big brother is watching...

...why not mom and dad?

With porn around every corner, regardless of what you are searching for, the internet continues to turn even the most innocent locations into threatening environments for children. Web 2.0 companies like myspace that can't monitor their own users thoroughly enough due to their exploding growth patterns are becoming breeding grounds for the raunchiest of the raunch. It's commonplace to find nudity and sexual content in user's blogs, comments, galleries and profiles. Yet, a large majority of myspace users are children. How do we keep them safe?

The first step might be to install some sort of parental control software. Unfortunately, few are foolproof and children who are more tech-savvy than their parents can easily find ways to thwart these applications. How about a plan B?

In addition to parental control software, a good computer monitoring program should be a useful tool. Once too expensive and hard to configure for anyone but large corporations wanting to watch their employees, companies like Spectorsoft are now offering monitoring software to everyday people (and parents) like you and me. You may not be able to keep your children from accessing everything that you don't want them to see, but you can at least keep track of what they are doing. I found this company at PayPerPost, but I believe that the corporation that I used to work for was using part of their software suite, as well. They even have a program called e-Blaster that will email you copies of all incoming and outgoing email on their PC.

Many parental access control applications rely on filters to keep children away from certain sites, but no set of filters is all encompassing, so software monitoring software can help you to fill those gaps by identifying which potentially "bad" sites your children were able to access.

Obviously, the other side of this coin is to teach your kids the difference between right and wrong and don't think that hiding everything evil from them will somehow keep them "pure". The best defense is knowledge and talking to your kids should help them to handle uncomfortable acquaintances on the internet safely.