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| Top Stories for Thu, Aug 28, 2008
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You should see what they are doing on your PC while you are away!
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BeAware acts as a surveillance camera, capturing screen shots on your computer automatically. BeAware monitors all computer activity by showing you exactly what appears on the screen as frequently as you set it to do so. Use it to protect your child's saftey, check up on loved ones, see if a spouse is being faithful - the possiblities are endless! click for more...
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| Your Kids Were Online, But Do You Know Where They Went?
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Parent Alert #7:
Your Kids Were Online, But Do You Know Where They Went?
It is all very well for parents to be told that they must supervise their children's activities online, but not so many parents have the time to literally be around when their kids are surfing the web to make sure no inappropriate websites are visited. There are several solutions to this problem. One of the simplest is to sit down on the computer after your child has gone off to do something else, and take a look at a snapshot of where they went. How do you do this? Easy. All you have to do is check 2 folders inside the WINDOWS folder of your computer hard drive (C drive). One folder is called "Temporary Internet Files" and the other is called "History".
Temporary Internet Files
The Temporary Internet Files ("TIF") folder can be found in your C drive inside a folder called WINDOWS. The TIF folder is also known as the "Cache" and it stores records of websites you visit while you visit them. When you connect to a website your computer starts to display the pictures and graphics on that website, but it also downloads a copy of them to the TIF folder, so that if you come back the next day to the same website, the site will load and display much faster, because now instead of your computer having to load the pictures and graphics from the website, it simply displays the copy from its Cache. By looking at the Cache files, or TIFs, you can get a sense of where your child went on the web.
Cookies
The TIF folder also stores another kind of record of a visit to a website. These are called "Cookies". Cookies assist websites in "remembering" information about visitors to make subsequent visits easier. For example when a website remembers your password each time you visit, that is cookie technology. To "set a cookie" the website actually transfers a small piece of data to your computer hard drive. Next time you visit that website the website looks at that cookie on your computer and makes use of the information it placed there before. The place where websites set cookies is the TIF folder. That means by looking at the cookie files in the TIF folder, you can get a clue about where your child has been on the web. Bear in mind that not every website your child visits will set a cookie.
Looking In The Tif
Go to:
C:\WINDOWS\Temporary Internet Files
That means a folder called "Temporary Internet Files" which is inside a folder called WINDOWS which is inside your C Drive. You get to your C drive by clicking on the "My Computer" icon on your windows desktop.
The window that opens has an "Internet Address" column and a "Last Modified" column. These are the only two columns you really need to look at for cookie spotting. You can sort the files in the TIF folder by clicking on the title bar of the "Last Modified" column. This will sort by date.
In the Internet Address column cookies are listed with the word "Cookie:" followed by an email address. BY looking at the email address, especially the bit after the @ symbol, you will see a list of domain names (website names) where your child has been. The part before the @ symbol will be you or your child's Internet username. For example, if for the date I am checking I see the following listing in the Internet Address column:
Cookie: chatcher@yahoo.com
Cookie: chatcher@earthlink.net
Cookie: chatcher@mcafee.com
Cookie: chatcher@safetyed.org
Cookie: chatcher@playboy.com
This tells me 5 websites where I went and which set cookies. If that cookie list was your child's you would probably have some words with them about that last entry.
The rest of the TIF folder will have pictures, files that usually end in .jpg, .jpeg or .gif. These pictures will generally have very boring names (in the "Name" column of this window) like "online.gif", "clip.gif" or "button.jpg". Of course if you see one with a name that sounds like it might be something you want to check into (like "sexy.gif", "susan.jpg", or "death.jpg", you can view these pictures simply by double clicking on them.
Now if you look in the Internet Address column you can see which websites these pictures came from. Sometimes the web address will be obviously a website that you do not want your child visiting. Sometimes you may have to go visit it to see what it is.
The History Folder
Have you ever revisited a website and started typing in the web address (the "Url") only to have your web browser complete the address for you? How did it do that? That's the role of the History Folder. it keeps a record of the web addresses you visit in order to speed up the typing in of the address when you come back. And of course that means that in the history folder you can find a trail of where your child went.
Go to:
C:\WINDOWS\History
That means the History folder inside the WINDOWS folder in your C drive.
Inside the folder you will see little files for different dates. Double click on the one marked "Today" and it will open to show you a list of websites that were visited today. You will see a folder for each website visited. Open the folder and you will see a list of "Internet Addresses". If you select one and right click on it with your mouse and select "Properties", you will see that precise Url for that record and can go check it out if you wish. Sometimes it will be enough just to see the name of the link without having to go to the actual website itself.
So there you are, a simple way to keep an eye on where your kids are going on the web!
Hey, My Tif And My History Folders Are Completely Empty!
Oh dear. It looks like your kid got there before you!
Both TIF folders and History folders can be purged (emptied) by anyone, including your child, if they know where to go to do it. This can be done one entry at a time from the folders themselves, or by going to Start/Settings/Control Panel and then selecting "Internet Options" from the Control Panels folder. Once Internet Options are up you will see under the Tab marked "General" two buttons. One button is called "Delete Files" and is in the section titled "Temporary Internet Files". The other button is called "Clear History" and is in the "History" area of that window. The history and TIF folders can also be selectively edited, so remember, just because you don't find any evidence of strange websites, that doesn't mean nothing is going on. It may just mean you have a smart kid!
[Note. The information above assumes you are using a Windows operating system. Other operating systems require slightly different procedures].
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