Most of us have an unwanted habit whenever we logged onto the internet - removing a few dozens of spam emails that often clutter our mailbox. The email's popularity as one of the fundamental internet tools has produced one niggling side effect: spam.
Unsolicited commercial and non-commercial emails are spreading like plague that feed off the Internet to connect hundreds of millions of computer users around the world, at virtually no cost. Most of these nuisance and distraction come in the form of offering to help us get rich quick or shed pounds in a few days. Amazing? Not quite, more like ridiculous.
There is no doubt that spam is a drain on productivity, a frustratingly costly waste of time and resources for Internet service providers and for businesses. It clogs corporate networks, and can be a vehicle for viruses that often cause serious damage and hefty economic losses. As we continue to wage the war in attempt to sift spam out of our inboxes, valid messages are unintentionally overlooked or deleted, which makes email less reliable as a channel for communication and legitimate e-commerce. Spam is such a worrying problem that it threatens to undo much of the good that email has achieved.
Reactive measures to stop spam includes installation of spam filters. However it is not simply to block out all spam, a smart filter can be customized to suit the preferences of the individual user. Not all spam is pure junk, it is not clearly distinguishable from a broad and global criteria. Thus it is critical to have a smart filter system that learn from a user's personal preferences to create a unique anti-spam program that is tougher for spammers to break down.
Proactive measures involve going out to stop spam before it gets distributed. Provider of email services should enforce regulations against spamming, accounts that violate anti-spam policies should be terminated immediately. The government and industry must work hand-in-hand to exposed spammers' deceptive practices. They used multiple servers to hide their origins and change to new ones frequently to avoid detection.
These and many other efforts across different fronts will lead to a world where we are less troubled by spam. And as violators faced stiffer sanctions, the incentives for them will decrease and spamming will lose much of its appeal.
Facebook, Friendster, MySpace. These are familiar names, you've probably have heard of at least one of these sites. And they have one thing in common - all of them are social networking sites, where users create a personal profile and create connections. People use these sites for a variety of reasons, ranging from finding dates and clients, to selling products or services, or making new friends and colleagues.
The majority of social networking sites allow users to decide how much of their information they want to share with the public. Users can hide their pages from the public so that only selected friends can view their information. Email notification is a popular feature that sends users an email whenever something changes on their profile. The email could be used to notify the user when someone posted a comment, someone sent or accepted a friend request, or a connection has an upcoming birthday.
Social networks may seem to provide opportunities for students, but they have their issues. Users often receive invitations from people they don't know. These strangers tend to try to connect with everyone they find on the network to drive up their connection numbers. Thus, the friends of a person who blindly accepts an invitation from a stranger might think that stranger is a trusted contact. Privacy is a major concern. Younger users may be unaware of the problems in revealing too much information. Thieves might use profile information for identity theft. Businesses worry about their employees giving out proprietary information or using the business brand in an inappropriate way.
But it's not all negatives though. People find jobs, bands find audiences, professionals find clients, people with shared interests make friends, friends stay connected. One site can provide a user with all the needed tools to keep a journal, manage appointments, receive customized news, and converse on hot topics. In short, social networks help users connect and share information as well as organize our lives.
Businesses with their own Web sites create profiles with links back to their sites to improve their site's search engine ranking. A user looking for a product or service might prefer to search for the product or service on a social network site rather than using a basic search engine. Or, a potential customer may stumble upon the company while browsing connections of connections.
To surmise, with so many different social networking sites out there that there is surely one for anyone inclined to go out and make a connection.Use caution, exercise common sense and the rewards of sharing information will soon be at your fingertips. Good luck!
Digital journalism refers to the production of news via digital media. With more and more newspaper publishing an internet equivalent of their daily works as well as the interactive sites on news stations' websites that offer podcasts, the shift towards getting news from the internet has adverse impacts on the traditional print media.
Digital journalism can be the work of recognized news sources, but it can also originate from individuals or small groups that have agenda or may be biased in some way or another. And since anyone with internet connection can easily publish a story, a lot of information that we obtained on the internet nowadays lack credibility, this leads to the proliferation of misinformation and conjecture. With traditional journalism "drying up", the collapse of journalism may be inevitable. We may not miss the newsprint that are inked on papers, but we may miss the writings of professional journalists.
Make no mistake, the age of digital journalism has arrived. With the emergence of gadgets like iPhone, the connection with what's happening in the world has become so much easier, everything can be stored in the pocket now. However, smart phone is only a start. Touch enabled devices like Amazon's kindle reader is redefining the future of print journalism to go digital. A touch-enabled device, with unlimited data plan that would allow users to view multimedia and video in ways that even smart phones will soon be a reality in the near future. Digital journalism gives consumers the added advantage of customization, they can decide which news feed and publications they want to subscribe to.
But that doesn't mean that the essence of journalism will be gone together with print media. An article (link provided below) written by ESPN demonstrates how the new trend of journalism can be equally, if not more interesting and engaging. The written content itself was great, but it got better when the editors did a wonderful job to lay out the paragraphs and font sizing.
Singapore, a country famed for its "fine" laws and suffocating restrictions on a whole range of issues, from littering to speech freedom. With the increasing dominance and popularity of online media, the government has loosened its previously stringent political regulations a few years back in order to accommodate to the increasing demand and pressure from opposition parties as well as the general public. However, there are still limitations imposed on the use of internet for political purposes, as then Minister for Information and the Arts Lee Yock Suan said "the anonymity of the Internet opens a door for surreptitious elements to mislead, distract and confuse the public."
Indeed, the view of "online equals free" has put online media in a delicate situation. What needs to be put into perspective is the concern of opportunity costs. Maintaining websites are never easy, much less a political website in the climate of fear in Singapore where fundings are hard to come by. Most Singaporeans are apathetic towards politics, their indifferent attitude makes it difficult to engage them through the internet since people tend to go to sites that interest them. In addition to that, the subject of subjectivity is something that we should not overlook. No journalist can claim that his or her opinions are objective, everyone including journalists from the mainstream media will have his/her own opinions which might not necessarily be objective.
More recently in 2008, Dr James Gomez (Workers' Party) published his PhD thesis from the Monash University, Melbourne titled "Democracy and Elections: The Impact of Online Politics in Singapore". In it, he argued that the electoral system in Singapore is impervious to the impact of the internet. His analysis of voting patterns and election results over the past 3 general elections in 1997, 2001 and 2006 reflected that there was no correlation between the use of internet by various opposition parties and their performance at the polls. This despite the fact that internet penetration rate in Singapore had leaped from 14% in 1997 to 71% in 2006. His doubts are not unfounded, despite online media having great potential of gaining significant mindshare from the mainstream media. The political climate in Singapore has been very harsh towards opposition parties, even with regulation changes the hostility still exists. While the potential of online media remains promising, there remains a lot of obstacles that stand in the way of exploiting the full benefits of it.
Microsoft Surface is a revolutionary multi-touch computer that responds to natural hand gestures and real-world objects, allowing for interaction with digital content in a simple way. With a large, horizontal user interface, Surface offers a whole new experience when multiple users can simultaneously interact with data and each other.
Key Features
- Direct Interaction: interaction made directly with contact via touch or gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard
- Multi-user experience: large 30 inch screen display enables several people to interact simultaneously with the Microsoft Surface
- Multi-touch: responds to many points of contact simultaneously, not just from one finger
- Object recognition: physical objects can be placed on screen to trigger different types of digital responses
Xbox 360 Project Natal
Project Natal is a electronic installation (size of a bar) that sits above or below your TV, having close resemblance to WII's sensor bar. However instead of sensing controllers, this device has a camera, sensors and a microphone inside that enables it to get an accurate sense of your space and you in it. This lets you control games just by moving around; kicking, jumping, or whatever body motions you engage in.
Key Features
- control video games and menus using your body instead of peripheral controls
- voice and full body motion control over your on-screen avatar
Managing an arsenal of passwords is an indispensable part of the internet culture.The use of password is your first line of security defence, without which keeping data safe will be an insurmountable challenge. With the need for numerous login accounts, using the same password for each login is tempting, BUT it might not be the most sensible decision around as some websites do not have strong security. Illegal access to password information from seemingly innocent-looking websites like ecards site may lead to the same information being used to hack into payment sites like paypal. The loss of personal financial data could result in grave consequences that one would do better without. To demonstrate how easy it is to hack a Facebook account, let's take a look at the following video (i bet you'll probably starting hacking around after viewing it!)
I'm sure all of you have hear of the saying that goes "to err is human", perhaps they should complete it by adding "to slack is normal". We all have the tendency to get lazy and complacent, that is only human nature. How many times have we heard of passwords being set as "password" and other outrageously simple and easy-to-guess security codes. There's a chinese saying that goes, the more dangerous the place is, the safer you are. So it seems like people have been putting that into practice. But they're WRONG! Numerous ingenious programs have been written to crack passwords at high volume, some by hackers while others are created by legitimate security testing tools. Most of these programs use a variety of dictionary based attacks to combine common words and word variations to try thousands of passwords as fast as the targeted system will permit. Some begin by guessing a whole bunch of common passwords. Outsmarting these intelligent attacks is not as easy as we think.
Strong passwords are essential in providing important protections to your online transactions. A password should be sufficiently long and complicated to make it difficult to guess. One trick is to use mneumonics. Instead of using a common word, the first letters of each word of a phrase is used to make the password. Adding numerals or symbols to a password makes it harder to crack. A password cracker has to guess the correct string and may try to use all possible combinations. By using numerals or symbols, this will increase the number of possibilities and cause the process to take longer.
In addition, short passwords should be avoided as they can be guessed in an reasonable amount of time by a motivated individual and offers little resistance against software hackers. In Roger A Grimes' 2006 article, Password Size Does Matter, he recommended using a password of at least 15 characters to keep it from being cracked. Other common password pitfalls include creating passwords using dictionary words in any language, words spelled backwards, sequences or repeated characters as well as personal information (birthday, passport number etc).
Passwords should be known only by the computer user and the applicable service provider. They should not be written down since they may be viewed by someone else. Writing down a password makes it simple for another person to pretend to be another user. If, say, login information is written on a Post-it stuck underneath a keyboard, another employee can use that to gain unauthorized access to files.
Since there are so many computers attached to the Internet, performing online transactions carries the risk of being seen by another person. To minimize this risk, when making an online purchase, a secure site should be used. The beginning of the website address may read “https:” which Eric Lawrence explains in his 2006 article HTTPS Security Improvements in Internet Explorer 7, this indicates a site that will use encryption to hide information being sent over the Internet so that no one can read it along the way.
It is important to use unique passwords for services that store personal financial data such as banking and payment sites. This reduces the risk that a password stolen from another site list could be used to access the confidential data. Shopping and travel sites may keep credit card information so those should be unique as well.
Internet giants Google's revised version of the Google Earth (5th edition), which allows users to access undersea data sparked a mass debate when British aeronautical engineer noticed something queer off the coast of Africa , about 600 miles west of the Canary Islands. The area is approximately the size of Wales, resembles the pattern of a street grid. Many believed that this could be the mythical sunken city of Atlantis, since it lies awfully close to one of the spots that Plato had pinpointed as a possible resting place of Atlantis. However, Google has moved swiftly to deny the rumor, stating that the lines are remnants of sonar traces left by boat as they surveyed the area. The following are two video clips that compiled the information gathered from youtube that offers a quick lowdown on what was seen on Google Earth
Skeptics have a point, why is it that prestigious marine research institutes, armed by sophisticated technology & equipments have not been able to locate Atlantis all these years, yet a software by Google can detect the location (even with the exact coordinates!) seemingly without much effort?
Yet, the evidence is compelling. The grid of crisscrossing lines don't quite seem to be the work of mother nature, remember, mother nature doesn't make straight lines, intelligent beings do. The site seem to be too vast and organized to be caused naturally. And while Google had claimed how did the lines originate, they were unable to explain why the blank spots within those lines.
Is it really Atlantis that is seen on Google Earth? And if it's not, do you still believe that Atlantis had actually existed? I'll leave the decision up to you :)
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