Daily Internet Digest

Face-to-face transactions over the internet may be limited only with the webcam (that is, if you consider this as face-to-face). Some believe that there is really no way a person can trace his/her online friend’s location, so it may seem to be easy (but not necessarily true) for fraudsters to lie about their real location (useful for anti internet scam too!).

Say goodbye to internet frauds since IP addresses are traceable. An IP address is a unique address, normally composed of four sets of numbers separated by three dots (i.e. 127.0.0.1). It works just like a house address since no IP addresses are alike.

Although IP addresses too change every time a person goes offline (through disabling the internet connection or turning off the router for LAN and WiFi etc.) and going online again, there will never be a time that your IP address will be exactly the same as another’s.

How to easily obtain the person’s real location through their IP address:
1. Go to http://www.ip-adress.com/ipaddresstolocation.
2. There is a tiny box (beside the “Lookup this IP or website” button) and type in the person’s IP address.
3. Click the said button and viola! The country origin of the said IP address is revealed.

Photo taken from http://www.cartoonstock.com

The internet nowadays is the best playground for business. Millions of people worldwide have access to it and since we live in an audio-visual culture, online markets have induced opportunity seekers with different splashes (programs made with Macromedia Flash), creative writing (such as excellently written ads) and videos to encourage them of venturing into their business.

Unfortunately, since the internet is an “all access” medium, many abuse it and many scams are continuously prevalent. If you have seen a “too-good-to-be-true” website, offering a relatively large paycheck for a “good-for-nothing” job (sites that offer “work from home and earn $50,000.00 per month while doing nothing!”), then might as well check the history of the said website.

How to do it:
1. Type in your address bar: http://whois.domaintools.com/
2. Affix the web address of the suspected website (i.e. if the website is http://www.website.info, then affix website.info AFTER THE SLASH).
3. You should now be able to see the history of the website, complete with the registrant’s name, how many other domains the registrant owns and how many times the said website has changed their domain name over a period of time).

Photo taken from http://theshadeswriter.wordpress.com

From online mapping technology to the latest venture of Google to help homeowners monitor the amount of electricity they use with PowerMeter, the company has been on the forefront of internet technology for a long long time. The much anticipated and now praised Google maps has become a very useful tool for most people who want to see the world as it is and for what it is. Available to the public, it allows people to learn more about the world through maps loaded with all the information they need. They added the ability to see paces of interest with street-view that is possible with extensive mapping and scanning technology that lets you stand in front of the place you were interested in. Continue Reading »

The case of the Pirate Bay people who were convicted and found guilty of violating several copyright and intellectual property rights issues has seemingly ended with their conviction, sending them straight to the slammer, end of story. We hoped it was but it seems these guys have a trick or two up their sleeves in their appeal process where they seek to overturn charges levied against them by seeking an impartial judge to preside in their affairs. Their lawyers argue that the previous judge that handled the case was quite biased from the start and that they were found guilty even before the process started.
The Pirate Bay is one of the longest and largest FTP file sharing sites the world over that has damaged the film, music and other industries where intellectual property rights were violated hundreds if not thousands of times every day. Continue Reading »

China has long been identified as one of the leading sources of hackers and malware the world over along with Russia and many other countries. Their aims may be for economic and other means yet the country itself is falling victim to it’s generation of computer savvy youth’s armed with the know how and cheaper technology coming in from the West to do more damage it now fears itself from home-based hackers. There have been publicized cases of hackers being caught and prosecuted but the government is taking more steps to prevent such incidents happening from within its borders. Continue Reading »

Copyright your content by licensing it under a Creative Commons license.

This protect your content from being plagiarized by lazy people who are incapable of producing their own content. Licensing your work protects your hard work from being used and abused by other people – sometimes even for profit.

The Creative Commons website has a number of different licenses (which you can get for free) you can use depending how you want your work to be used (or not at all). These licenses are also recognized by courts of law, so you can seek prosecution or fining of plagiarists if you so desire.

A number sites like the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation also offer licenses, but these are more geared towards software and code.

Mainly because of the free-ranging quality of the web where hyou may get one source but risk missing several others making it an exercise in futility. Most measures to control content and software have been quite effective till the internet became so far reaching the policing efforts have simply become too costly. There have been major success stories with major piracy hubs being closed down for a couple of hours till they got the system back up again. The ability of these hackers to move from place to place is quite frustrating for law enforcement for they can lose these people in the blink of an eye. Even some for the best Information Technology security systems are having a hard time to cope with the ever growing threats that are on the internet.
Continue Reading »

It’s a good thing that a lot of people are learning more and more on how not to click on possible malicious sites, but numbers show that there are still people who do:

The investigation, conducted by McAfee(R) SiteAdvisor(TM), studied the five major U.S. search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) and found that the overall chance of clicking through to a risky site declined by 12.0%. Still, McAfee estimates that consumers click through to risky sites more than 268 million times each month.

“It’s good to see that clicking on search engine results has gotten modestly safer,” said Chris Dixon, director of strategy, McAfee SiteAdvisor. “But when almost one of 12 sponsored links still clicks through to a risky site, there remains significant room for continued improvement.”

Hopefully the number goes down even further next year due to additional internet knowledge and ensure that internet security goes higher.

Source

Image Source: doit.wisc.edu

McColo, a web hosting site has shut down just last Tuesday. What is good news is that it brought with its closing, thousands of bits of spam that is used to crowd our email inbox with. This good news is made possible by the efficient investigative work of a reporter, Brian Krebs of Washington Post. The company was brought to the attention by Krebs and during the last four months, they have been collecting data about the San Jose California based company. They believed that the company is being used by the cyber underground to send spam. It is said that after its closure, spam volume has drastically decreased by almost fifty percent. While we rejoice in the company’s closing, many believe that the spammers will regroup and wreak havoc to our inboxes.

Image Source: guardianhometechnologies.com

Maintaining a network of home computers can be quite a dilemma if you have not even the simplest and most basic tools in trouble shooting your network. There will come a time when you’ll be needing some items to assist you in quickly reparing your pc and internet connection. You can just simply provide a small shelf in your closet. If you just dont have that space, maybe look for a small shelf, if for an unfortunate reason you dont have a shelf, look for a drawer. A complete loser you can be if you dont have a drawer to spare. In that case go find yourself a card board box. Make it nice and put some label in it so you can easily find it when you suddenly look for it. A basic computer toolkit maust have a Phillips screwdriver, a wire cutter, wire stripper and cable crimping tool that will work for your cable types. You also must have a network cable in hand. SO the next time you buy a cable, buy twice as much so you can keep a spare supply. Because somewhere in time you will need them.