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With the holidays coming up once again, I’ve been asked to give a roundup of gift suggestions. I decided to look around my house, to see what I had. I started asking myself what I’d like to give as a gift, or what my friends and family would want to receive from me.

The first item I came up with is a large, sharp knife. There are just so many things you can do with them! You can well… cut things! There’s always something that needs to be cut, right? Sharp knives are also a lot of fun to run around the house with! My Mom always encouraged my brothers and I to do this when we were little.

My number two suggestion is fire! You can keep things warm. You can also use fire to get rid of any excess paper that you have after you open a gift. Fire is also one of those things you wouldn’t think about giving, but there you have it. It’s free, so it won’t even cost you anything to give!

Number three on my list of must-have items to give has to be a laser pointer. These are great for pointing directly in someone’s eyes! You’ve done that, right? You can also take it with you to a movie theater. Point at the screen so that everyone can see exactly what it is you are talking loudly about.

My number four suggestion is bleach. I wouldn’t use bleach on my dark clothes. I use it on my white clothes though, of course. Sometimes on occasion, I put the bottle in my drink cabinet on accident. The bottle looks kind of like the chocolate milk container. A lot of people would use bleach to clean things though, so it could be a good gift.

Number five is prescription medicine. Even if the person doesn’t have any prescriptions of their own, maybe they always wanted to get some! If you have something lying around you don’t use anymore, why not re-gift it? You never know when it might help them feel a little better. It’s legal right? I mean, it was prescribed by a doctor!

None of these are the safest gifts you can give. If you would like to give your friends and loved ones a gift of safety, why not check out OpenDNS. If you haven’t looked at this site yet, what is stopping you? There’s nothing to install, and using their service can mean the difference between keeping yourself safe… and having a potential disaster befall you or your computer.

Keeping your family safe online has never been easier. OpenDNS gives you more than 50 filtering categories to choose from. Simply check the boxes of the categories you want to block and watch your filtering take effect within minutes. Rid your household of annoying, intermittent Internet outages. Switch to OpenDNS and immediately notice a faster, more reliable Internet experience. Join the millions who’ve already unbundled their DNS service from their ISP’s Internet connection.

Take the guesswork out of identifying phishing Web sites with OpenDNS’s industry-leading anti-phishing service. We’ll tell you when the site you’re trying to visit is fraudulent. Search results get you back on track when you mistype a URL or try to visit a site that’s down. Our smart “did you mean?” spelling suggestions help point you in the right direction, instead of showing you a hard-to-understand error page.

The best benefit of using OpenDNS is not just that it will protect you by blocking sites from ever opening up, it also helps load the sites you do want much faster. Why not give the gift of safe to someone you care about? Email them a link to this site, or even print out the information and hand it to them physically.

Hopefully you understood I’d never honestly recommend any of the products I talked about at the beginning. I do, however, strongly recommend using OpenDNS for your safety and peace of mind.

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Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

http://live.pirillo.com/ – In Boy Scouts, the first badge I earned was a fishing badge. I caught a crappie! Of course, we all know that fishing is a great pastime. But what many people don’t know is that when “fishing” is spelled PHishing, it’s a potentially very dangerous thing.

A Phishing scam is one in which a Web site collects information that you willingly enter. Now, when I say “willingly,” I mean just that. It is of course unintentional on your part that you are entering the information on a bogus site. These scams often come about via emails. Let’s say you get an email from what appears to be your bank… or PayPal. It says something about needing to verify your account information. Many people click the link. That link takes them to a site which is NOT their bank or PayPal, even if it appears to be. Then, they could inadvertantly enter things like bank numbers, social security numbers, and the like. Now the bad guys have all the information necessary to not only take your money… but possibly steal your identity and ruin your credit, as well.

The biggest rule of thumb is to never click on a link within an email. If you do receive something like this, and are concerned it could possibly be from your financial institution, open your Web browser. Manually type in the bank address and log in that way. Do not click the link in the email. As a matter of fact, many banks and savings associations are no longer even putting any links in emails, for just this reason.

So yes… turn on (or leave on) those phishing filters in IE 7 and Firefox. It’s just another layer of protection for you, to help keep you safe. It doesn’t harm anything. It doesn’t interrupt or change your browsing speed and experience. What possible reason would you have for not wanting that protection?

Another good way to help keep you safe from phishers is to use OpenDNS. This is a service you can run on your computer or network without having to install anything. Instead of using your ISP DNS server to resolve a Web site, you would use this service. Not only does it speed up your Internet experience, it also provides a phishing filter!

Bottom line… protect yourself. Every layer you place between you and the bad guys is a good thing. Compute smart… compute safe.

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