The meaning of protective parents has been taken to a whole new level thanks to communications technology.

It used to be that worried parents would get their offspring to telephone them or text to say where they were and confirm they were OK. If the children were traveling further afield, then email really came into play.

But a mother worried about her son’s gap year travels has ensured she can keep tabs on him with a GPS device.

Harry Wilder, 19, from Oxford, is wearing a GPS tool from Traakit which reports back within 15ft of his exact location, texting his mum if he deviates from the path previously agreed.

“I feel like I am sort of with Harry on his travels which gives me peace of mind and means he doesn’t have to check in with a phone call,” Harry’s mum told the Daily Mirror newspaper.

“I have no way of knowing if a street in Australia is dangerous but if he was in Bangkok, for example, I could see if he walks in an area which might not be safe and ring or text him.“

Her son, who’s been down under since April, doesn’t seem to bothered by the Big Brother-style antics.

“It has actually worked in my favour because if they can see where I am, I don’t get constant phone calls asking how I am. From a security point of view, it is quite useful and if one ever was in a situation where you couldn’t get hold of him and you needed to speak to him, it would make me feel much happier just knowing where he was,” he told the newspaper.

To keep a watchful eye on her son, Harry’s mum just logs into a website every day and she is furnished with real-time progress updates.

According to a study by Message Labs, nine out of every 10 emails received today are spam.

As a journalist I get a lot of mail that isn’t particularly relevant, but I don’t tend to block PRs (senders of said mail) en masse just in case a little diamond in the rough does crop up. But there is one PR company (I shan’t name names) that probably sends me a random press release every half hour or so. I tend to automatically delete them.

Professional inboxes are always going to be a little harder to balance the emails we want from the ones we don’t, but I certainly don’t envy the average home user if they’re trying to battle the same level of spam as the rest of us in the corporate world.

Spam is a fruitless task that does nothing more than irritate so that genuine emails suffer and we must continue to fight back. Does anyone really want to make their penis bigger if they’re female? Or maximise their bust size if their name is Sid and they’re a 21 year old bloke living in Watford? I rest my case.

Dear Jacqui Smith,

I’ve been very well behaved this past year, so I’d very much like it if you could buy me an iPhone at Christmas.

Yours sincerely,
Maggie

Forget letters to Santa to get what you want. Nowadays, it’s probably much easier to talk to MPs. After, all it seems they can expense pretty much anything these days, including, er, a moat.

Jacqui Smith is again under the uncomfortable media spotlight for her expenses claims. This time, it’s all over an iPhone she bought for her husband who manages her constituency. Granted, the iPhone is a great tool for organising business life, but why the hell should tax payers foot the bill?

With governments rising our taxes to pay for education or get us out of debt, why don’t they just do the sensible thing and stop bloody well frittering our taxes away on whatever they please? It would certainly help stop the flow of people leaving this country because the powers that be are bleeding us dry and giving us nothing but column inches in return…

It’s a nice dream. An all-inclusive society where everyone is paying dirt cheap prices for their mobile calls, no matter to whom or when they are.

In the business world, we’re pretty savvy when it comes to making our budgets work for us and getting the best deal on call and data plans. Some consumers are equally as demanding of mobile operators, but others are paying way over the odds without even realising.

That could soon be a picture of the past, however, thanks to a new online comparison tool called BillMonitor, which has just received accreditation from communications watchdog Ofcom.

The tool aims to find the best deal for your usage needs across - based on either an analysis of your bills or a quick and easy tariff search - the big five networks. It was developed by maths boffins at BillMonitor with the help of scientific advisors from the University of Oxford - that’s a whole lot of brain power.

It certainly pays to be fashionable. And Posh Spice et al have a lot to answer for…

That’s if you believe research out today by CPP that reckons women with large handbags are making themselves more of a tempting victim for ID fraudsters. Supposedly, this is because ladies are carrying around far more than they need in these larger than life bags, including passports, bills, pay slips and so on - a veritable banquet for the bad guys to feast on.

And, before the men in the industry become complacent, they should realise they’re at risk too. As the Telegraph points out, one in 10 guys now carry a so-called ‘man bag’ with many of them using it to transport documents that could easily prove lucrative in the wrong hands.

“It’s easy to forget that your identity is as valuable to a thief as your wallet or car keys. As handbags get bigger and man-bags become more popular, people need to be aware of the risks attached to carrying around personal documentation and avoid doing so if at all possible,” CPP card fraud expert, Kerry D’Souza, told the Telegraph. “Ideally your passport, bank statements, passwords and payslips should be locked away at home in a secure place.”

National Work From Home Day has come to an end for another year. And what a day it was.

The whole IT PRO team worked from home today in one way or another. I came into the office this morning as I had a number of meetings that required face to face interaction, but I then worked from home in the afternoon.

The IT PRO team are incredibly productive every day but I think they were even more so today. Even though I was in the office this morning in between meetings, I think I actually got more done as I didn’t have the - pleasant I may add - distractions of jokes and banter from the team.

I then used good old fashioned pen and paper on my train journey home as there just wasn’t enough room for me to get my laptop out. But I still made that time work for me.

The rest of the team had their trials and tribulations during their specific out-of-home assignments (Benny: someone else’s home, Jennifer: a pub, Nicole: the park, Ash: a coffee shop), but nonetheless, they enjoyed both the added freedom and the ability to really focus on the tasks at hand that come with working away from the office - a change of scenery is as good as a rest.

So, while the day to honour home working is over, it’s certainly not the last time we’ll be embracing it as it certainly has its merits.

It’s that time of year again… Work Wise UK’s Work Wise Week is almost over for another 12 months. As part of that initiative, today marks National Work From Home Day.

IT PRO is conducting a bit of an experiment today. The bank of desks usually filled by news-hungry journalists is empty, bar mine. For everyone has ditched the daily commute and is working from home today.

We plan to try and be just as productive as if we were in the office, making use of technology such as IM, email, mobiles, conferencing and other collaborative tools to help us work as a virtual team.

I’m actually in the office this morning but I plan to see just how much work I can get done during a train journey later this afternoon. I’ve worked on trains many times before but I’ve never really tried to measure its success. Today is different.

The rest of the team will also be visiting different places as part of the experiment. Cafes, parks and so on will all be tested out to see what they can offer remote workers.

While working from home is often seen as a luxury or a privilege, it’s actually the only way some businesses can function.

We’ll let you know how we get on today but we’re also interested in hearing your working from home stories, so please get it touch at comments@itpro.co.uk.

If you had to choose between eating or emailing, which would you go for?

Interestingly, according to a new study from O2, many would actually choose the latter. The mobile network’s Digital Families report reckons that some 11 million families are choosing to spend their cash on the net rather than food or utility bills as the recession’s grip gets ever tighter.

We’re also increasingly using technology to free up more of our lives to spend quality time with the family, according to O2 who has bracketed us into four different types of techno households:

1) The leaders 2) The resistors 3) The Followers 4) The Drifters

Social analyst Bob Tyrell, who compiled the report, said: “How parents control technology is key to maintaining work-life balance. Many may argue that the ability to stay in touch with work means we never completely switch off and relax, but the verdict from our report shows this does not weigh too heavily with parents.”