A great mix of stories in this week’s segment including a Washing machine in a bag for Travellers, Windows 8.1 and old technology sucking up workers’ time at the office..

Listen below

Teching back the Night May 15 2013

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This week – Safety on YouTube for Kids, Backing up to ‘The Cloud’ and Facebook offers that are too good to be true = scams.

Kids a few clicks away from inappropriate content on YouTube

Here’s some good info for any parents who think it’s OK to let their kids randomly click through YouTube videos.

Some new research from Internet Security Company Kaspersky has revealed that at any time kids can be just a few clicks away from viewing content that’s offensive, violent, sexual or just plain inappropriate for their age.  They’ve done this by examining the ‘suggested’ videos that sit along side any video you might be viewing at the time.  Here’s some examples.

• A search for “Sesame Street” is just 2 clicks away from watching a car accident video and footage fo a woman giving birth.
• A search for “The wiggles” will bring you within 3 clicks of a mash up of racist and homophobic quotes from the movie ‘Mean Girls’.
• Searching ‘Peppa pig’ will bring you just 4 clicks away from car crash compilation and ‘Dora the Explorer’ is just 4 clicks away from a music video featuring swearing and nudity.

The lesson here is not to simply let your younger kids have free access to YouTube ..and consider putting into place parental controls on computers to block or restrict access where appropriate.  Of course there’s also room there to have a conversation with your kids about what is and isn’t appropriate viewing.

Backing up to ‘the cloud’ is affordable

Backing up your important files with a ‘cloud’ service is a great idea, but where do you start?

All the basic free services like Google Drive and Windows Skydrive might be good to store some of your files, but what about the entire contents of your computer, which could be terabytes of data?  Well you will need to spend some money, but it’s surprisingly affordable.  Services like Carbonite and Acronis True Image lite offer much large, automatic backups of your files for as little as 5 dollars a month.

 

Facebook Scams to watch out for

One of the great things about social networks such as Facebook is the ability to share something that’s really great with everyone you know…but sometimes that ‘great’ something isn’t really what it seems.

For example there’s a fake Playstation 4 profile account on Facebook which reports that Sony is looking for Australian’s to test out the upcoming PlayStation 4 games console…with testers getting to keep the new hardware when the job is done, and all you have to do is click ‘like’ to take part.

The bad news is that this is simply a scam…a very popular one that can been done many times over, reminiscent of the email doing the rounds in the late 90’s that promised hundreds of dollars from Bill Gates just for forwarding on a ‘test email’.

Sorry…anything that looks too good to be true, usually is.