower case letters numbers and symbols (!@#$%^)
• Use L337 if necessary.  Wait!  What is L337?  Some refer to it as leet (elite) speak, or teen chat code.  For example, I use the word “greatscott”  I could use Gr347$coTt or Gr34TSC0T.  You can see the pattern. Zero for O, 1 for L or I. etc.
• Use a different type of obfuscation, for example,  replace vowels with the number of the alphabet.  Gr21tSc44t.  AEIOU = 12345

Now, I’ve only listed a few easy ways to create a good password.  Whatever pattern you use or create, remember it.  Remember the pattern and it will help you remember the password.  A password isn’t any good if you can’t remember your own!

You’ve heard of temporary internet files located on your computer.  These files are cached images, downloaded by your browser for quicker viewing when you revisit that page.   The content can range from icons, background images to photographs.

Now picture yourself (sorry for the pun) viewing someone’s photo album on their Blog, Facebook or MySpace.  As you browse through that person’s photographs, your computer has downloaded these images and saved them onto your hard drive.  While this seems perfectly harmless, pretend these images are of your family and children.  Every person that views these images now has a copy.    Furthermore, Google Images has most likely “crawled” your site, thus caching these images.

Now before you feel the need to freak out about this concept, there are a few precautions you can take when putting photos of your family and children online.

1. Think twice before you do. Ask yourself, “Do I really want this picture online?”
2. Check to see if the photograph reveals your home, child’s school or location where they can be contacted.  If it does, do not upload this photograph.
3. Consider resizing the photograph to a smaller size, so detail isn’t as high.
4. Don’t name the file “Jenny at the beach.jpg”  Consider an obfuscated or random type identifier in the filename, such as “j23abc001.jpg”  And under any circumstances, do not put your child’s name in the filename.

The bottom line is really, think twice, and consider the consequences.  Many parents want to share the images with their family, friends and relatives.  The bottom line is really, think twice, and consider the consequences. (yes we said that twice for emphasis)    Some sites have privacy settings and passwords you can set before someone can gain access.  Consider those options.

ZooBuh has many resources available from parents to teachers that can help with questions you have.

I watch the news every night. While it’s not a daily occurrence, it is more frequent now than it ever was before to hear horrific things that are happening with our children because of computers and the Internet. This week, a local school had two 11-year-old boys use a school computer to look at pornography. We’ve all seen episodes of “How to Catch a Predator” where predators solicit underage children. There are horror stories of child predators on popular social networking sites. In March of this year, just one of the fifty states found that more than 2100 of its registered sex offenders were on one of these popular networking sites. Even more upsetting is that this news came a month after this same popular networking site had booted more than 90,000 sex offenders.

It is so common place for kids to be tech savvy that even modern day commercials poke fun at it. Recently, a large cell phone company aired a commercial about texting and using acronyms. New acronyms are becoming part of speech everyday. A few years ago, I visited my sister for a week. Her kids at the time were 11, 9 and 1. They were quick to pick up my speech and to my surprised had picked up some acronyms I use in daily speech. Surprisingly enough, my sister had no idea what any of them meant. That is often the case with parents as kids pick up and learn new things everyday.

So how do we keep our children safe?

There’s really only one way to keep your child safe and that begins with you. As the parent, the guardian, the teacher, the adult, it all begins with you. You absolutely must be involved in the child’s online experience if you are to guarantee the child’s safety on the Internet. I’ve listed a few tips below to help you.

The first tool to keeping our kids safe is communication. Parents need to talk to their children about internet safety in the same way that we talk to our children about crossing the street. Guidelines must be set. Children must understand that there are certain sites that are trusted and safe for them to use. It is important for kids to know that they should never give out personal information online. Addresses, last names, and phone numbers are all information that should remain private. Even pictures should not be shared. Too often information can be picked up from just one innocent picture. Kids should know that anytime anything inappropriate happens online, they should speak with a parent or trusted adult immediately.

Once you’ve spoken with your child about Internet safety and set up guidelines regarding computer and Internet usage, it’s time to find the right place for the computer in your home. A good rule of thumb is to never have a computer in your child’s bedroom. This isolates you from keeping a close eye on them. I tell people, if they aren’t sure, to look where the carpet is worn the most. This indicates a high traffic area in your home. The family computer should be located near this area with the screen in view. It’s also important to make a mental note of where your child’s friends keep their computers. While you may not have any control over where your child’s friends keep their computers in their homes, it is very likely that at some point your child will use a computer with a friend in their home under someone else’s supervision.

Finally, invest in software, programs, and sites that will help you keep control over your child’s computer and Internet experience. There is no price too great when it comes to your child’s safety. There are browsers designed just for children, network software and even email and blogs that were created with your child in mind. Find what works best for you and your child.

It’s important to remember that the answer is not keeping our children from computers and technology all together. With all that bad, there is a whole lot of good. Computers provide extensive information at our finger tips. Children use computers and the Internet to learn about history, current events and so much more. Computers aid in helping children learn to read, type and even write. Children want to be connected now more than ever.

While this article does not address the issue of spy ware or viruses, it’s important to remember that you can always replace a computer. You can never be too safe when it comes to your children.

www.zoobuh.com

Some suggested rules of internet safety for kids are as follows:

1. NEVER talk to strangers
2. NEVER give out any information like your name, home address, or phone number
3. NEVER tell someone where you go to school
4. NEVER send a picture of yourself
5. NEVER agree to meet anyone from the Internet in person
6. NEVER give your password to anyone, even your friends
7. NEVER threaten anyone online and ALWAYS behave appropriately
8. NEVER download or install any program without parental permission
9. DO TALK to your parents about your online experiences
10. ALWAYS ask your parent questions if you have them, no matter how small

Parents, you can modify or add to this list as you see fit.  Nobody knows your child better than you.  Make sure they understand these rules before you allow them online–even if you are present.

Just remember, the more you interact with your child, the better off they will be.  Make sure you take Internet Safety seriously.

A fun, colorful reminder that can be printed out is available here: http://zbl.in/4VaTv