Michael Whalen's Page

New Hampshire State Representatives have sponsored a bill to update and improve the state's anti-bullying laws. According to the Portsmouth Herald’s January article this bill could make a stronger more up-to-date law that takes cyber-bullying into account.… Continue

Apple’s iPod Touch version 3.1 update adds a feature that parents have been clamoring for--content filtering. It is now possible to filter content based on a predetermined setting. Prior releases allowed disabling applications such as YouTube or Safari and the icons would disappear from the screen. This release has a more refined approach to parental controls. It is now possible to filter based on the rating of the content. For example, movies can be… Continue

Well publicized stories of cyber-bullying, stalking, or other types of dangerous social networking related incidents contribute to present day parental angst. As if it weren’t hard enough to keep them safe social sites, like Facebook, provide access to kids and their public information 7x24. It is unfortunate that software companies seem to be in perpetual catch-up mode but, progress has been made with regard to social networking… Continue

The new report for the detection of malicious code by anti-virus software products has been posted by AV-Comparatives.

AV Comparatives is an authority on computer anti-virus vendor comparisons.

The following vendors have been tested, compared, and rated in this edition;

avas!, AVG, AVIRA, BitDefender, eScan, ESET, F-Secure, G Data,

Kaspersky, Kingsoft, McAfee, Microsoft OneCare, Norman, Sophos,

Symantec, and Trustport.



This report can be found… Continue

Stories abound of pictures being ‘borrowed’ from online family albums or Facebook for various fraudulent purposes. There was the Massachussetts mother who found their child’s photo on a Craig’s list adoption scam and numerous cases of… Continue