It’s Your Home – Keep It Secure

Posted: July 1st, 2009 | Author: Lorraine Craymer | Filed under: Technology | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »
by Lorraine Craymer

Our cities are becoming more frightening and we need to devote more attention to basic security. Common sense protects more than your home and home security is also about keeping people safe. Good home security is about how you think. Do you ever forget to lock up? Do you usually forget to lock the garage? Does your house offer lots of hiding places like shrubs, beside doorways and lower windows? When you’re away, does your house seem deserted? Do trusted family members know where to locate you if necessary? Once you can master these simple basics, you can look at different products.

Home security alarms have been in use for a while and have become more sophisticated in many ways. There are systems with contracted monitoring or systems that will call just you. My favorites have wireless components. They’re easy to move around and they’re also simple to install on your own. The old fashioned rigid one-size fits all systems are gone.

Security lights for you home are invaluable to the homeowner and I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to do without them. What vandal or thief will want to lurk around a brightly lit home? They’re your premier line of defense. And when you’re coming home late at night a good set of motion sensitive lights will reveal threats in darkened corners and prevent you (and your invited guests) from breaking your neck on less sinister threats- like a bicycle lying across the path.

It’s about time to notice that there has been a lot of commitment invested in the development of solar powered home security products. So we can be eco-friendly and reduce our electric bills too. On top of that you’ll find that the wireless solar powered systems are super simple to set up. All the pieces stay in one place -power source, cameras, lights and you don’t need to pay anyone else to hook it all up for you.

The new remote controlled home security cameras take your home to a better place. You’ll be resting happily and safely in the den and casually monitoring cameras located about your property you’ll see it all. Cameras for the nursery with conveniently small monitors and remotely controlled cameras mean you’ll always be in control. A few of the remote controlled cameras and recorders can be watched though the internet. So, worried parents of normal teens can keep an eye on the party.

Do you remember the first nursery monitors? Happily they have improved immensely and they range from audio monitors to surprisingly stealthy hidden cameras that we call Nanny Cams, stashed inside teddy bears.

Hidden cameras have evolved considerably from the original boxy versions that were wildly expensive and took terrible images on top of that. Today’s hidden cameras are small and have lots of different features. You can have hard wired or wireless, colored or black & white and a growing number can even pick out an image in almost total darkness. What you won’t find audio recording- that’s illegal.

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Parental Anxieties Of The Internet

Posted: June 30th, 2009 | Author: Sam Roberts | Filed under: Computer | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »
by Sam Roberts

The parental anxiety of the internet, its vast applications and information, are in equal measures a bane and a boon. From the positive angle and especially in today’s context, parents would want their child to be able to manage a computer. While most children may have no interest in the various computer languages or be overly concerned with the vast applications, they would certainly know how to create their email id and access the internet.

This too is good as it gives the child the power of connectivity and a link that can provide a huge data of information to help them with their assignments. In fact, the internet has ’shrunk’ the world to a level that they can even learn about other countries and cultures seated at their desk, something that the earlier generation used to glean from the National Geographic magazine, not even the television. Unfortunately, this free information and net connectivity is not minus the misuse, which are the main cause of parental anxiety of the internet.

Any parent knows that full access of the internet will open the windows platform, but also opens doors of concern. For instance, the pornographic sites leave a lasting impression on the impressionable minds, and this cannot be erased overnight. The urge then is to know more, and a contrary cycle is set into motion. But for this, it just would not be fair to deprive the child of the internet entirely, and parents would be wiser in trying to counseling rather than in exercising a ban. Tell them about the rules they violate unknowingly, and tell them the truth about why they should avoid.

While we understand that parents would like to protect the purity of thought and the innocence of childhood, this is the best recourse left to the parents to defer their anxiety level. This is necessary too as some unscrupulous sites actually lure children towards porno-sites in the guise of URLs titled with the information that they would normally seek. The larger anxiety of parents is of their children falling pray to cyber stalkers, paedophiles, sex maniacs, who can entice and lure children on chat lines.

For restraining part of the parental anxiety of internet, it is well said that arming the children is equivalent to teaching them. Therefore, instead of relying on a gadget that only blocks certain sites, open their mind with a vast array of your talks, aligning and spelling out all your fears for them. Place it on the children as a ’shared parent child responsibility’ instead of relying on cyber laws that are applicable only after the damage is done.

Parents should understand that even counter-technology is just a tool, and not some magic wand. However, their anxiety today of the internet can be at ease knowing that the tech-savvy children no longer consider it a new world, but just an alternate environment that ties them to the real world. So real in fact, that the parents should also be prepared to accept that their children have already read this article.

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