Tech savvy safety for those damn kids

Here are a few tidbits I'd like to share with you so we can all try to keep our kids out of trouble. Because it's summer and they're all sleeping until 11:00 a.m. and then causing all sorts of mayhem, while we are hard at work earning money to pay for their sweet sixteen birthday parties.

#1 Change your iTunes password TODAY. Consider taking your credit card information out of your profile for a little while. Or switch to buying gift cards.

While Apple has been putting the best spin on the iPhone 4's not sooo gooood antenna, hackers have been quietly stealing passwords and selling them, and the media just can't bear to cover TWO iStories at once. My friend got hit for HUNDREDS of dollars over the July 4th weekend. Gawker had a story about this a week or two ago. Apple won't care if your credit card info is fraudulently used, Moms. That will be up to you to sort out with the bank.

#2 Tell your kids NOT to put "we're going on vacation!" as their status on Facebook. Because nothing says "come steal all of my mother's jewelry and drink my father's booze" quite so clearly. You like the family jewels, right? Well, he won't let you near them if someone comes in and drinks all of his booze.

#3 Set up your Wii to stream movies from netflix over your wireless router, as a peace offering to the little darlings BUT *set parental controls* (just search for that phrase in the online help) or your kids will watch the Flavor Flav Roast long enough to see him get called a feece with teeth, or something equally horrible that you don't want them to repeat at Catholic school in the fall.

#4 Mention that texting to Canada is really, really expensive. Because it is, even with unlimited texting. Don't ask me who my boss's son was texting. It was $80 in one month or something crazy like that.

#5 Remind your kids that sexting is bad. On a completely unrelated topic, my radiology team joked after they drew circles on me(see my previous post) that they were taking pictures of me for medical records, but also for the Internet. And I may or may not have sent an actual photo of me to my sister (with headlights covered, thank you). She may or may not have replied that either a toddler got to me with a sharpie while I was "sleeping" or that someone drew a drunk stick man's face on me.

#6 I've also read that in airports, people smarter than me are setting up connections that look like the airport's free Wifi but actually run through their own laptops, to let themselves see everything you're doing. They can steal your important data and passwords, and not just the strange picture you're sexting to someone. Ahem. I'm sure there are stories about this on Snopes that will definitively answer whether this is true.

#7. Don't let your kids tell you that you need to buy the complete collection of DVDs of LOST to get the 12 new minutes the producers wouldn't give us in the 12 hour finale. It will be on the individual season 6 DVD set also, and I love you Hurley,...