TopChoiceReviews Blog

One of the newest ways child predators are targeting kids is through online gaming. Online computer gaming is very popular amongst children and teens. Most popular game consoles such as XBOX and Playstation also offer a way to connect to the internet and play various games online with other gamers. Playstation 3 also has integrated text and voice chat as well as the ability to download photos. Child predators are now taking advantage of the online gaming community by posing as a child in an online chat room where children look for gaming teammates. Once they gain trust of the child, they will typically attempt to communicate with them through another method such as email or though instant messaging programs such as MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger and try take the relationship further. There have already been several investigations with online gaming predators.

If your child participates in online gaming, the best thing you as a parent can do  is to educate your children to watch out for strangers online asking them about things other than gaming, especially personal things such as where they live, etc… to tell them to go away and stop communicating with them. We also recommend that you take a proactive approach and consider installing parental control or parental monitoring software which will allow you to monitor and control your child’s email activity, chat activity, websites visited, etc…

If you would like more information about parental control and parental monitoring software, see our parental control software review site where we gather, compare, and review the most popular parental control and parental monitoring software available.

Bitdefender has recently released the latest version of it’s antivirus software - BitDefender Antivirus 2009. The following are some improvements / additions they have made:

1. They have improved upon their real time web, email, and IM traffic scanning.

2. They have improved their anti-phishing protection and it will now help to prevent personal information from leaving your computer through email, IM, and web.

3. They have added instant messaging encryption.

4. They have reduced system load and avoids user interaction during games.

5. They have created a ‘laptop mode’ which helps prolong battery life.

6. They have added a family network system which allows you to manage and configure Bitdefender on all computers on your network from a single computer.

7. The user interface has been updated to a cleaner more modern feel. See below:

Standard view:

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Advanced view:

They have also added a ‘vulnerability’ module, which monitors for various Windows and browser updates. As with the other modules, you can control whether or not to enable it.

The update engine still receives virus definitions every hour and real-time scanning is still as unintrusive as the previous version. BitDefender remains our top choice in the antivirus category. If you want more information, check out our full review of BitDefender Antivirus 2009. To see BitDefender Antivirus 2009 compared with other antivirus software, check out our antivirus software comparison chart.

Roughly 75% of teens who regularly use the internet use instant messaging programs whereas, in comparison, roughly 45% of adults who regularly use the internet have used these programs. Clearly, instant messaging and chat programs are amongst the most popular communication tools available. You probably already know this. What you may not know, is that it is entirely possible to monitor the communications within instant messaging programs. Whether it’s seeing who who your children are chatting with and chatting about, whether it’s protecting your children from online predators, whether it’s keeping an eye on the online conversations of your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, roomate, employees, or students, all of this information can be monitored, recorded, and saved.

If you want to monitor instant messaging programs on a computer, what you’ll have to do is install software that has this capability. When searching for this software, keep in mind that there are several different instant messaging programs such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MySpace IM, AOL Instant Messenger, etc… So make sure it can monitor the chat programs used on the computer that you will be monitoring.

Most software that handles chat monitoring will also have the ability to monitor other things such as email, web sites, keystrokes, screen shots, etc…

If you want more information about chat monitoring and computer monitoring software, check out our computer monitoring software review site where we compare and review of popular computer monitoring software.

Many computer users are wondering if Evidence Eliminator will work on Vista. The answer - as long as you are using version 6 or higher, Vista is supported. Ok, so it’s supported, but how well does it work? Evidence Eliminator is not only the most feature packed privacy and Windows cleaning software available, but It’s file erasing capabilities are unmatched. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how Windows deletes files, I’ll briefly explain.

When you ‘delete’ a file, it isn’t really deleted. Windows simply ‘moves’ it, or rather moves the file system pointer of the file to the Recycling Bin. When you take it a step further and empty the Recycling Bin, the file still physically exists on the hard drive, but the operating system now allocates this area of the hard drive as available to be written to. Unless the precise sectors from which the file exists is overwritten, the file can easily be recovered by using standard file recovery software.

When you delete a file using Evidence Eliminator, not only are the underlying sectors are re-written, but you also have the option of specifying the level of file destruction such as overwrite repetitions and write modes. The file cleaning and deletion processes exceed US Government Military standards. Evidence Eliminator is also the only privacy software which claims to remove magnetic remenance by under writing directory structures to make data undetectable by electron microscopes.

Of course, there are also many other useful cleaning and maintenance features within Evidence Eliminator all of which are supported on Windows Vista.

If you want more information about Evidence Eliminator, check out our complete review of Evidence Eliminator.  If you would like to see it compared with other privacy software, check out our privacy software comparisons.

Myspace recently announced that they will now allow parents to submit their child’s email address so when they attempt to create an account using the email address, it will prevent them from creating the account. I really don’t understand the logic behind this. A new email can be created in less than 5 minutes and most teenagers are aware of this. It’s great that they are trying to do something, but I don’t see it being very effective. Any thoughts…?

Phishing sites/scams are designed to trick you into thinking you are at a legitimate website hoping that you will enter your login information, credit card information, or other personal information. It’s difficult to detect these scams because they usually do a great job at impersonations. These phishing scams usually come in the form of an email. The email will look like it is from a legitimate source and saying something like the following:

[Subject: Paypal security department]

“Dear paypal user:

We have recently detected several attempts to log into your account from an unknown source. Please login to your Paypal account and confirm your security information.”

The email will also include a company logo, as well as several other elements that a real Paypal email would look like.

The link that you think is supposed to log you into your account actually grabs your login information and stores it for the scammer to do whatever they want with.

How to determine if it’s a scam / fake email:

Find the link they are trying to get you to click, without clicking on the link highlight over it, and look in the lower left hand corner of the email window. It should show a URL. If the URL does not begin with:

http://www.[domain].com

…where [domain] is the domain of company in which the email is about. So in this example, paypal is the domain - so the URL must begin with http://www.paypal.com. If it has anything else after the http://. IT IS A SCAM! Do not even click it.

Some email programs will not show the URL in the lower left of the window, so you can either take a chance and click the link, hoping that it’s not linking to a virus script or play it safe and install antivirus software. Most popular antivirus programs have anti-phishing capabilities built in to detect these sites for you and warn you in advance. If you want to see who we recommend for antivirus software, check out our antivirus software review site.

Be careful when you receive any email that talks about your account or recent security issues. Also, these scams usually imitate large, popular sites such as Paypal, Ebay, some large banks, etc… If you ever fall for one of these scams, and someone gets ahold of your account information, you could have some major headaches down the road.