How to Block Websites that are Unwholesome, on Gaming Consoles and Phones

What is it that really takes entertainment technology forward - VCRs, DVDs, cable, 3D, Internet - what is the kind of consumer demand that really fuels the need for change and leaps forward in technological innovation? No, it isn't the soaring human spirit that does it. It's porn, pure and simple. If it weren't for powerful demand for accessible porn, none of these entertainment media devices would ever have made it to the mainstream, media experts claim. As wonderful as all of that might be for spinoff benefits, as a parent, you certainly do experience a degree of anxiety over keeping your child away from porn. It happens to be more difficult today than ever before now that it's accessible on Internet connected gaming consoles and any smartphone. You’ve learned how to block websites like that with child monitoring software on the computer. What do you do with all these new devices that allow access? How to block websites on those?

While completely blocking websites on cell phones and gaming consoles can be extremely tricky, you certainly can easily make a few changes to make sure that your child doesn't accidentally stumble on something even if he isn't actually looking for it.

You don't even need a smartphone to access the Internet - any underachieving feature phone will allow a reasonable amount of Internet access. The problem with phones of course is that they are used outside of the home. It can be very difficult to monitor what goes on on a phone's Internet browser. Now certainly, your child isn’t going to accept a phone that doesn't access the Internet. That would brand him a loser in his school. What you could do instead is to apply with the carrier, Verizon, AT&T or anyone else, to activate content filtering on your child’s phone. This only works for feature phones though and not for smart phones. On smart phones, you'll have to get a browser like the K9 browser that allows parental restrictions. And in case your child tries to install another browser, you have to turn that facility off in the Restrictions menu.

On both the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Wii, you can just switch the browser off altogether.  You don’t have to worry about how that could cripple the machines in their gaming abilities. The browsers are just incidental add-ons. If you don't want to do that, on the PlayStation 3, you get to subscribe to Trend Micro's parental blocking service that costs $20 a year.

Is Amazon feeling Heat from the Competition? The Kindle is finally open to Free Online Library Books

For years, if you wanted to read free online library books, you had to choose something other than a Kindle - your laptop, your smartphone, a Nook, or the Sony reader. Librarians around the country now though, will no longer have to use the well-rehearsed consolation tone in which they inform disappointed library members that the Kindle never was open to library books. In a statement that reverses Amazon’s express policy in the matter, the company has said that from now on, all free online library books are going to run on the Kindle. That would include the 10,000 or more public libraries there are in the country.

The Kindle, a product so famous that for the most part has come to be synonymous for the e-book reader device itself, has baffled fans all over the country, forever, with its library book ban. Everyone's always been trying to find some kind of hack that will allow them to use library books on their Kindle. Perhaps what changed Amazon's mind was how tech writers have been writing the Kindle's obituary ever since the iPad 2 came out.

Of course, this doesn't crumble all the barriers there are to accessing free e-books. Lots of publishers are extremely uncomfortable having their books becoming borrowable. They try to impose the strictest of conditions on libraries - the way they do when they say that an e-book sold to a library expires in one year. But that sounds positively generous compared to what some other publishers feel. Simon & Schuster and Macmillan have completely boycotted public libraries altogether.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Amazon opened themselves up to free online library books. They were beginning to lose market share to the Barnes & Noble’s Nook. That device has color, it has an open platform and it has a technology partnership with e-book software giant Adobe.

Amazon is designed has quite a bit of flexibility and thoughtfulness into its new Kindle library book program. To begin with, the Kindle’s WhisperSync technology that allows you to highlight passages and write annotations in the margins, works on these library books too. You can be safe in the knowledge that you won't be pulled up for vandalism. When you check the book out later at any time in the future, you'll find that Kindle has kept track of your annotations for you. Should you ever decide to buy that same book, Kindle will remember your annotations then too.

Keeping you Good Name in a Time of Websites that find Information about People

We may not intentionally place personal details about ourselves on the Internet for strangers to find; but place them there, we do - descriptive accounts of our dates, anecdotes about our job interviews, our opinions about movies and vacation spots, our troubles with our spouses - we put them all on Facebook and ask all our "friends" what they think; and we invite them to share their lives with us in similar fashion. There are all kinds of people out there whose job it is to find information about people - businesses that wish to employ people, marketers who wish to do a bit of research on the cheap, potential romantic partners, potential stalkers - social networking and everything else we do to to share our lives on the Internet present a rich field of information to anyone with an agenda. What are you supposed to do?

To begin with, how do you find out what information about you is available online? When someone out there tries find information about people like you, what is the aggregate of all that they can see about you on the Internet? That's where a website like Spokeo comes in. Key in your name, and and right away, the search engine calls up all the estimates it can find of where you live, who you are, all the pictures it can possibly find about you, your address and everything else. You can get all of this for free at many of these websites; sometimes, you are asked for a donation. Some of these search functions even make it possible for you to find out information about a person's political affiliations, their vacation preferences and everything else. It goes through all the Facebook comments that public or blog posts to do with you. Companies can easily use this kind of information to deny person a job, insurance coverage or a loan.

A lot of what people find in wiki eaks is usually embarrassing stuff that one world leader has had the misfortune of being on record saying about another. Come to think of it, that's the kind of information that these people-finder services dredge for. And they can be very successful. One of the first places you go to to clear up your good name would be all the online dating sites that you no longer use that have a great deal of personal information that you at one time must have volunteered. Some of these places can have outdated policies on privacy and can easily have leaked stuff about you.

To reclaim your life, should probably start out by deleting all revealing information about you on Facebook. Make sure your privacy settings make your details available only to your closest friends and make sure that you deactivate any unused accounts at any social networking site that you are a member of. If there's stuff about you on someone else's website or social networking account, you have no choice but to ask them. Sometimes, you have to speak to the people-finding websites to have your details removed.

To find information about people on the Internet isn't any big deal anymore. Perhaps prevention is the only good way to deal with this problem. Make sure that you aren't ever careless about what you type in on your computer keyboard.

Spy Tools for the Smartphone to Help Suspicious Romantic Partners

Technologies certainly makes snooping easier. Not long ago, an American company got into trouble and was all over the news for how it placed concealed cameras in all of its toilet stalls to try to check if employees did drugs. Businesses certainly take a close look at every website you visit while you're at a work terminal; that's a given. Now that everyone has a little computer in their pockets that they call a smartphone, jealous romantic partners have it particularly easy finding a way to snoop on one another. Spy tools aren't really today's news. They've been around for a while, far longer than high-tech smartphones, certainly, and people have become used to them - eavesdropping devices and so on. But every once in a while, a new product comes along that takes a situation people know and expect, and that moves it up to a whole new level. That's what the ePhone Tracker, a smartphone app from Retina Software, does.

Of course, the moment you hear of what the ePhone Tracker can do, you're going to be outraged for certain. This app is something you install on a phone that you wish to snoop on. In fact, it wouldn't be far-fetched to call this, actual spyware - spyware installed by a trusted person. The function it performs is pretty straightforward - once the app is installed on the phone of the person (that one is close enough to presumably that one has access to their phone) it keeps track of every phone call and text message on the phone and sends detailed transcriptions through e-mail to anyone the installer chooses. Spy tools like this would be no use of course if the owner of the phone could just take a look at their list of apps and find it. The app however, installs in some kind of stealth mode. The owner of the phone will have no idea that it is there, keeping an eye out for everything they say - to rat on them. The phone's owner may feel quite safe in deleting the phone's entire history; simple track-covering actions of this kind can make no difference to the ePhone Tracker, however. It has a copy of the phone's history all by itself. And oh, as some wife stalkers will undoubtedly be pleased to know, the app records every move the owner of the phone makes - through GPS - and sends that to the snooper as well.

Spy tools such as these could turn a person's phone into a grand peep-hole into their lives. There is practically nothing they do with or without their phone that they can keep a secret from whoever chooses to spy on them. Contact lists, e-mails - everything becomes an open book. Retina software believes that they aren't doing something to empower stalker. They say that statistics tell us that when people believe that they are being cheated on, usually, the facts bear their suspicions out. They just feel that their spy tools are a kind of social service. A social service that costs $50 for a year's subscription. The product apparently has robust user interest. It doesn't speak well for society that it does, does it?

A New Virus That Masquerades As Mackintosh Antivirus Software

A new malware attack for computers connected to the Internet isn't really news. There is one every minute. But only when it's for Windows computers is it not news – Windows computers have famously had nearly half a million pieces of malware designed for them. When someone designs malware especially for Apple computers, it certainly is news. The Mac has tried to push as its selling point it's low profile to malware designers. Apple has always said that the company, with its 12% market share, just doesn't present as interesting a target to malware designers. Apparently, someone just thought that designing stuff to take the Mac down could win him a bit of attention. The malware in question is especially remarkable for the fact that it masquerades as a version of the MacDefender Macintosh antivirus software. Mac users who try to download the popular MacDefender Macintosh antivirus software end up often with the pirate version that brings up a load of viruses with it.

So what exactly do people do wrong to actually become infected? Apparently, Mac users have mostly been targeted by the malware through the course of a search through Google Images. The malware apparently just downloads itself as you browse through images. You also need to be using Safari. As you go about the Internet, minding your own business, the Safari browser suddenly displays a message that your computer has been infected. It offers the rogue MacDefender macintosh antivirus software as the remedy for it. Macintosh users, who aren't really used to the deviousness that malware makers use to get past their defenses (Windows users would never fall for that one), readily believe in what they're being told.

The reason the creators of this virus have chosen to masquerade as the popular Macintosh antivirus software is probably that the Safari browser is by default set to automatically install trusted software. Since MacDefender is a trusted software company, it just gets right past the gate. The good part is, that this virus, clever as it is, isn't really that malicious. It just keeps asking you for payment and for your credit card number. To remove it is pretty simple.

To stop the program from running, you probably want to go to the Activity Monitor and disable everything that's named MacDefender. Search Launch Agents and Launch Daemons for any mention of MacDefender; look at your Library and StartUp items as well. Once you're done, you can then drag the MacDefender program from the Applications folder to the Trash. You can also search for MacDefender with Spotlight and delete everything you find. If you don't have the virus yet, make sure that you make it difficult for the virus to enter your computer in the first place. You need to open Safari, go to Preferences and under the General tab, take the checkmark out of the "Open 'safe' files after downloading." Box.