Keep Your Kids Safe on the Internet

Berglund Authority Level 3

by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
Editor, Interface

Johnson, Simon. Keep Your Kids Safe on the Internet.
Emeryville, CA: Osborne, 2004.

The Internet has become a dangerous place in the last two years, as criminals of all descriptions have learned to use it for their own ends. It is an unusual day that opening our e-mail does not reveal multiple appeals for fake medicines, requests from those working some variant on the "Nigerian" e-mail scheme, and a variety of attempts to "phish" financial data. [1] And further, every variety of pornography is endlessly pushed at us.

These problems are serious enough even for consenting adults, but when one realizes that most children now must use the Internet for their school assignments, the number of potential victims seems endless.

There is need then, for at least one good book that helps parents guide their children through the potential dangers of the Internet. There is, however, a type of book that merely makes the problem worse by repeated breathless warnings of terrible dangers, coupled with facile solutions that usually involve buying software off the shelf and in effect preventing the child from accessing potentially dangerous sites. These works, which proliferate constantly [2], are little more than extended advertisements.

Other parents resort to futile attempts to turn back time to a period when there was no Internet and deny children its advantages as well as shielding them from its disadvantages. This, of course, is an impossible task. A teacher of my acquaintance recently received in her office a pair of earnest parents, accompanied by their chagrined high school freshman daughter. The parents gravely informed the teacher that they had decided that their daughter, who had been denied access to the Internet at home, now needed "Internet lessons" so as to be able to use it as effectively as the other students in her classes. As soon as the parents left the room, the student told the teacher not to bother arranging a tutor; she had been using it at friends' houses as long as she could remember.

In search of a useful parental guide, we looked at many works. The one we find most useful, for a certain type of parent at least, is Simon Johnson's Keep Your Kids Safe on the Internet. Johnson comes to the task with strong credentials. He has been working in the Internet industry in Australia, has a great deal of experience in security in particular, and is a parent as well.

The strengths of the book are that the author sees safety for children as a subset of the wider issue of Internet security. By protecting our computers and ourselves we also begin the task of protecting our children. For those of us whose heads have long been abuzz with such terms as "firewall," "filtering," "virus," or "phishing," the work serves as a systematic introduction to computer security. Using it as a guide, one could effectively heighten the security on a home computer system, as well as guide a neophyte user, whether child or adult, through the dangers of the Internet.

The author's overall approach might be summed up in this quotation:

The Internet and the threats that exist on the Internet are only likely to grow. It is your responsibility to educate your children about the dangers of the Internet. Although I have filled a lot of pages with software evaluations, I can't stress enough that education is the key, not computer software and certainly not "banning the Internet" altogether. Internet filters, virus scanners, and firewalls reduce the risk, but they don't eliminate it. There will always be ways around computer software; its not 100 percent foolproof, and you shouldn't rely upon it as a babysitter. (p. 280)

As indicated above, much of this book is composed of very careful software reviews of the leading applications for specific security-related tasks. This approach is a two-edged sword. The reviews are currently very useful ones, but will quickly become dated. (The work appears to have effectively been closed for publication as of June 2004.) This is an extremely crowded and dynamic field. Some of the also-ran producers will be updating their software, new producers entering the field, and others closing down, perhaps because their product was better than their business model.

But the book could, we believe, maintain its utility for two reasons: First, the reviews, no matter how dated they become, themselves lay out the advantages and disadvantages to different approaches to accomplishing security-related goals. We learn about different approaches to filtering, for example, and the trade-offs involved in them. Secondly, the author has created a WWW page where he suggests he will continually update the material. Unfortunately, at present the pages, found at: http://keepyourkidssafe.com/ consist of an extended advertisement for the book, backed by the sorts of terrifying statistics intended to make parents either rush to the bookstore or pull the plug on the Internet.

Given the dynamism of the Internet and the creativity of the market-driven criminals who see it as little more than a gigantic pond of rather stupid fish, it is probable that no book can be useful for longer than a year or so. But until a better book comes along, Simon Johnson's work, Keep Your Kids Safe on the Internet, is the place to begin protecting your children, providing that you are willing to take considerable responsibility for doing so. This will include systematic education of your children, strengthening the defenses of your home system, and becoming a thoughtful consumer.

Footnotes:

[1] We have published on all of these in the pages of Interface. For financial transactions, see Financial Transactions on the Internet, Part II.
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/edit.php
For the Nigerian scam, see the May 2002 edition of Interface, "Globalism, Crime, and the Internet",
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/05/editorial.php.
"Phishing" is the creation of fake web pages, which appear to be those of legitimate companies. This scheme begins by multiple emails spammed to potential victims who are usually warned of some problem at their bank, etc., that require that the victim enter account numbers, passwords, credit card information and other private data into the fake web site.

[2] A Google search on the terms: "Children Internet Danger" produced 48,000+ results. See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Children+Internet+Danger&btnG=Search
accessed November 7, 2004.