A couple of weeks ago, I ran a highly unscientific survey on twitter. Asking what advice would people give to children about security.

The response was overwhelmingly in favour of educating them to be cautious online, not trust people and generally be paranoid.

Other comments were more along the lines of teaching them not to click on suspicious links in emails or visit sites like 4chan.

Anyway, taking the leading topic of not trusting people online I thought it would be a good idea to make it into a PSA style video. Like most of my video’s it turned out different to how I initially envisioned it to be and hence it’s a lot darker and more serious than my previous offerings.

Note that the intention isn’t to say that the internet is full of paedophiles and that’s the only threat you should be worried about. But rather, it applies equally to adults as well as children and for many reasons. You have fraudsters who want you to forward them your bank account details so that you can receive a lottery winning, or dodgy marketing companies trying to harvest your information so they can sell on.

In a nutshell, it’s better to be paranoid online and be careful of who you share information with.

New Years is nearly upon us and we all like making resolutions that we know we probably won’t keep.

January will see all the gyms hand out 3 month free contracts which the masses will sign up to and by February tumbleweed will be blowing across the treadmills.

Plus we’re pretty lame and aren’t very good at choosing our own resolutions.

Therefore, I’ve come up with a genius plan. I want to ask YOU to pick MY new year resolutions. Say whatever you want, drop me an email, leave a comment on the website, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google + or carrier pigeon.

Go crazy, tell me I need to include more security content in my video and blog. Or maybe you want better quality entertainment. Perhaps the colour scheme on the blog is painful to your eyes and you want it changed. Maybe you want to see me drop some annoying habit I have like starting off every sentence with the word “So”.

I’ll pick the most common ones and in January publish the list that I agree to.

However, there are strings attached. If you want to propose a new years resolution to me, you too should ask someone, even if it’s only one person, to write down a few resolutions for you. If I know you well enough, I’ll even throw some your way.

Giving feedback to others where you want them to change isn’t always easy. Maybe this way we can get others to change around us so that they don’t annoy us as much. Heavens knows that’s a lot easier than changing ourselves  

Let the games begin.