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An interview with Anup Narayanan.....

1. How did you get started in this project?

The project whatsyourisq was started about a year back and the BETA was launched in November, 2003. We shall be releasing the “Production” version of the application on Jan 1, 2008

2. What was the motivation behind starting whatsyourisq?

As an information security professional, I do a lot of awareness training programs because I enjoy interacting with people. During the course of these interactions and also adding in my experience from information security consulting, I realized a simple fact. Organizations and parents rely too much on TECHNOLOGY to mitigate security risks. But the TECHNOLOGY is only as good as the people using them. Also, the TECHNOLOGY curve in information security has peaked and there is scope for very little improvement. For example – you already have 1024 bit encryption, what real benefit does the end-user gets if the 1024 bit encryption becomes 10 times stronger?

Another big area of concern was the PARENTS and KIDS space. There is very little focus here compared to the CORPORATE security space. For example – schools lack online safety programs and at the same time CYBER BULLYING is a growing threat that hurts kids.

Hence our focal point was conveying information security awareness through a medium of awareness that is “VISUAL” so that it registers. Also just conveying information security awareness wasn’t enough. I wanted to create a management system for “DELIVERING, MEASURING, MANAGING and IMPROVING” information security awareness. Thus whatsyourisq.com was started.

Whatsyourisq provides information security awareness through visual mediums such as animations, games, posters etc. and also helps people to keep track of their awareness levels and of their employees too.

3. What are the different verticals of information security awareness whatsyourisq will address?

We have 3 principal focal points – Businesses, Parents and Kids. I will talk more about the Parents and Kids angle here. What your child does online is a genuine concern for parents. But they are not able to address it effectively due to reasons ranging from lack of time –to- looking “UNCOOL” in front of their kids. Our aim is to educate parents and give them a set of simple tools that they can use to discuss online safety with the kids.

In fact our focus stems from a simple question – “HOW OFTEN DO YOU SIT DOWN AS A FAMILY AND DISCUSS ONLINE SAFETY?”. We want to help parents do this.

We are also working on a simple but effective online safety training program that the whole family can attend together online.

4. How long the process took from beginning to end?

Starting from the vision, design, coding and release it took approximately one year.

5. Difficulties/roadblocks along the way

Being a young company resources were the only issue. But with a good team of angel investors we were able to take it from the design stage to the product stage. Also having my good friend Sreejith to develop the product at an affordable cost was a great help.

6. How long has this service been available?

This is a recently launched service and is been available for approximately 2 months.

7. Fees charged?

For the Corporate customers our fees range from $12 to $8 per user per year depending on the volume. For parents and kids most of the content is free. We may decide on a pricing model for e-learning programs on information safety for parents as and when it comes to it. But it will be on a very affordable scale.

8. Affiliate program available to website operators and bloggers?

We would love to associate with other safety and awareness providers and are open to suggestions. It could be as simple as sharing content or providing a button with a link. We await your ideas and suggestions.

We also invite security experts to write for us as starting Jan 1, 2008 we will be having a Guest Author column in whatsyourisq.com

9. Response you have gotten:

Most of the responses that we have gotten tell us that it is an INNOVATIVE and MUCH NEEDED product because as I mentioned before, there are enough security products in the TECHNOLOGY and PROCESS space. Awareness and the human mind are two areas where security is weak.

10. Any other things you would be interesting/important to readers, specifically parents and teachers

The aim of whatsyourisq is to become “COMMUNITY-POWERED”, especially in the PARENTS, KIDS and generally the FAMILY space pertaining to information security and online safety. Please participate in discussions and sharing on whatsyourisq and please talk about the online safety problems that you have faced or your concerns about your kids and what they do online. This sharing of information may be the first step towards the community sharing their solutions with you.

 By Digital Frenzy - J. DesRochers

What is Cyber bullying? Cyber bullying is when a group of people or one person centers out another teen, child, or adult by sending emails, writing post, or putting up sites about you that degrade, contain death threats, hateful comments and other rude things that have a mental impact on other people’s lives. Cyber Bullying can be done through the Internet, or it can be done by text messaging.

Recently, I read an article on CBC news about a boy who was humiliated all over the web. A bunch of students who remain anonymous decided to create a site that was dedicated to him. The website contained hateful comments and slurs about the boy and one person even sent him an email that said “You’re gay, don’t ever talk again, no one likes you, you’re immature and dirty go wash your face.” The situation got so bad that the boy had to drop out of school and finish the rest of his year being home schooled. But this is just one example of Cyber bullying.

Another boy had made a video of himself pretending to do the well known movie “Star Wars”; when students got a hold of this tape they posted it on the web for all to see. Many people downloaded it (and still are today) and joined in on the so called “bully game”, adding sound affects making it a parody. What the boy thought was fun, turned out to be a living nightmare.

A recent survey that was done found out that 14% of young Canadians had been threatened while using messengers like msn and yahoo. The other 16% of them admitted to the fact that they were posting hateful comments themselves about kids, parents and teachers. Another survey says that 99% of Canadian students have used the internet. 48% say that they use it for at least an hour a day, and nearly 60% say that they use chat rooms and instant messaging.

In February 2007, nineteen students in Toronto that attended a catholic high school got suspended after bullying their principle. In Ontario students can be suspended for Cyber- Bullying thanks to the changes of the province’s Safe school act that came into effect just this year.

Most students that are in my grade eight class have a Facebook account or an account on Myspace . Facebook is for high school and college students, but public students are getting around this by simply lying about their age. 20 or more profiles containing public school students ranging in children 10 to 13 were reported to Facebook and those profiles have yet to be removed.

Just last year a 13-year-old girl hung herself in her closet, because she believed someone she had met on MySpace had turned against her and just recently a 17-year-old teen was charged for allegedly hacking into another teenager's myspace account and using it to threaten others.

Many parents are unaware of what their children are up to online. Parents need to pay more attention to what their children are doing online. All children should follow some sort of guideline when they are on the computer. After some research, I came across the following tips for children and teens using the internet.

Guard your contact information (Home phone number, home address, email, and the school you are attending ect .). Don’t give out your cell phone number our, your instant messaging name to anyone that you don’t know or friends that you don’t think you can trust.

If you are being harassed online or through text messaging, take the following actions immediately:

• Tell an adult you trust- a teacher, parent, sibling, relative ect .

• If you are being harassed leave the area or stop the activity (ex. chat rooms, online gaming sites, instant messaging, web cam, texting …)

• If you are being bullied through e-mail or instant messaging, block the sender’s message. Never reply to harassing messages.

• Save all harassing messages received, and forward them to your internet service provider. If the bullying includes any physical threats, tell your local police, don’t try to take it in to your hands.

A computer is a privilege and should not be used to abuse other people. The computer should be used with moderation and not as a toy.

Cyber bullying continues to grow more and more each day. Whether you are the victim or the one that is the bully, it should be stopped. After you look into the damage that can be caused by cyber bullying, I am sure that you will have even a stronger opinion on this problem, because I know I sure do.

Remember every one can make a difference, why not start today. When you are Cyber bullying you are abusing someone. When you stop, they are no longer a victim of your abuse.

Resources:

cybersting.ca

cbc.ca

Cyberbullying.ca

bewebaware.ca/english/CyberBullying.aspx

Digital Frenzy blogs at http://www.digitalfrenzy.net/ His blog features art, graphics, photos, poetry, and teen issues all from a teen’s perspective.

Visit him today!

        In Paul's own words:

Paul and LauraWhat started of as nothing more than a simple question from my wife,ended up in 7 months of development and a software solution to a problem that most parents are going to face at some point.

“What’s Laura doing on her computer?” was the question, “I don’t know”, was my reply. Laura was 10 at the time, and she had her own laptop in her bedroom, although she had full access to the family PC downstairs.  Laura was getting to that age where she liked her own room far more than hanging around downstairs with the olds! She was 10, using a tool that would allow her to communicate with ANYBODY in the world and I had no idea what she was doing. This didn't’t seem right, the switch had been flicked and I was curious and very nervous about what my little girl was up to.

I think if Laura had been a little younger maybe she would have been happy to only use the computer when either my wife or I was with her. As it was all her friends we’re using the computer alone and so she wanted to. I started of by searching the net for child monitoring programs, there were a few available but they all had at least 2 flaws. Expensive and overly complex, I wasn't’t interested in Laura’s passwords, what keys she’s been typing, restricting the websites and programs she was using (After all she only wanted to use social networking websites and instant chat. These presented the biggest danger as far as I was concerned). I knew exactly what I wanted, just simple screen shots of what she was looking at emailed to me. In order to get this I needed to buy all these extra features and install overly complex programs that wanted to take over my computer.

In December 2006 whilst discussing it with some friends, it was decided that I’d go ahead and write my own software. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted the program to do and as I was writing if for myself it made it quite a simple process in terms of design. The only thing slowing me down was nobody pushing me for a product and the fact that Laura wasn't’t using her laptop as much. However in late April this year all that changed, whilst running some tests on the screen grabbing part of the program I had the misfortune of seeing some of the Bebo profiles that Laura had been browsing. Now I have nothing against social networking, I’ve been around on the Internet since 1993 and have grown up with technology, but what I saw on the profiles of those 11/12 year old girls’ profiles was enough to poke me up the bum with the proverbial red hot poker. “How sexy do you think I am?”, “What would you like to do to me?”, I was fairly sure that the parents of SuperHotAndSexy96XX had no idea what their daughter was up to online!

After several months of hard work, a finished version of the program was ready.  In the end I’d settled on the name ICU Monitoring Software or ICU for short, ICU being a play on an Insight into your Children’s Unaccompanied activity.  I installed it on Laura’s laptop and the family computer, discussed with her at length of what was going to happen and left it at that. In the 2 weeks that I trialled the program a few small issues were found and resolved. In terms of monitoring my daughter there were one or two things she was doing that I picked up on and asked her to stop, the main one being her surfing social networks for the profiles of “famous people” (mainly Disney stars) and leaving comments! A quick discussion about how people might not be who they say they are and me asking her not to leave comments on profiles of people she doesn't’t know was enough to nip it in the bud. Laura completely accepted ICU, understood that I was only looking out for her, that I wasn't’t interested in what she was and wasn’t discussing with her friends and that I wouldn't’t ever mention what she was doing unless it was something that was worrying me. To this extent I make it a rule to delete the e-mail of Laura’s activity once I have checked it over. Of course once we had ICU then my friends and family also wanted it which presented new problems.

Not all parents are computer literate, many can barely turn on a computer. My family is the perfect example of this and that’s who was going to use the software next. I cut down on the number of options, made everything as intuitive as possible and even created a short video to demonstrate just how easy to use it was. The feedback I received was excellent, anything that could be made simpler was and at that point it was suggested that I might want to make it available for other people to buy. I’d achieved what I set out to do by writing a program that would help keep Laura safe online, my friends and family are very happy using it and I’d have nothing to lose so after some work (including the designing of a snazzy logo) ICU was released for general sale. The most important thing to me is that it’s a solution to a problem that I’m happy to use.

Laura is 12 now, using MSN Messenger to chat to her friends for hours at a time and she even has a webcam. Without having ICU there is no way I would be happy with this but now it’s not a problem because I know it’s very easy for me to look out for her.

Visit ICU Today.....

By way of introduction, my name is Sameer Hinduja and I am an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University.  With my colleague Justin W. Patchin of the University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire, we research issues of online safety and cyberbullying, and train youth, parents, educators, counselors, and law enforcement around the nation in these areas.  Please see our website for more information on what we do.

Parents around the nation have been informing us of the difficulty they are experiencing in their attempts to discuss online safety issues such as cyberbullying with their children and teenagers.  This may stem from a lack of confidence in really *knowing* the technology with which their kids seem so proficient.  It may stem from a desire to avoid being a "nag."  It may stem from an unhealthy relationship between the parent and the child where open communication just doesn't happen.  All of these factors make it difficult to broach the subject.  But it must be done in order to bring the issue to the table.  Perhaps your child will disclose some details of unpleasant experiences interacting with others in cyberspace.  Perhaps they won't.  Regardless, it is up to the parent to initiate dialogue on this topic.  Through dialogue, parents who are somewhat unfamiliar with the technology being used can learn from their children, while children who are naïve or unfamiliar with the dangers of online aggression and interacting with strangers can learn from their parents. 

The question then, is, how do we begin a discussion on this topic?  If you eat dinner together, bring it up at the dining table.  If you drive your child to school or to an after-school activity, bring it up in the vehicle.  We don't recommend you bring it up while your child is on the computer as they tend to be completely immersed in what they are doing and cannot focus on the important message that needs to be conveyed.  Just find a time when they are willingly (or unwillingly!) giving you their undivided attention, and bring up the topic.

To assist you, we've created a document with a few sample "scripts" between a parent and a teenager.  These cover cyberbullying via social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, via email, and via cell phone text message.  We've also compiled a list of basic questions to stimulate conversation regarding Internet safety issues.  This document can be downloaded and distributed freely and widely!

Please don't hesitate to let me know at hinduja@cyberbullying.us if you found the document helpful, or if we can be of any further assistance to you.  It is essential for adults to do their part in helping youth consider and recognize the inherent dangers associated with online environments, and to remain vigilant as they interact in those spheres.  Good luck!

Photos by Jamison Boyer

The talented creators of Adina's Deck, The Exclusive Detective Agency Specializing in Solving Cyber Bully Mysteries, discuss the background and their vision for this very important cyber bullying project.

Adina's Deck was filmed in the San Francisco area in May 2007, where more than fifty crew members and one hundred actors contributed to the pilot episode. The creative team is currently looking for funding to produce “Season 1″ of Adina’s Deck (8 episodes) as well as for international distribution.

By educating children, parents and teachers regarding cyber bullying issues and giving educators additional learning tools, Adina's Deck also provides a unique way to for children to participate in a "Choose Your Own Adventure" , where they are in control of their choices.

The Interview with Debbie:

**Why did you choose cyber bullying??

When I started researching the "solution" I found that very little was out there. And most of the content that did exist was geared towards the teachers. I had difficulty finding as much geared towards the students. Adina's Deck is unique in that it will appeal to both students and teachers.

**How long did this entire project take to complete?

During this time we (Jason Azicri and I) were doing research and developing ideas for the script. We finished the script at the end of March. We had about 4 weeks of pre-production, finding crew, holding auditions and fine tuning the script. We filmed for six days in May, 2007. We should be finished editing by the end of this month (July, 2007). So the total process has taken about four and a half months.

**What are your goals with this project??

Debbie Heimowitz

Debbie has worked in film and television, including MTV's Channel Surfing, Warner Brothers Saving Shiloh and produced the independent film, The Sofa.  Visit her Cyber bullying Project  or Adina's Deck for more information.

An interview with Jason Azicri:

**How did you get started on this project?
I had worked with Debbie before and she told me that she wanted to do a "film" for her Master's at Stanford. The main goal was to help students with a learning problem. It's always great to do a project that is made to both educate and entertain.

**Do you have other film/director experience you care to share?
Yeah, I wrote and directed an independent film that Debbie produced called "The Sofa". I'm just finishing it up and am currently entering it into Film Festivals.

**Why did you choose to do a project on cyber bullying?
It's a growing issue that needs to be addressed and not ignored. Cyber bullying is a phenomena that has really heightened many old problems that students have had to deal with.  It's like watching the "writing on bathroom walls and passing notes" taken to an entirely new level. In some cases the bullied have become the bullies. It's also giving people the power to turn anybody life into a tabloid while it takes away the author's accountability.

**Do you have any personal experience, with family or friends, that have been impacted by cyber bullying?
Great timing with that question. Actually, my 17 year old brother was just Cyber bullied. A girl posted pictures of him doctored up and posted it on his My Space page and her friends pages.

**Is there a particular reason for the name of your project?
Adina is our main character. She has a deck of cards that she fiddles with throughout the show. There are four girls and four suits. Each girl represents a suit. So the girls make up Adina's Deck.

**What goals do you have in mind for you production?
We would really like to get this into schools as an educational tool. We're looking into other mediums (Internet, DVD, etc). A dream situation would be to get to do more episodes. (especially on a network). There's just so much we found in the research. The episode was also meant to be an origin story in the event that we got to do more".



Jason AzicriJason was a special needs PE and health teacher for three years.  He has written five screen plays thus far. Visit Jason at The Sofa , or at Adina's Deck.

Debbie and Jason have kindly invited me to the film premiere, Saturday, July 28th in Stanford, Ca.  I only wish I could attend! This screening will be the first time Adina's Deck will be shown to the public.

As someone who is passionate about the issues of online safety and specifically cyber bullying, I am beyond excited about this production!  Bringing much needed awareness to such an important issue, is paramount.  I plan on using some of this material in my curriculum next year, and hope to help Debbie and Jason bring their vision to fruition.

Photos by Jamison Boyer