You have probably heard all about it in the news and in magazines: Hundreds of crimes are occurring on a daily basis because predators are taking advantage of children using the Internet. Children tend to be easily fooled because they are so trusting, which allows them to become vulnerable to criminals. Here are some basic rules that you and your children should follow as a means of promoting safety when using the Internet. Everyone is capable of falling prey to these crimes, so everyone can take advantage of these rules no matter the age.

1. Communicate:

If anything should ever happen to make your child feel uneasy, he or she should let someone know immediately no matter where they are. This could be a teacher, a principle, a librarian, a guardian or a parent.

2. Have Your Child Ask Permission:

Train your children to ask your permission before disclosing any personal information online. Teach them about how extremely dangerous it is for them to give their personal information out to anyone online without your knowledge and approval. Children should never give their information out without your permission, not to a website, not to an online friend. No matter how innocent it seems, your child should absolutely approach you first.

3. Be Involved:

Children need to understand that they should never accept a meeting with anyone that they met online no matter how innocent it might seem. If you think the situation might be okay, you should definitely talk to the parent of the stranger, and you absolutely MUST accompany your child at the time of the meeting and NEVER leave your child alone. The more involved you are in your child’s activities the safer they will be.

4. Set Ground Rules:

Children should always ask an adult before they do anything that is significant online. For example, before opening an odd e-mail or downloading or installing a piece of software. These things can be dangerous, because there is no telling whether or not they will compromise your child’s personal information without closer inspection. Your children need to learn that they must always ask an adult before they do anything online. If you have to block Internet access when you are not at home in order to enforce this, by all means do so. Teachers should following the same idea at school, making the Internet inaccessible when students should not be using it.

5. Enforce Your Restrictions:

Most importantly, teach your child the importance and seriousness of the restrictions you create. If your child is not taking all of your rules seriously, he or she may already be putting himself or herself in danger. These rules cannot be among the ones that your children decide to ignore, because breaking an Internet safety rule can be dangerous, or even fatal! Reinforcement through repetition of these rules is important so that our children will come to understand them thoroughly. Otherwise, there is no telling what dark things are lurking online just waiting for the right child to come along. You are your child’s best protector, so act responsibly now and do whatever it takes to make sure your child stays safe on the Internet.

Bad guys use sophisticated testing to create malware that can evade even the best security programs.

If you think that the latest security suites afford complete protection against malware attacks, think again. Today’s for-profit malware pushers use dedicated test labs and other increasingly professional techniques to improve their chances of infecting your computer. And the techniques they employ to outpace security software makers appear to be working.

Make no mistake–a good security program can go a long way toward keeping you in control of your system. But PC World’s recent tests of security suites found that new malware easily evaded the applications. In our tests of how well security software blocks unknown malicious programs, the best performer detected only one in four new malware samples. In contrast, February 2007 results from similar heuristics testing showed that the best utilities caught about half of new samples.

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Nobody likes backing up files. Quite frankly, it’s boring, so the job needs to be very simple and require as little effort as possible, for both backing up and restoring the data.

I’ve tried a few online backup solutions. I found most of them were either too confusing to set up, or didn’t give me the options I specifically needed. Of course security is also a major issue. You are backing your files up to a remote server. Who has access to those files?

Enter Mozy. An online backup solution getting quite a bit of attention. In September of 2007, Mozy was acquired for $76 million by EMC Corporation, a public storage company with a $40 billion market cap. It’s safe to say that they’re not going anywhere any time soon.

First thing first; security. Mozy wins major points for wonderful use of encryption; something a lot of other online backup solutions do not offer. When you use the software, your files are encrypted on your computer using 448-bit Blowfish encryption and then transferred to the Mozy servers using 128-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.

They also give you the option of using a random generated encryption key they create or your own private key to encrypt your data. If you use your own private key, you must be very careful about not losing it because if you do, your data is pretty much gone forever. They will not help you decrypt your stuff.

The interface is simplicity itself. You specify which directories/files you want backed up, and Mozy backs that data up securely at regular intervals. To keep network traffic low, it will only back up files that have been changed.

If the worst happens, simply run the program and select the Restore option. Select the files you’d like returned and they will begin downloading back to your system. Alternatively, you can also log on to your Mozy account via their home page and select the files you need to restore there for a “web restore”. If you have a ton of data you need back, they can burn you a disc and FedEx it to you for an extra charge.

Mozy was recently featured in Time Magazine’s best web sites of 2007 list. The service, as well as the software (available for Windows and Mac) will probably come pre-installed on lots of new computers before it’s all said and done.

If you want to test it out, you can sign up for a free account which gives you 2Gb of storage (very generous for a free account). If you need more storage, you can opt to pay according to how much you require. Current price is $4.95 a month for unlimited personal backup.