"Doing" Internet Safety

* who you talked with (no names are needed - just a brief description of age)
I talked with a male - 54 years of age - soon to be 55.

* what you shared and how it went (was it positive? negative? hard? easy? valuable or not?)
The man has been in the business sector for many years and is very familiar with word processing and e-mail - as he continues to use it in his daily life since he is not yet retired. But it was interesting to find out how little he actually was aware of when it comes to the internet. He has a vague idea of what spyware and adware are and it is interesting to see the generational gap. Although as I reflected upon my youth, I still remember being in middle school and having to log on to AOL through a dial up modem and you were charged by the minute for using the service...in direct contrast to today's world where we send and receive movies across the internet now. I shared with him some of the terminology that is used and how the computer logs the addresses visited in the browser's history. He knew that it was not a good idea to open e-mails from people you don't know - and virus' have been a hot topic recently with the USB virus that was supposed to evolve just last week on March 1st. While he found all of this information interesting, when asked how practical he felt the information was - he wasn't really sure how practical it was to tell him all of this now. He has a wife who only uses the computer for Solitare and he uses it for e-mail and business purposes - that is it. Anything that would affect him (like opening e-mails from unknown senders) he already knows. He was interested in learning a little more about virus' - since his desktop at his home crashed less than a year ago - presumably from an overload of virus'. It was easier to share all of the terminology as we were both on a computer during the phone conversation. I think it was a positive experience - but as previously mentioned, perhaps not the most practical conversation.