The power of the Internet has only just begun to show its strength….

Peace out.

It explains how the social networking website Facebook can be used for all the wrong purposes. The article illustrated how research coming from Britain stated that 35% of users will accept friends that they do not know. This can give identity thieves access to easy information such as telephone numbers, addresses, relationship status and sexual preference.

If you asked me, whilst Facebook has great practicality and commercial viablity, it needs to be very carefully monitored in the sense that identity thieves and paedophiles are far more prevalent on the Internet than people suspect.

Anyways, I am off to check my Facebook messages

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/from-harvard-dropout-to-instant-billionaire/2007/10/25/1192941211560.html

I will admit, it is not the traditional methodology as created by beloved Facebook, MySpace et al, but you have to admit, this new method is most definitely interesting. A distortion of reality perhaps (if you choose it that way), but even despite this people are still flocking to the site.

I just dont think we can definitively say where the trend is heading. All i know is that right now it is growing in so many different directions I am struggling to keep up….

I think this is a great initiative, and I hope its success takes off rapidly.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/google-gives-a-birds-eye-view-of-poverty/2007/11/02/1193619116213.html

A German man is attempting to hold Google to ransom. He is wanting a job at Google, in exchange for giving up the domains he registered which hold Google’s name. The websites, to me, do not even seem worthy of Google’s time, let alone a job there. After all, Google has been ranked the best employer in all of America.

The ultimate irony is, if Google wanted to,  they could take him to the World Intellectual Property Organisation!

It examines how there are few, if any laws governing Facebook, and the fact that many people are being banned from using Facebook for ‘pety’ acts. As the article explains, surely severe crimes should be punished, but are we going too far when pety acts such as trying to contact a number of people in Scandinavia before embarking on a giant move result in being banned from the most viable way of connecting with people?

Furthermore, the fact that such a large site as Facebook has no actual specific terms of use is beyond me. “The conditions are so nebulous and leave so much to Facebook admin’s discretion that they realistically could do anything they wanted and attribute it to these guidelines. “… [It's a] pretty straightforward breach of one of the most fundamental tenets of any just legal system – that people should be able to know the law in order to prevent them from breaking the law.”

So, I guess only time will tell whether Facebook will have a relook at how they ban people, or whether the Facebook fad will die out and become a thing of yesterday…..

However, one must also question – how fast is fast? Sure, this is super fast, but I can assure you that it will have a minimal, if noticeable, impact on the speed of general PC’s as we simply do not need for these computers to be so fast. Perhaps we should be focussing our resources on more important and more productive features???

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/839-trillion-calculations-per-second-beat-that-ibm/2007/10/26/1192941294254.html

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/06/26/1182623861485.html

 A Canadian person created an online auctioning website similar to ebay, and ended up selling it on ebay! The ultimate irony!

I also think at times it defeats the purpose of living – I have visisted all the ancient Wonders of the World without ever having left my desk – such is the clarity of the satellite images. Whilst technological aid like this is supposed to enhance our quality of life, sometimes I think it does the reverse – it makes us more lazy, inactive and less sociable – look at how I am communicating with you right now (face to face communication is very much a thing of the past now).

Anyways, thats my two cents worth – I am sure there will be many who disagree….

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/09/13/1189276881132.html

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend and are enjoying their week.

Thanks to the benefits of Foxtel IQ, I saw a 60 minutes programme which aired a few Sundays ago. It was titled ‘Web of Evil’, and produced by Lincol Howes and Julia Timms. The story was in relation to some horrific crimes perpetrated against Justin Berry, at the time a 13 year old American boy.

The story highlights the problems with Internet crimes (continuing on from what I have raised before). At age 13, Justin was asked to take his shirt off in front of a webcam for $50. He rationalised that if he takes his shirt off at the beach, then he can do it in front of a webcam and make $50 from it (a considerable sum of money for someone at age 13). News of this boy spread like fire around the pedophiles circle, and very soon Justin was performing sick acts (which I really do not want to discuss, some of which were even blotted out on the programme) for hefty sums of money. Over the course of a few years, Justin made in the hundreds of thousands of dollars through higher and higher demands.

As Justin said, the ‘Internet is a pedophiles friend’ and this is the scary thought. The presenter of the programme demonstrated to the audience how quickly pedophiles jump onto our kids. Within 10 min of advertising that she was a 12 year old girl, there were three responses. One was harmless, but the conversations with the other two got very dirty very quickly – one even offered to meet up after 6min of conversation.

As FBI agent Arnold Bell says, the pedophiles ‘greatest weapon is the anonymity the Internet provides’. Furthermore, what is truly horrifying (although I am not sure if I believe this statistic), 1/5 of victims are less than 3 years old.

Clearly something has to be done to protecting our children, and taking away the Internet from them is definitely not the solution. All I can say is that I am a long way away from having children, but I sure hope that by the time my children are able to use the Internet, this sort of crime will be a thing of the past.

Peace out.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/09/15/1189277023871.html

It seems as though our criminals are constantly one step ahead of the technology, always managing to evade the law and finding new ways to commit crimes. Is it ever 100% safe to make purchases online? I know if you make online purchases from trustworthy large companies, if something goes wrong, they will usually monetarily compensate you. But what happens for purchases from smaller stores? Do these smaller stores lose out on potential online purchases simply because they cannot provide the 100% anti-fraud guarantee?

When will it be that the good guys are one step ahead of the criminals?

I understand that the artists need to make money and that this is their job. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for that. However, when lawsuits are based over the ability to buy a new concord jet as opposed to only flying first class like the regular people, one must seriously begin to question who in fact these laws (if any) are trying to protect???

What has the world come to? Are people now only making music for the money? What ever happened to the good old days where music was produced from the heart, not the soul???

Anyways, I’m off to listen to some music on my ipod.

 I wanted to draw your attention to the problems of fraud on the internet. In particular, I wish to draw your attention to a recent problem on ebay. This blog entry is inspired (for want of a better word) by the following article on the SMH: