Internet Safety

Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)

DON'T IGNORE IT, REPORT IT!
If you genuinely stumble across such images accidentally, or are inadvertently exposed to them you must report them to the IWF.
It is an offence to deliberately seek out illegal images and purposely viewing child abuse images can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
Why should I report these images?
Reports from the public help us to combat this content and where possible, have it removed. This makes the internet a safer place for everyone.

Child abuse images reflect the real abuse of a child and your reports to the hotline might help the authorities to trace and rescues a young victim from further abuse.
How do I report?
Go to the IWF website www.iwf.org.uk and complete the step-by-step form.

The form is easy to navigate and reports can be submitted anonymously.

www.iwf.org.uk

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Toolbox Corner...Basics Explained

Cookies

If you use a personal computer it would be difficult not to have heard of cookies. Do folk really know what that means? A small piece of computer code is placed on a PC’s Internet Browser by web sites when they are visited. Some companies use the cookie to send information back to ‘HQ’; detailing what sites or what advert has been clicked on. They are also used to assist organisations to manage memberships etc. Although this is legally acceptable and supported by the ICO.
They remain on your machine until either you manually remove them or they are removed via a time limiting instruction.

So it would seem they are an innocuous and harmless piece of code…But?

Why then have they become the target of irritation and ire from computer users? Unscrupulous people have designed another element based on using the cookie; it does similar things as the ‘normal’ cookie but stays on the computer without any time limitation. Also it is programmed to scour the parent machine sending back to ‘HQ’ snippets of important information.
This information is harvested by 3rd parties, and sold on for profit.

How many times have you asked the question…how did they know about that?

These ‘Bad Cookies’ are called Local Sharing Objects or LSO’s
In this era of privacy invasion we need tools to enable us to weed out this type of cookie; Deleting normally through browser options does not remove them, there is however a small add-on program that will do the job and control these pesky intruders.

Mozilla Firefox has such an add-on, click on Tools on the menu bar; scroll down to Add-on sub menu, from the page launched the program ‘Better Privacy’ can be added to Firefox.
Using the default settings the add-on runs in the background doing its work identifying LSO’s and removing where necessary. Well worth a look, anything that helps protect our on-line privacy is good in my book.

Coming up…

1. Other Browsers;
2. Fight against privacy intrusion.

By using any of the 'Advice' contained in these articles the user asumes full responsibility.

IOWNW can not be responsible for loss of data or other mishaps. All due care is taken when preparing the articles.

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