Christopher Dawson has an excellent article on ZDNet this morning about teaching children by example. He makes a good point about the importance of being active in our children's lives and teaching them how to behave, both online and offline, by example. Yes, that's difficult, but we are talking about parenting. :)

Kids learn from the examples we set

As I've stated before, one purpose of this blog is to review products that may (or may not) be useful tools for parents. The first tool evaluated and reviewed is OpenDNS.

Any discussion concerning the challenges of parenting in the age of the Internet at some point usually involves someone will come out in favor of stronger laws to protect our children. While I can certainly relate to the urge to make things better, I'm also beginning to realize the full complexity of these problems.

I recently completed a very well designed course in web application security put on by the SANS Institute. My job at the University of Northern Iowa involves managing web servers, including online learning systems, general web servers and specialized web based application servers. As you might imagine, security is a large and growing aspect of my job. While the training focused manly on highly technical issues, one concept that came up again and again was that the most vulnerable part of the web is the end user.

The situation I spoke of in my last post, Unwelcome Visitors brings to mind the often uncomfortable topic of online pornography. Since this blog focuses on technical issues that modern families face, it's probably best to get to this sooner than later.

A good friend of mine recently had a situation with her family's home computer that is unfortunately all too common. Her computer was infected with what is known in the computer industry as malware. This is a blanket term used to describe many categories of "bad" software including computer viruses, adware and spyware.