MySpace and Facebook Child Danger?

I was waiting for something like this to show up, because it confirms my suspicion. As parents, it is important to understand that allowing a child to roam the streets of NYC without an adult opens up dangers to the child’s welfare. The recent eight years there has been a lot of fear tactics placed on parents that the Internet is a threat to children because of the amount of molesters and perverts looking for innocent kids.

Microsoft, ATT, AOL, Turner Broadcasting and others have paid for this study to be performed by a group at Harvard called the Internet Safety Technical Taskforce trying ton confirm these statistics. The results may not be what you think:

A) The Internet is not as dangerous for social interaction as many claim

B) Children should ALWAYS be monitored by parents in some way (see other posts in my blog)

C) Children on children bullying is a far worse problem on social websites like Facebook and MySpace, than sexual predators.

For more facts, please go to the Internet Safety Technical Taskforce at the Berkman Center for Internet Society and the The Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire posted paper on hidden forms of bullying.

Three million hit by Windows Worm

Everyday, viruses and worms are modified and put into the Internet sphere. The purpose of this is to turn your windows machine into a zombie, forcing people around the globe to partake in a ‘global computer grid’ of zombie machines. This grid will be used to spread itself and turn the machines into spam boxes.

According to Microsoft, the worm works by searching for a Windows executable file called “services.exe” and then becomes part of that code.

It then copies itself into the Windows system folder as a random file of a type known as a “dll”. It gives itself a 5-8 character name, such as piftoc.dll, and then modifies the Registry, which lists key Windows settings, to run the infected dll file as a service.

Once the worm is up and running, it creates an HTTP server, resets a machine’s System Restore point (making it far harder to recover the infected system) and then downloads files from the hacker’s web site.

The lesson here is that there is a new kind of worm, that will infiltrate your machine through the Windows operating system. The only way to prevent these infections is to either purchase an Apple machine, install Linux on your existing or future computer, or make certain your current machine has the latest patches and and WORTHY antivirus (read = not free).

IF your computer has been infected with this, then you have to make your mind up as to the amount of time you want to spend on the cleanup. If you have endless amounts of time, then you can try and have people remove the bug, if possible. Otherwise, the best approach is to just backup everything that is important and reinstall Windows.