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Internet Security:
Written by James M Sandbrook - Monday, 11 December 2000, 1:29:02 AM.
Although the Internet is made up of many wonderful friendly people, you should be very careful with your privacy, VISA cards details, etc.
Like many 'places' where people get together in mass, you will find people who want to take advantage of you on the Internet.
Spammers:
Your email address can be used to send you spam, spam is advertising that you do not want.
Spam is much like the junk-mail you get in your mailbox at home, you don't ask for this mail but you get it anyway.
The people who send you spam are called 'spammers'.
Spammers are people will go to lots of trouble to get your email address and then they
will send you email as much as possible, they often give you an email address or a web site for you to unsubscribe from their advertising, but often the email address or web address doesn't exist.
Sometimes if you reply to a spammers advertising mail or you try to unsubscribe from their emailing list (which you didn't subscribe to in the first place) you are letting the spammer know that your email address is a valid email address, then they will send you lots of email after that.
With today's modern mail programs such as Netscape you can filter out spammers mail into your Trash folder.
How do these spammers get your email address?
They get your email address from Newsgroups, mailing lists and web sites where you fill out forms giving your email address details.
If you send an email message to a newsgroup you can take this precaution, have your email address like this:
rachel_No_Spam_@aol.com
Then at the bottom of your message include this sentence:
When replying to my email please remove '_No_Spam_' from my email address.
Spammers can use software to 'read' email addresses in newsgroups, if they get the above email address all they will
receive for their efforts is an error message saying the email address does not exist.
Personal Data:
Some web sites collect your personal data when you fill out forms giving your email address, home address, phone number, etc.
Before filling out any forms on a web site have a look at the companies privacy policies web page, read the information they provide and then decide whether you still want to fill out the form and give them your personal information.
Often when you are filling our forms you will find that they have a small check box that you can check if you do not want to be sent other emails from them. Sometimes the font (for the text that goes with the check box) is very small and these check boxes can easily be overlooked and the next thing you know you are getting email that you don't want.
Internet Shopping:
The Internet is a wonderful way to shop, my family has brought many items through the Internet.
You go to an online-store and select the items you wish to buy by putting them into your 'shopping cart' and then when you are finished you purchase the items with your VISA card.
You don't want your VISA card details becoming public knowledge for obvious reasons.
A good online store will have good encryption software to protect your personal information and VISA card details.
The best known secure server technologies was created by Netscape Corporation, this uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and provides data encryption, message integrity, server authentication, and optional client authentication for a TCP/IP connection.
The prices of products advertised on the Internet can be very good, mainly because a company on the Internet has to compete with companies from all around the world, not just in their own country.
But beware, you can be ripped off by some sneaky companies as well.
If you are new to the Internet then you may want to take things slowly and then purchase products only off companies that you have heard of, in other words big-name companies.
Like people you meet every day in your day to day activities most people are honest and thats the same as the Internet.
Currently my family has never had any problems with any company we have purchased off, but we are careful just the same.
The Hacker:
A hacker is normally a person who finds a way to connect to a web site and change or destroy the content on a web site or steal the content on a web site including your personal data.
Cookies:
A cookie is a small file that is put on our hard drive by a web site, a cookie is used to collect information about what pages you visit, and hold information like a password you may have for that web site, with the password information in a cookie then you do not have to re-enter your password when you visit that site, etc.
Even though a web site can put a cookie on your hard drive, they cannot access other files on your hard drive.
You can configure your web browser so it does not accept cookies.
You can use encryption to encode your email and other files that you send over the Internet.