Ask Marian

I'm not surprised. Today, Federal Judge George Wu tentatively rejected the federal conviction of Lori Drew in the her infamous cyber bullying case. It's not surprising since the case hinged on a strange interpretation of the laws about terms of use policies for MySpace. Since the malicious messages were sent from a fake account, the creation of the fake account become the issue to be decided in the case. It is so normal for online users to simply click "Yes" or "Accept" and ignore, misread, or misunderstand those complex, legal documents called "User Agreements" or "Terms of Use Policies". There doesn't usually seem to be a penalty in doing so. To now claim that this behavior is actual evidence of hacking is a specious argument to most casual observers. Rather, it was a convenient prosecutor's effort to find a way to get justice for the Meier family for the tragic loss of their beloved Megan. Read more...

Piano-playing kittens. Laughing babies. Music and dance videos. A rap song about the Large Hadron Collider. Instructions on how to fold a shirt, braid bread or put on makeup. It's incredible what you can find and enjoy online at YouTube.com. No wonder YouTube is the third most visited website, just after Google and Yahoo. Unlike many websites where people come, read an article for 2 minutes and move on, visitors to YouTube stay for an average of 22 minutes apiece. The audience for the site tends to skew younger and with higher education than the average web user. From our own OnlineFamily.Norton data, we can review what our kids are actively searching for on sites like Yahoo, Google, Craigslist, EBay and so on. YouTube is the top search entry and includes variants like " youtube"; "you tube"; "youtube.com" and even "utube". Anecdotally, when I visit elementary schools and interview the children, YouTube is often the first site mentioned among favorite sites for all ages, even as young as kindergartners. So you should know what our children are looking for on YouTube and what dangers might exist there for the unwitting visitor. Read more...

If our American founding fathers like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin could be here today, wouldn't they marvel at innovations like the Internet? Could they recognize our world of instant access to real-time news sources from throughout our world? After my week in the UK for a Family Online Safety Institute conference on mobile computing, I'm struck by the convergence of factors giving us unprecedented and overwhelming information about government, our citizenry, elections overseas and the proverbial "man on the street." Read more...

The recent tragic events at the U.S. Holocaust Museum were horrific. I send my heartfelt condolences to the family of slain security guard Stephen Johns and to his extended family of the entire staff of the Museum (a national treasure). I have had the privilege and thought-provoking experience of chaperoning my daughter's class through the museum on a field trip to Washington D.C. and the message one takes away is that hatred and racism are a social cancer we all need to fight together. No one group can defend against it and hope to succeed. As we gathered around our evening news and online reports to understand the story, many reporters and news sites provided quotes and links from the shooter's racist and hateful thoughts and writings. I choose not to mention him or provide his ideas with any additional coverage but the availability of hate speech on the internet is one that should be of concern to all parents and teachers. Stories like this one may cause an otherwise open minded child to click over to a hate site or be exposed to the angry rants of delusional people. You might not even be aware of those online visits unless your child comes to you to ask about what they've seen. And if the child continues to explore these abhorrent ideas, they may even begin to think what they see on the Internet is truth, because there are never any representations of balanced or opposing viewpoints. Read more...

According to Nielsen ratings, the number of minutes we're spending on social networking site, Facebook, soared by 699% in the month of April, compared to the previous year. MySpace saw time spent on their site fall by 31% in the same time period. Still, social networks continue to draw us all in, with total time spent on social networks up 81%. Newcomer Twitter showed rocketing traffic, up 3,712 percent with a total time spent of nearly 5 million hours in the last year. All of this activity on Twitter, Twitter-related services, Facebook and MySpace hasn't escaped the notice of your boss either. Increasingly, economy-constrained firms are paying more attention to productivity of their employees and deciding they need to block the use of these sites and services. You'll want to save your Tweeting for the off work hours now. I won't be surprised if people pretend to take cigarette breaks in order to get their Facebook status updates in during the work day! Read more...

Symantec is a proud contributor to the Anti-Defamation League's effort to provide programming and materials to educate school administrators and classroom teachers about cyberbullying and cybersafety. As part of the material package they've developed for educators who attend their one day workshop, they've created a marvelous cyberbullying quiz. Do you think you know all there is to know about cyberbullying? Take the quiz yourself and see if you are a cybermaven! (Answer key provided after the quiz.) Read more...

Right up front, I need to tell you I don't like spying on my kids. It takes too much effort, my knees don't hold up well to crouching outside keyholes, and my kids are wise to me anyway. It's easier for everyone and so much healthier for us to discuss online safety and our family rules up front. According to the latest Norton Online Living Report, 1 in 5 kids globally is breaking family rules. I suppose the hidden good news message is that families are trying to set some rules. But what's ok in my house and ok in yours can be pretty different. I get emails everyday from parents trying to deal with their rule-breaking kids in some creative ways. Read more...

A few days ago I had a painful conversation with a friend. He'd been laid off from his job after nearly ten years and in the process lost access to his contact lists, his passwords for all his online activities and his personal music and photos. We all know intellectually that it's wrong and maybe even stupid to store anything personal on a work computer but in practice, we all slip up. I know I'm guilty of this: my work computer is a reflection of my 12 years at Symantec. It's a veritable Cairo Geniza ( or storage room) of presentations, strategy documents, even videos from business trips around the world. Read more...

Last week the Federal Trade Commission filed complaints against three companies associated with scam calls that have been tormenting consumers in the US of late. I've received these cell phone and landline calls, claiming our auto warranty is expiring. Why is the message always the same, that it's the second call? I suppose to create a sense of urgency. It's easy for us to resist these hyped calls since none of our family cars are new, one is over 40 years old and the calls to our teen's cell phone are clearly scams since she doesn't even drive. But many consumers have fallen for these tricks and paid out huge sums to the crooks behind these calls. It's a relief to know that the government is getting after these people! Read more...

A new wave of phishing attacks on Facebook users is underway. You'll remember the story from several months back of someone whose login credentials were stolen and then the crook used that Facebook access to swindle the victim's friends out of thousands of dollars. The current effort resembles that one, in that a compromised account sends a malicious link to friends. The friends click on the link and are taken to a site that looks just like a Facebook login page. Providing the criminals with their login and password can sometimes injure the victim beyond the damage to their social network. Read more...

Our big annual "what are those kids doing online?" study, or as most people know it, the Norton Online Living Report came out a few months ago. When the data for the United Kingdom was released, Symantec also provided some helpful hints from renowned etiquette mavens, Debrett's. The advice holds up beautifully for online families worldwide so I'd like to share it with you. Read more...

Most of us use Craigslist to offload used cars or find other household goods in the neighborhood. But for a growing number of people, the service is also used as a seedy online bar area where strangers hook up for casual sex and secure the services of prostitutes. You can claim all you want that this is legal expression of our freedom of speech but for a concerned parent, learning that a virtual want ads section includes such adult material has been disappointing. It's not like your child would have found sexual content and photos of half naked women in the ol' Yellow Pages (although there have long been ads for "massage parlors".) Read more...

If you own one of the Norton products that includes a 3 user license and you purchased via a download, you may be stuck trying to figure out how to add the product to another computer. It's certainly the number one question I get at my Marian@norton.com email address. I'm happy to tell you there is an easy way to do this, even if you don't consider yourself to be tech savvy. Read more...

Nothing freaks a parent out like the topic of sex and their kids. We don't want to teach you about it, we don't want you to know about it, we don't want to admit we ever did anything and we certainly don't want you anywhere near the topic either! You hear me? (Why am I yelling? Weird.) I took my teen daughter to see the Zach Efron film, "17 Again" this weekend and complained to her that I felt it portrayed teens as being single-mindedly focused on sex, with no other interests. My daughter thought that was a fairly accurate portrayal! Oh dear. Read more...

For every social ill, we have a related effort from cybercriminals to steal our money or infect our computers. Stay vigilant and add keeping your online security efforts up, in addition to washing your hands and carrying around hand sanitizer to prevent the actual flu virus from infecting you. Read more...

ABC-TV's Good Morning America show came to my home to interview me about the new, free family safety service called OnlineFamily.Norton. Let me tell you a little about what goes into making this popular news program come to life. It's not quite like learning how sausage is made but it gave me such appreciation for how hard people work and for so long to create just a few minutes of television. Read more...

A small study released today from research group AK Tweens shows that girls as young as 10 years old are involved in sexting, the sending and receiving of sexual messages and photos, just as 20% of their older peers are known to do. In the report, which combines reporting of both racy text messages and the more serious issue of sexually explicit and nude imagery, 30% of the respondents have already engaged in the practice. It's enough to make us all want to grab cell phones and computers away from our children in response! Read more...

S.T.A.R. - A nice, simple acronym! Truly, there are four things any parent needs to be doing to help their families enjoy the Internet, computers and all technology with more confidence and more "up time". Read more...

I was one of those people who, when I was still single and childless, would look with concern at kids who seemed to spend all their out of school hours glued to a gaming system. I'd read the news reports of kids playing these violent games with so much inappropriate sexual content and imagery and utter the only appropriate kind of oath, "my kids will NEVER play video games!" Now fast forward a few million parenting years (15 years on your calendar) and our house is full of gaming consoles, controllers, handheld systems and PC gamer accounts. Is it a case of kids ruling the roost or did I gain some kind of insight over the years? Could it also be caused by lack of sleep and infrequent adult forms of communication? Possibly. Read more...

I have a bone to pick with some of you. During the Conficker/Downadup worm media circus these last few weeks, a few of you were moved to state (in blogs, Twitter messages and in online forums) that, "You don't need antivirus or security software. You just need to avoid dangerous websites." All I can say to someone who gives such misjudged advice is, I hope your computer has nothing of value on it. And I hope you never use it for anything involving financial or private information. Because if you do, I'd bet that your data is already being shared by cybercriminals somewhere "out there". Read more...

I was out for a few days on vacation (and will have a few more days out of the office this week too.) I just want to make sure you're up to date on the latest news in online safety and security so apologies for taking a briefer approach than usual in the interest of getting it all in. Read more...

Tempting though it might be to download the yet-unreleased film, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" from the various online file sharing networks, take heed! One entertainment reporter chose to do just that and it cost him his job. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the latest installment in the X-Men series (not a fangirl per se, but it's got Hugh Jackman and lots of comic book action, so what's not to love?). But I can wait until May 1st to pay my $12 at the local multiplex along with everyone else. It might be boring for me to go on and on about not participating in piracy (certainly some of my teen coder friends think I'm "way uncool") but it's legal, ethical and the right thing to do. And you can't live in Los Angeles without being highly sensitized to the economic woes of the entertainment industry. Even if your wallet is slimmer than normal or even if you are out of work at the moment, I urge you to avoid engaging in online piracy in order to enjoy the latest films. There are consequences though usually not as direct as what happened to reporter Roger Friedman of FoxNews.com. Read more...

Ask a high school or college kid about their iPod or video library and you’ll soon hear a lot about file sharing. It’s used as a method for swapping favorite music files, TV shows or movies, often avoiding paying fees for them. And it’s often illegal. With the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) actively sending “Cease and Desist” letters to anyone found to be illegally trading copyrighted materials, it’s in your family’s best interest to talk about the right and the wrong ways to find and share music and movies. Read more...

It's tempting to paint those kids who've created or sent around some sexy photos of themselves as "fast", "slutty" or worse. More likely they are vulnerable kids who fell prey to peer pressure or even a perception that it's normal in our media-soaked society to present yourself to strangers and classmates as a primarily sexual being. We adults can take comfort in knowing that, despite the media barrage of attention, sexting is still an unusual activity, one that has been adopted by only 20% of teens, if the one credible study available is to be believed. Nevertheless, the only way we can stop this trend is by shining a light on it for parents, so they in turn can improve their vigilance and educate their kids. Read more...

A new study out from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CCRC) found a neglible increase in the number of online sexual predators caught looking for minors, despite large increases in the number of kids using the Internet. And several other reasons to show that our online kids aren't as endangered as hype about "stranger danger" might lead you to believe. Read more...

We're not over the April 1st hump yet. That's the day Conficker may or may not unleash it's wormy fury on us by sending 10 million infected computers out on the internet to cause trouble. On Sunday, Symantec's Steve Trilling discussed this threat with 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl and helped people throughout America understand how this worm works and the range of damage we're concerned about. The demonstration of how a hacker can remotely monitor your computing with a keystroke logger was a classic. I encourage you to watch the story, now online, to better understand why the internet security industry is holding its collective breath. Read more...

I live in Los Angeles and it isn't uncommon to run into famous people in the most unusual places: dry cleaner, dentist's waiting room, kid's ballet class and so on. It's always exciting and something that can add a little spice to living in a town where, when we say it's a company town, we mean the entertainment industry. Read more...

Like a city besieged by a wannabe criminal announcing his next act, the cybersecurity industry is in a wait and see mode to see what the Conficker worm (also known as Downadup) will deliver on April Fool's Day. Read more...

Dr. Tanya Byron, parenting expert and television star in the UK, stated that our society is "afraid of children" and we are "raising our children in captivity". Because parents have become so fearful of the dangers our children might encounter when outside, we've trained them to remain indoors where they become more likely to experience Internet-related dangers. While we're panicking over gang violence and risks of child abductions in the real world, our children are quietly navigating through cyberbullying attacks and dangerous downloads without any parental help. Read more...

Facebook has been going through some modifications recently. You probably noticed the shift to your home page, taking on a more "twitter"-like sense of immediacy. Naturally, the pushback from users was swift but I have a feeling that we'll adjust eventually or Facebook will allow us to customize our home page more in the future. Just seems to be the natural course of things in web interfaces to ultimately give the user more control as the site matures and adds features. Read more...