Online column

A weekly tech column written for The Southland Times, a company that pays well enough to keep me in handbags and Drambuie

Staying safe on the internet

The frightening fact that one in four children aged between seven and 10 have met face-to-face with strangers who had contacted them online was revealed in the Internet Safety Group survey released on Monday.

The survey of more than 2500 New Zealand school children has resulted in a warning to parents and teachers alike to be vigilant when it comes to what our kids are doing online.

While there are plenty of choices when it comes to filtering software programs to control what sites children can visit, no program is 100 percent safe.

Cyber Angels offers advice and help for those who have become the target of the unwanted attention of someone online, while SafeKids has tips and suggestions to boost online safety, including a page of guidelines for parents.

Sites such as Ask Jeeves for Kids and Yahooligans are child-safe search engines that filter out sexually explicit, violent or hateful content. You’ll find a more comprehensive list at the SafeKids site.

Online safety is an important issue for both children and adults and cyber stalking seems to becoming more prevalent.

Stop Net Abusers is dedicated to the victims of the stalkers who frequent chat rooms and internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels and includes transcripts of some of the online abuse. It also has information on how to protect yourself, tools and useful links.

Sometimes, the stalking and abuse moves offline and into real life, often with tragic consequences.

Probably one of the most widely known crimes with ties to the internet is the murder of United States 20-year-old Amy Boyer.

Type her name into any good search engine and you’ll find links to hundreds of archived news articles and sites about her.

Her killer, Liam Youens, spelled out his plan to murder her on websites dedicated to Miss Boyer and used the internet to buy her social security number and access personal information to make his stalking easier.

Auction sites galore

 

Auction sites are hugely popular on the internet and Kiwis are lucky enough to have several New Zealand-owned sites to choose from.

The biggest of them Trade Me was started by Wellington’s Sam Morgan in 1999. Now boasting almost 75,000 members, Trade Me is going to be tough for any competing website to beat. The site is user-friendly with a tidy interface and plenty of features to make the auction process fun.

Unfortunately, on Tuesday night Trade Me was subjected to a spate of rogue bidders signing up and making inflated bids on auctions. While the site’s administrators acted promptly and disabled the members in question, the situation has angered many of the site’s members.

Although there are many complaints on the message board about the administrators failing to act on the members’ other concerns, Trade Me has acted on some of the suggestions offered, including adding a link to the end of each auction for members to report dodgy dealings.

Launched in September 2000, Recycle also has a tidy interface and is easy to navigate.

Recycle registered its 1000th member last month. While the site doesn’t have as many members or listings as Trade Me it is free to list auctions on this site.

Buy Me also offers free auction and classified listings but the site isn’t quite as easy to navigate as Trade Me and Recycle. However, it does offer extra features, such as competitions.

Another New Zealand auction site launched last year is Daniel Parker’s Done Deal. I haven’t joined this one because of my aversion to spam. Done Deal used 12,000 e-mail addresses harvested off the Trade Me site to send unsolicited junk mail advertising itself. This caused a bit of a backlash at the time and it might be something Done Deal will always have to battle to overcome.

Of course, the largest auction site on the net is eBay, which launched its New Zealand site last year. The site is huge and offers a wide range of goods for sale but don’t forget that all bidding is likely to be in US dollars.

New Year antics

Now that Christmas is over for another year, the next big landmark on the social calendar is New Year’s Eve.

While Christmas is a time for over-eating (and over-spending), new year is known for more liquid indulgences. Martinis Online, based in Calgary, Alberta (the martini capital of the world, so the site says), was put together by a group of martini connoisseurs to “fill the glaring hole in the public’s martini knowledge, a hole that only our alcohol-fuelled zest could fill.” You’ll find enough martini recipes to give you a headache before you even get the cap off the vermouth.

That reminds me of a joke. A bloke walks into a bar and orders martini after martini, each time removing the olives and placing them in a jar. When the jar was filled with olives and all the drinks consumed, he started to leave. Another customer, puzzled by the man’s actions, asked him what it was all about. “Simple, ” the first man replied, “my wife just asked me to pop out and buy a jar of olives.”

Did you know the Babylonian new year celebration lasted for 11 days? I didn’t until I found https://wilstar.com/holidays/newyear.htm. I think after 11 days of celebrations, you’d probably be in need of a hangover cure.

The Global Hangover Guide offers various delights, including the Turkish tripe soup with garlic vinegar. I think the hangover sounds like the preferable option here.

However, if at the end of the day (or the bottom of the bottle) you wake up feeling like you’ve had a tongue transplant and it doesn’t fit, and you know you’re going to spend the day dealing with a bad case of bottle flu, you could simply log on to the internet and surf to Hairy Tongue, a lifeline for the hungover on the internet.

The site says its aim is to provide solace through distraction because “no matter what they say, there is no better cure for a hangover than simply pretending it’s not there.

 

Checking Santa’s travels on the web

Every conversation I’ve taken part in lately seems to contain the question: “So, have you done your Christmas shopping yet?” The short answer is no. In fact, it’s the only answer.

Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Christmas. It’s a great time to spend with family and friends, a time of good whisky and goodwill. And now is probably a good time to take a look at Christmas on the net.

If you already know what you want for Christmas and are ready to send a list off to the man in red, go to https://www.santa-at-home.com/ to send him an e-mail.Yes folks, it’s the 21st century and Santa is  online. No doubt he keeps an inventory of presents on there too so let’s hope his site isn’t hacked.

Another thing I’m not good at organising is sending Christmas cards. If you have friends online, the easy option is to send an electronic card, or e-card. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of sites that offer this service. Simply go to your favourite search engine and type in “send free cards” and you will be spoiled for choice.

As you can imagine, Christmas Eve is a big night for Santa. However, with the various time zones throughout the world, and a little Christmas magic, he manages to get all the presents delivered by morning. If you are interested in tracking his progress on the big night, the NORAD tracking website (https://www.noradsanta.org/english/ radar.html) goes live on December 24.

At Christmas even the most artistically challenged among us feel the urge to make things. Dean and Nancy’s Everything Christmas has links to enough craft ideas to keep you busy until next Christmas.

The ultimate Santa site has to be https://www.claus.com/index.shtml, where you can take a virtual tour of Santa’s village and check out your place on the infamous naughty or nice list.

If you’ve always wondered what Santa does in his spare time after Christmas, that question and many more will be answered at the Santa FAQ page (santaclaus.com/faq.html). It seems last year he visited New Zealand, part of Europe, and the Florida Keys. I should mention that this page is written from a Northern Hemisphere perspective so it talks about Santa’s holiday time as spring and summer.

 

 

Scroll to Top