Making GOOGLE search safe for Kids : Two steps

1.    Invariably in most of the homes barring few...the desktop or the laptop is shared by all...including your enthu and school going kid.Today Google has become part of our lives...be it office or home or school lessons..it is always there.But at times it may become embarrassing when some inappropriate content is shown in presence of your kid while searching for something that your search may not be connected with at all.At these times there are basically two steps to more safe surfing.Google has given this in settings, but by default they are off.Though Google does not promise that after configuring in the way presented below,the content flashed is guaranteed to be safe but yess...it will be much filtered and safer...

First Google search configure :

Goto http://www.google.com/preferences

and check the option to Turn on SafeSearch to filter sexually explicit content from your search results as shown in the screen shot below :

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Second step is to configure your youtube settings.

Goto http://www.youtube.com/

and move to the bottom of the screen and check the option to Turn on safety mode to hide videos that may contain inappropriate content flagged by users and other signals.

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Zoomed portion shown below :

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A video screen cast of both the settings shown below vide youtube :

DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE SAVE OPTION AFTER CHECKING THE OPTION

FACEBOOK : The New Playground @ Dangerous

1.    It does not date back long in the past time corridors when I as a kid used to go to play grounds in the evening to play with my friends...meet them....fight with them...abuse them...get abused and then get back home for studies and prepare for next days school work and the cycle repeated every day...week and months.But what happens today with a typical metro kid....a school child in the bracket age of 10+ goes to Facebook to play with friends...he meets them.....abuses them at times...gets abused on the wall or vide posts.So more or less....things stand at the same place ,only the grounds have changed.First it was the actual play grounds and now it is all getting virtual.....blame it on lack of infrastructure with concrete eating much of space in metro's or lack of parental monitoring owing to their ultra busy lives.....for the new era generation...social networking sites like Facebook is the new PLAYGROUND.....the virtual one for a change!!!!

2.    So the rules remain the same....ie we have our social circle like we used to have in past...we meet vide post and comments...we like each other for something and dislike each other for some thing...here we cannot shake hands and hug each other but yess we can take grudges out of each other via so many means like hacking....cyber bullying...post hatred... cyber stalk...mobbing...sexting,internet trolling etc...the list is actually endless and the related terminology is on a phenomenal increase.So a typical new gen kid for whom Facebook kind social networking sites are the new playground to play....the proneness to the bad elements in the society remains actually higher then in past....for here it is just a matter of few compromised screenshots...hacked passwords and the kid is on way to become a victim...

3.   The recent case of Amanda Todd is indeed beginning of such sad but many in line expected incidents waiting to happen....today we may allow our kids to have a Facebook account or some social networking website account but without effectively monitoring the kid remains as prone as Amanda Todd.For this to happen the parent have to have basic IT IQ quotient to monitor to avoid any such incident.Like past when a child could be left at home assuming safe..it does not remain the same today....he has access to smartphones....he has access to tablets...internet via so many means.Even basic forensic knowledge possessed by the parents is bound to fail if the same is happening in Cloud rather then on the machine at home...

4.   Its time for the parents to equip themselves with the tools and knowledge required to monitor and watch the kids...also realizing that today's kids are more smarter in terms of grabbing the technology then ever....if you have reached reading till here...u must read the complete story here

CLEAR PLAY & DVD PLAYERs : E-CENSOR

1. A new technology that can CENSOR ALL POTENTIALLY UNSAVORY SCENES of a movie, making it watchable with children at home is all set to introduce it self to the parents.It invariably happens across the homes when one family sits down to watch a movie on a DVD thinking there’s nothing up ahead likely to cause embarrassment, only to find the stars undressing and making the set of family watching the movie awkward.

2. ClearPlay (patented) comes to the rescue in all such cases.This is an advanced parental control feature that allows filtering of regular DVD movies. ClearPlay is a technology that allows the users to skip over or mute undesirable content such as profanity, graphic violence, and adult content.

3. A ClearPlay-enabled DVD player is required, along with what are called Filter files. These files, which are created by ClearPlay editors, will know where the possibly unwanted content is located, even to the exact frame. This allows the ClearPlay DVD player to block offensive or undesirable content during playback of the DVD. The choice is also made available to watch the film in its original form, by turning the filtering off.

4. ClearPlay allows users to customize what they want to skip. There are twelve categories of content that can be filtered and with four different levels (none, implied, explicit and graphic).These categories include: Violence, Sex, Nudity and Vulgarity. You will also see a list, before the movie starts, of possibly questionable content that ClearPlay will not remove depending on the movie, scene and/or situation.

5. Thanks http://technochest.com