GreatDad.com is one of nine daddy sites mentioned at 100 Best Health Blogs for Soon-to-be Moms.

Pictures, once shared on the Internet are out there to stay, with no guarantee you can delete them. It’s not just drunken photos on FaceBook or MySpace that might come back to haunt your teen at job time, that you have to worry about.

Innocent photos, in combination with other personal information posted and shared online, can provide more than enough details for a predator to stalk your child. Take a picture of a cheerleader, standing in front of their house, with the address showing.  

From just this one photo, any interested observer can find out just about everything they need to know. The neighborhood they live in, the economic class they belong to, the color and design of their cheerleader uniform and potentially the school they attend, how sophisticated or not they appear. You get the picture.

We need to teach our children to be very careful what information they share, and with whom. What they think is private often isn’t.

- Bob Kessinger, CyberPatrol

Bob is the co-author of Surfing Among the Cyber Sharks: Parent’s Guide to Protecting Children and Teens from Online Risk - June, 2009.

We have plenty of other gift ideas for dads in general, but here are two good gifts for divorced dads, probably from friends or family interested in supporting dads’ relationships with kids who may not even be in the same city. Both are also wonderful presents for dads who “can’t be there” whether due to business travel or military service.

The first is the Vidtel telephone service. Vidtel is finally the telephone of the near future that AT&T promised to us at the 1964 Worlds Fair. Vidtel, using broadband (cable or DSL) connections, finally makes good on that promise.

Because it’s broadband, rather than POTS (plain old telephone service), the picture quality and voice are as good as any online connection using Skype or one of the many online video chat services. The big difference though is that the connection is made using what looks to be a traditional telephone. This means that any child can answer the phone, and even dial from it, making connection possible without an adult to set the connection up.

Vidtel is a bit expensive at $14.95 per month for each phone (other Vidtel payment plans available). At this price, it’s not for everyone, but in our tests, it does what it promises to do: makes it easy to make video calls, inlcuding video voicemail. For a divorced dad who doesn’t want to go through a ex-spouse gatekeeper for every conversation with his child, this might be a good solution.

Additionally, the Vidtel has an auto-answer setting making it possible to be used as a room monitoring device. We’d counsel against using this for spying, but there are very real situations (new babysitter) where this might be handy.

The ease of use of the Vidtel system also makes this a good choice for older grandparents who may not be able to use computer videoconferencing.

The second is the etendi BRIDGE,, available at etendi.com. BRIDGE is a website that provides a closed environment for families to communicate without fear of outsiders and open emails. The users of BRIDGE can only write, share photos, look at a shared calendar and see video of the specific BRIDGE users in their group. This makes it perfect for kids who might be too young to have their own email.

The desktop if set up for sharing photos and there’s even a shared whiteboard where you can imagine dads able to help on math homework. This is certainly not “ideal,” but changing family situations demand technology solutions, never to replace real dad time, but far better than no contact.

Key for dads right now: the service is FREE for four or fewer users. So dad and up to three kids can communicate. A more extensive plan is available for larger families and more users.

BRIDGE was the winner of the GreatDad Recommends program and MrDad Seal in 2009.

Actually, nice to know that Facebook is reacting quickly and forcefully to this attack. If you saw this one, it’s just a good reminder not to stick in your password without thinking twice, or three times.

Facebook early today suffered its second phishing attack in 24 hours, but the social networking site took swift action to resolve the matter.
Yesterday, attackers worked to lure Facebook members to FBAction.net, a site displaying a bogus Facebook login page that hijacked users’ accounts. Today, a second attack appeared, this time using fbstarter.com.

While the creator of the site remains uncertain — the site is registered to “Boris Soroka” in Moscow, according to Whois records, which aren’t necessarily legitimate — Facebook and its security partners are moving quickly to lock things down.

“We’ve already blocked www.fbstarter.com from being shared on Facebook, which stops the spread,” Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told InternetNews.com. “Now, we’re deleting that URL from walls and inboxes. We’ve also blocked access to the URL so if someone does find it on Facebook [on their wall, in their inbox, or in an e-mail notification] it won’t send them to the destination. Finally, we’ll automatically reset the password on any account that sent the malicious link. Thus, the data becomes useless to the bad guys very quickly.”

[From Facebook Fights Second Phishing Attack - InternetNews.com]