Craig Crossman photo Craig Crossman
National Newspaper Computer Columnist

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PROTECT YOUR ONLINE KIDS IN REAL TIME FROM ANYWHERE

There's a new instantaneous way to protect your children when they go online. Parents know that their children need extra protection in the real as well as the virtual landscape. After all, the Internet brings the world into your home. Unfortunately, many parts of our world have undesirable elements. Most parents are aware that there are many products and services designed to protect children who go online. Most of these work by blocking access to dangerous web sites, and by keeping track of where they go, with whom they are chatting and any other type of correspondence in which they may engage. But the problem with all of these safeguards is that they can only alert you to a problem after some time has passed. That time can vary quite a bit. Normally, most parents usually review their children's activities at the end of the day, but even then it could be too late. A clever abductor could arrange something within a few short hours or even less.

Actiontec 's Kid Defender takes parental controls to the next level. That level is the ability to monitor what your children are doing online instantly, at any time and from any place you have an internet connection. In other words, you now have the ability to watch what your children are doing online as it happens. And if you see something inappropriate, you can stop what they are doing immediately, and it can all be done remotely.

Installing Kid Defender is an easy setup. Just install it on your child's PC and the PC from which you will be monitoring everything. Set up is a breeze. In fact, you don't have to know anything about IP addresses, gateways, routing or whatever. Kid Defender will automatically seek out the route from your computer to your child's PC and initiate the monitoring link for you.

Kid Defender notifies the parents every time their children go online and then displays on your computer's screen exactly what they are seeing on their screen. And if you have more than one computer or child you wish to monitor, parents can use their same single computer. Pressing a key displays the screens of the different computers you are monitoring. If your kids are different ages for example, and you wish to define different blocked web sites and user names, you can do that as well. That's because in addition to the real-time monitoring ability, Kid Defender also lets you define blocked web sites and people you know you don't want your children to contact.

Additional features let you save each day's activities in case you need to review what they did at a later time. Kid Defender keeps track of all web pages visited as well as transcripts of all instant messages and chat room conversations. For those parents who may have some pangs of guilt when it comes to monitoring their children, Kid Defender does not work surreptitiously. Your kids will see a small icon in the system tray that alerts them that you are there, watching what they are doing as caring parents should be.

Kid Defender is more than just software. It actually is a service to which you subscribe. The CD includes the Kid Defender software as well as a one year subscription for the real-time monitoring ability. You can also download the software and pay $4.95 a month to give Kid Defender a try. Either way, the software comes with a license to install Kid Defender for two parents monitoring two children. Real-time monitoring licenses for additional children is $2.95 per child per month.

In this day and age of sexual predators, pedophiles and other lowlifes lurking online, Kid Defender is a modern day tool to be used by justifiably concerned parents everywhere.

Kid Defender is currently only available for Windows 98 or later.

www.kiddefnder.com

Craig Crossman is a McClatchy-Tribune newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the nation's longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on computers and technology, Computer America, heard on both the Business TalkRadio Network® and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network®, weeknights at 10PM Eastern time.  Visit his website at http://www.computeramerica.com

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