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Internet Content Filtering
9 years
Despite best intentions, good education and in-person monitoring, sometimes the internet can be a dangerous place full of things we’d rather not have our children accidentally exposed to. There is a category of software and other solutions for filtering these things out before you see them called Content Filtering. This post is designed to give an overview of the major content filtering software packages available. It isn’t a be-all and end-all and doesn’t go in-depth into each package but gives you an overview of the key points of difference and costs so you can find one and it out to see which one meets your needs. Where possible, prices are in NZ dollars and correct at time of publishing by may change over time – look up the website concerned for accurate pricing at the time of your purchase.
Software:
Net Nanny is the grand-daddy of internet filtering software and has been around and evolved over time almost since there was an internet to filter. It has solid filtering, a good feature set and time controls for limiting internet use (although this is apparently not customisable for specific applications).
Cost: 1 devices $39.99/year, 5 devices: $59.95/year, 10 devices $89.99
This is software from a Christian organisations, based around the scripture Job 31:1 “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman.” The key point of difference of Covenant Eyes is that it includes accountability as well as internet filtering.
Cost: $10.99/month for individuals or couples without kids. $14.99/month for families with kids.
Norton Family and Norton Family Premier.
Norton Family is a free online tool for monitoring and filtering internet usage. You can sign up for a free account and download the client on different pcs.
Norton has a great history of solid antivirus products but on some systems has also had a history of being a bit resource intensive and may slow your computer down at times.
The Premier version adds mobile app supervision, location supervision, video supervision and weekly/monthly reports and costs $49.99 per year. For a full breakdown comparison see this chart.
Premier is also included in their full Norton Internet Security Suite if you buy the 3 devices option – This is good if you also want to combine internet filtering with antivirus, identity protection and backup.
Cost: Free for Norton Family, $49.95/year for Norton Family Premium. $79.99/year for Norton Internet Security for 3 devices (includes Family Premier).
Open DNS is a little trickier to understand but is a good solution for internet filtering. It uses the DNS (Domain Name Service) that the internet uses to convert domain names that you understand (like www.google.com) to IP addresses that computers understand (like 192.224.142.40). You tell your computer or router to use the Open DNS servers for DNS lookups and then set up you filter preferences with Open DNS to tell them what to block. They have guides on their website for setting up your computer or router.
While this option can be more technical to set up, the advantages are that it’s free and hard to bypass.
Cost: Free
K9 Protection is a free service that is focused around protecting children. It is small and has a web-based interface for configuration and can be difficult to bypass. The biggest limitation with this software is that it doesn’t appear to support multiple user accounts so you can’t set one rule for the children and one rule for adults for example. But if you can live with this, it’s worth a loo.
Cost: Free
Router Level Filtering:
A router is the device you most likely use to connect to the internet. Depending on the manufacturer, this device may have filtering built-in. Refer to the documentation that would have come with your router on how to access its configuration. Look in the setup or configuration page of your router and look for pages on Content Filtering or Parental Controls. Routers control the flow of your internet so it’s a logical place to set up content filtering and the configuration of these devices is not often changed so it’s difficult to bypass if the configuration is protected by a strong password.
ISP Level Filtering:
Some internet service providers will offer a service where they will do the filtering for you. The main advantage of this is that it is very difficult to bypass as all of your internet will go through their equipment and it’s not dependent on any hardware or software at your home. So if you buy a new computer for example, you don’t need to re-install the filtering software on the computer as the ISP will do the filtering for you.
2 ISPs I found will do this in New Zealand as an advertised service – Watchdog Internet (DSL Broadband Service with 40GB per month of data from $85.45 per month including GST) and Maxnet ($5 or $10 add-on to your internet plan depending on the level of customisation you want on the filtering). Other internet providers will usually have some form of add-on service or protection they recommend – give them a call and ask them what is available.
There’s more to security than just filtering:
There is much more to overall security than just filtering. You should consider strong passwords, the physical access to your devices and network, backups, anti-virus, malware scans and firewalls etc. I’m hoping to cover off some of these topics in an upcoming blog post – stay tuned.
Get Help:
If you want any assistance setting up the appropriate protections for you and your family or more advice on what the best options are for your situation, get in touch!
Backup
9 years
A lot of people around me have been talking about backups, asking about backups and loosing data because they didn’t have sufficient backups. For example, I know a with a guy who is a sale rep. He’s a great guy but took up a role in sales after his freelance graphics design career was cut short because his computer including his entire portfolio of work was stolen.
Another friend of mine is an amateur photographer. She backed up all her photos to an external hard drive. Her laptop was stolen and the thief simply stole the removable hard drive right along with it. Along with a huge chunk of her portfolio she also lost several years worth of family photos.
I recently rebuilt a laptop for a client with a failing hard drive. While I managed to recover some data off the drive before it died completely, there was some data lost.
In all of these cases data was lost due to not having sufficient backups and not understanding good backup processes.
“What do a computer hard disk and a gerbil have in common? Their average lifespan is about 3-5 years.”
T.E. Ronneberg
In other words – stuff on hard drives seems permanent but this is a mistake. Drives are physical devices and all hard drives – even SSDs deteriorate with age. Some will last much longer than others but it is never safe to have only one copy important data in a single location – be that hard drive or otherwise.
Backup Principles:
Back up everything:
Often that sort of information on your computer or electronic device is more valuable to you than the device itself. The amount of information that goes through our computers these days increasing and so is the importance of not loosing that information.
What should I back up? If possible, back up everything. You never know precisely what you will lose, how you will lose it or the impact it might have on your life if you lose it.
Sometimes the amount of data involved makes this difficult. Depending on your level of IT skill, you can sometimes get away with not backing up your operating system files and program files if you don’t mind re installing these and you keep the licences and keys and installations safe and handy. But you need to consider the downtime involved in needing to re-install this software and configure it.
Automate the process:
People are generally not good at repeated mundane tasks. You will forget, life will get in the way and it will become less and less important to you over time unless you automate the process.
Software is great for this purpose. A package that I recommend constantly is Crashplan – www.crashplan.com The basic software is free and allows you to back up to external hard drives and a friend’s computer. Most importantly it automates the process so once you have this set up, you can forget about it.
The 3 2 1 Rule. 3 copies, 2 locations, for every 1 bit of data.
A good rule of thumb for good backups is to have 3 copies of the data in at least 2 locations. This covers for the majority of scenarios.
Why do I need 3 copies in 2 locations? Say you are working on some photos on your computer and as a backup, you copy those to an external hard drive. Great. If anything fails on your computer, you have a backup. But what if the building with the hard drive and the computer burns down or both pieces of equipment get stolen simultaneously? Where is you backup now. This is why you need 3 copies in 2 locations. If you had an additional backup at a friend or family member’s residence or the files backed up to the cloud, then you have resiliency even if your first 2 copies and 1 location are lost.
Confirm the backups work.
Backups are useless unless you can recover information from them when you need it. Test your backups to make sure you can access them and copy files off your backup. Remember that you may not have access to your current computer or if you do, it may not have any of its current information on it. You need to confirm that the backups will do what you are hoping that they will do.
And test them regularly. Backup media can deteriorate over time just like the hard drives you are backing up.
Protect your backups
You need to keep your backups at least as secure as you do the main data – if not more so. If you are backing up to an external hard drive, and not encrypting or pro.
If you need help or advise with your backups – Get in touch!
Clearing out space on your email
9 years
Here are a few tips if you find yourself running up against the mailbox limit on your email. The actual process for clearing out space will be dependent on the application you use for checking your email (e.g. Outlook, Microsoft Live Mail, web browser) and the email provider.
1/ Clear out sent items, deleted items and junk folders. Some email providers count the emails in ‘Sent Items’ and deleted or trash items as used space. You can usually save a lot by purging these items permanently. If you rely on these for reference of some sort, consider permanently deleting anything that is more than 3 months old or 6 months old (when was the last time you actually needed an email more than 6 months old?).
2/ Look for emails with attachments, save the attachments locally to your computer and then delete the email. A single very large attachment can take up the same space as potentially hundreds of emails. Get the files out of email storage so they are not counting against your mailbox allocation.
3/ Find out exactly how big your mailbox is and which folders are the biggest culprits. Most email programs will have tools for letting you know the sizes of individual folders – use this to find the worst offenders and treat accordingly.
4/ Check options in your email program for archiving and deleting space on server. Some email programs are set to keep a copy of the email on the server even if you delete it locally in your email program – this means files on the server might still be taking up space. You may also have some options for archiving older emails which means you can still search for them but they don’t show in your mailbox or take up space against your allocation.
5/ Use an alternative service like Gmail or Outlook.com – these products give you free email accounts with lots of space and show you a few ads in return. It can be a hassle initially to have to change your email address and let everyone know the new address but going forward you gain the freedom to change ISP without changing your email and they usually offer a lot features and more space than on your local ISP.
6/ Pay for more storage – if none of the above options work or appeal, your provider will have options for paying for more space – ask them about options and find one that fits best for your needs.
Here are some more specific tips as and guides if you are using
Outlook – http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/cleanmailbox.htm
or Gmail – http://www.howtogeek.com/112734/how-to-free-up-space-in-gmail-5-ways-to-reclaim-space/
If you’d like us to help you with clearing out space on your email or discussing options and processes to migrate to a web-based solution, get in touch.
Basic File Maintenance
11 years
Over time, as you install more and more programs on your computer and collect more and more data, it can have an affect on your computer’s performance. In extreme cases this can cause your computer to freeze or stop booting. Having a lot of applications running at startup or running all the time puts demands on your computers limited resources.
But there are some simple steps you can do to regain some control. Its like servicing your car regularly to keep it running in tip top shape, there are things you can do to service your computer and keep it running well.
Delete Temporary Files
Nearly every application on your computer stores temporary files. The biggest culprits are usually web browsers. Web browsers store files locally on your computer (called caching) to speed up the response time if you go to the same site again and it hasn’t changed since you last went there. For example, if you go load a website, there is a good chance that it will take a while to load but your computer will save a copy of the images etc to your local computer. This means if you go back to that site or reload the page again, it should be faster but all those little cached files are taking up space on your hard drive.
Windows has built in tools for deleting temporary files:
For Windows 7:
Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup. If several drives are available, you might be prompted to specify which drive you want to clean.
For Windows Vista:
Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup.
For Windows XP:
Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup. If several drives are available, you might be prompted to specify which drive you want to clean.
Call in the experts:
There is an application that I use a lot called CCleaner (http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER) – this application can clean out all the files that Windows built in tools can but has extra templates for other programs you may have installed, and has other tools for helping you clean up space.
Do it regularly:
We recommend you clean out temporary files on a regular basis. Every week to 2 weeks is usually a good schedule without going too overboard.
Be aware of what you’re deleting:
Sometimes, these applications will remove cookies, form data and other useful temporary files from the internet. This usually isn’t a major issue but you may find yourself logging into facebook again after you had previously saved your login details or setting up a website with your favourite settings again.
Defrag
When files are deleted they leave a gap on your hard drive. This gap is then filled by files that are saved later but they do not always fit exactly in the gap. So over time you may end up with some large files that are spread across various parts of a hard drive (become fragmented). This means the computer has to work harder to find and read all the parts of the file and this slows performance.
Note: This is not necessary (in fact it may be harmful) if you have a solid state drive and Windows 7. Windows 7 is optimised for use on a SSD and defragging them can reduce their lifespan unnecessarily reading and writing to the drive).
Clean up start-up programs and services
Windows comes with a built in utility called msconfig that can help you to configure what items occur during startup.
Common culprits are Microsoft Office, PDF viewers and old programs that you don’t use any more.
You can see the list by:
Windows XP: Go to Start -> Run and typing ‘msconfig’ and press ‘OK’.
Windows 7: Click on the start menu and in the search box type ‘msconfig’ and press ‘Enter’
Note: You can also bring up the ‘run’ dialog using the “Windows + R” hotkey.
Uninstall unused programs
Old programs that you don’t use any more are simply taking up space that can be used for other things. Sometimes they may even cause issues with installing new programs.
Remove them by going to
Windows XP: Start -> Control Pannel -> Add Remove Programs and Features
Windows 7: Start -> Control Panel -> Programs -> Uninstall a program.
Go through this list and remove any programs that you don’t recognise or that you no longer use.
Find the space hogs:
There are some great programs such as WinDirStat (Windows directory statistics) https://windirstat.info/ and TreeSize – https://www.jam-software.de/customers/downloadTrial.php which can scan your hard drive and show you the large files and folders that are taking up space on your computer.
A lot of time I’ll find large files that are better moved to a backup or archive hard drive or just not needed any more and can be deleted. It’s important to make sure you understand what you are deleting though as sometimes important system files (like the swap file, the Winsxs folder and hibernation files) can get quite large but are still required by Windows to operate correctly.
Re-install Windows
Drastic measures time! When the computer gets really bogged down and especially if you are having serious issues with Windows, it may be worth while investigating if it is worth re-installing windows. Unless you’ve done this before and know what is involved, I would recommend getting a computer technician to advise you if this is necessary and whether or not it will help. At the very least BACK UP YOUR FILES before you do anything else.
I like to rebuild my Windows installations about once every 1-2 years even if nothing is wrong just to refresh the system and clear out all the crud and accumulated settings/drivers/temporary files and miscellaneous files that can accumulate in Windows over larger periods of time. I’ve found Windows 7 to be more stable and less likely to a need a re-install than previous versions of Windows but others experience has differed.
Upgraded Routers
11 years
by Gregory McKinnell
in Information
A friend of mine sent me an ad that he had seen for upgrading your home or small business router. The company was selling routers for around $150-$200 with promises of increasing internet speeds for your connection, increased wireless connection range, less crashes, less disconnects and software upgrades improving hardware. My friend wanted to know if this is just marketing hyperbole to get people to buy routers or is there some truth to it?
My response: A little bit of both. It is marketing to get people to buy more routers. But there is some truth to it.
Here’s the overview:
The standard router you get from your Internet Service Provider (often for free) will do the job for most people. You can connect as many devices as you like and they all will be able to connect to the internet. No bells or whistles, just connect to the internet. In theory, you’d be limited to about 256 devices (you run out of IP addresses and a basic router wouldn’t do vlans) but the network would start to slow down too much if you got more than about 12 simultaneous users on a regular router. Having said that I’ve had 2 of these standard routers fail on me in my time so they don’t last forever and are not as stable/reliable as they could be.
There is a higher class of consumer router. They will do everything the standard routers will do but add a lot more features. For example:
- Quality of Service or QOS. Deciding which type of internet traffic gets priority. So you can prioritise say gaming traffic over video traffic. Or video streams over torrents.
- Better Security Firewalls and rules to say what gets in and what gets out. Want to Block outlook from sending emails or block some websites?
- Better logging and alerts – e.g. Send me an email when I get to 75% of my data usage.
- VPN connections to connect to your home network from other places
However:
Some of the stuff like Dual Band 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz leaning in the direction of marketing fluff unless you specifically have some devices that only connect on those frequency ranges or you live in really packed wifi area like an apartment complex.
Cars are a pretty good analogy. A standard Toyota Corolla, for example, will get 4 people from A to B in a reasonable time. A BMW 5 series will still get 4 people from A to B but they have better controlled air conditioning, lighting and comfortable seats. They can watch a dvd on the way and let the car park itself when they arrive. They both do the same job and the first will be fine for most people but the later is worth it for anyone who wants to spend the money for those features.
Of course like the routers, these cars usually come with some options that are superfluous as well.
Conclusion:
If you want better control over your network and don’t mind spending a little bit of time to set up a router, then the upgrade is probably worth it. If you want 4 devices connected to the internet and don’t really care about things like security or traffic shaping, then stick with your standard router.
Extra for Experts:
If you’re a little more technically minded, the firmware (software) on some routers can also be upgraded with 3rd party software such as DD-WRT or Tomato Firmware. These in turn add extra features to routers beyond that which manufacturers generally include in their firmware.
Quick Tip: 2 separate windows for Excel Spreadsheets
11 years
You can open 2 separate windows with a separate Excel spreadsheet in each. This is not the default behavior of Excel and it tries to keep all your spreadsheets within one Excel window although you can swap to see which spreadsheet is on top.
The trick is that you have to open 2 instances of Excel. Here’s how:
1. Open your first Excel spreadsheet.
2. (This is the trick) Open another copy of Excel from the Start Menu shortcut or right-click on the icon in the task-bar and choose ‘Microsoft Excel 2010’ or 2013 etc depending on the version you have. Do not go file -> Open from this window or double click to open the second file you want – this will just open that document within the same first excel window.
3. Drag this window to the second screen or correct position.
4. Open the second workbook you need by going to File -> Open on the second Excel Window.
This is really handy if you have multiple monitors and need to compare 2 spreadsheets or copy and paste information from one to the other.