To BCC or Not? - Let's Stop the Spam

I mean seriously is it too hard to understand a simple email program and use the bloody thing correctly to protect peoples privacy?

Computers have been around since ….. what 1990 (common use) email for just about a long. Email has been common use since 2000 (or thereabouts)

How many spam emails do you receive daily? 10, 20, 30? or more? I imagine that businesses receive 100's if not 1000's.

If employees used BCC for group emails, then spam would be greatly reduced. Just tonight I received an email from a sporting organisation (state based) and in the CC section, there are 25 email addresses.

6 are ISP addresses, like Telstra and Optus
1 is Government defence address
1 private business
15 are free email addresses (predominately hotmail!)
1 is a large business
1 is a "mobileme" address

So big deal you say………………

If everyone on that list forwarded the email without cleaning up the email addresses in the CC line - YOUR email address has been exposed 1 x 25 = 25, and each recipient forwarded that email twice, and  every person who received that email also sent it forward by two. Your email address has been sent to 30,065,107 people (If I am not mistaken) IN SEVEN (7) days……………………….

See how evil not using BCC can be?

Do you know how much a viable (working) email address is worth? It's worth between $10 and $30 on the black market. Value of Email on the Black Market Now add to that any other personal information a hacker or spammer has been able to determine and you can immediately double that value!

So USE BCC, Train your staff, train your parents, train your children and stop the spam.

The meaning of  CC and BCC (Old School)
CC = Carbon Copy
BCC - Blind Carbon Copy

How much is an email address worth on the black market?

Due to this post:- Syncing Mobile Phones Offline and this post Why Can't I Sync my Mobile Phone Offline I had many people question my demands to be able to sync my personal data (possibly including your data, OFFLINE) My reasons are purely privacy of your data and mine.

I don’t want the world knowing what I’m doing and where I’m going and who’s birthday it is (via my calendar) I don’t want the world to have access to your email address and phone number (via my outlook address book)

In other words, my reluctance to use a phone that requires the transferring of all this information online, (via an email account or similar) before I can download back to the phone is something I refuse to do. PERSONAL SECURITY.

If my email address was hacked (hopefully never) there would be close to $7000 worth of data available for sale on the black market! Did you know you are worth that much?

Depending on who you listen to – your email address ALONE is worth anywhere between $10-$30 depending on what you do, who the address was gained from and what information is attached to that email address! Add to that other personal data of addresses and phone numbers AND BIRTH DATES and that value could triple! That’s JUST IF MY EMAIL address was hacked. Then the documents that you store online (in your email account sent folder), like passports, credit card information etc, that adds hundreds ($100), if not thousands ($1000) to the value of the data stolen.

From Expert Reviews UK Expert Reviews - How Much Are You Worth to a Cyber Criminal?

From Experian Experian - How Much is Your Personal Identity Worth?

So are you happy using a HTC Mozart which requires data to be uploaded/synced via a live.com account? Or happy to use iTunes to transfer your data?

Online security has been a big issue recently, not just at the personal level, but at the commercial level, look what happened to Telstra this past weekend, look what happened to Sony and another gaming venues recently. Is anything online ‘safe’ anymore?

Should people be more aware of the information they store online and perhaps reduce/delete unnecessary information? It’s not for me to say, but I prefer to store everything locally and not online, thus my demand to be able sync MY personal information OFFLINE on MY computer and not yours!

Edited: 26th December 2018

When I was growing up.......and modern communication

I was thinking about a conversation with my darling Mstr13 – He wanted to visit some friends, I said ring them and find out what they are doing. He said I don’t have their phone numbers. I said, then how do you contact them? –Internet, was the response.

I thought back to when I was growing up, when I was 13yo. I grew up in a small town and we’d ring friends first thing in the morning (not before 9am) that would be rude, and we’d organize our day that way.

Then we I grew up and left school, same thing, you’d ring the house and organize something, if you were lucky they had an answering machine. If they didn’t, you’d try again later.

Then pagers were invented. Great for working people, great for people contracting, you worked out with family and friends codes, that when the number was sent through, you’d add and extra digit at the start or finish of the phone to signify something. 0=out, 1=in, 2=home soon

Then pagers had text capability – WOW – it was heaven, no more trying to remember what meant what. Mobile phones were around, but they were far too expensive for the average person to have. Mobile phones were for corporate type people.

Eventually the cost of owning a second hand mobile outweighed the cost of a pager and returning phone calls etc. So many people switched over to mobiles.

Now if you don’t have a mobile (or don’t answer it on the second ring) you are a luddite .

Technology has gone far these last 20 years, now it is common for people not to have access to a landline, to only have a mobile phone, everything is wireless and far more cost affordable.

The internet for those under the age of 20 years, is considered the norm, in fact life didn’t exist prior to that apparently!

I think what scares me, is that in an emergency, people won’t be sitting by their computer waiting for you to contact them. How will kids manage if there is an emergency and they don’t have access to a computer?

Mobile phones are great for 12-24hours and then after that you need 240v power to recharge them.

I suppose what I am saying is get something other than an online user name from people you considering friends, imagine putting out a call for “deep_throat”, whom you haven’t spoken to in a month. You know they live in Timbuktu, you know they go to “Prince School of the West” You think their name is Tom, but you have no idea what their surname is. Get their phone number! It would make life a little easier!

Take care out there

Trolls

(A long one, but worth the read)

I’m not talking about the trolls that live under your neighbourhood bridge. I’m talking about trolls on the internet, you know those horrible people that take great delight in shooting down every comment you make and make fun of you at every turn. That destroy something online that was good for the community.

Some of them are so good you may not even realize this is the case – until it is too late.

Trolls or trolling is not a new word, just something you hear bandied about lot, simply because of the anonymity of the internet has allowed them to breed in numbers not previously seen.

Once upon a time – you signed up to the internet and you were issued with an ISP email address and anyone worth their weight in forum/site admin would ensure that you used the ISP email to sign up with. That stopped a lot of the bullying and trolling and even the trolls from putting in an appearance for fear of being caught out.

Now days, more often than not, ISP’s no longer issue their own email addresses and rely on the user opening, operating and being responsible for their own email accounts, using a free method like gmail, yahoo or hotmail.

This in turn has forced site and forum admin to relax their rules and opened the door for multiple user names operated by the same person.

I’ve seen one person admit to having 20,30,40 different user names, just to stalk and harass people in one forum, and once they get a taste of the power. They become almost psychotic in their approach to forum and site rules and take great pleasure in getting others suspended/reprimanded and then boasting about it in other forums.

Then you find that a group or cliché of people get together creating further harm to sites and eventually the site is forced to close.

A perfect example is the ebay forum that used to exist in 2009, it was mostly a good place, and the admin were as good as could be expected considering the size, but the trolling and bad manners of a group or cliché of people, made ebay realize that it was not possible to sustain the forum in its current format.

So a new forum was created with different rules, to try and stop this sort of trolling behavior, unfortunately I don’t believe it has stopped, only caused the non-trolls to move elsewhere. That is only one example of perhaps thousands that happen on a daily basis.

Once the cliché get together, they then start sharing information and tools and invariably it doesn’t end, only grows as people search for some form of identity or something to make them feel important.

Once upon a time with an ISP registered email address, a report would be made to the ISP, and the ISP would take the offending account down and do whatever was necessary to prevent the action from occurring again. Now the ISP’s are toothless tigers and do nothing more than provide bandwidth.

With IP masking and shielding anything is possible, people just don’t realize how much is possible. For example it is possible to declare you are in England, or the USA or the Philippines (anywhere on Earth really), when in actual fact you don’t even possess a passport. You can post travel photos, and admin when checking the IP note that it is from the portrayed country and have no reason to be suspicious.

Then the multiple account holder, the number of user names is only limited to the amount of time available to the user to create and confirm email addresses and then create and confirm forum user names. See how easy it really is.

I could be anyone, in fact I could be any number of people, who do you believe, him, me or her over there or even the pet dog? – I am all the same person. In fact there is a whole family of me!

Never trust anyone or anything on the net – it’s not worth having your online reputation destroyed ;)

Back-Up – Did I Say Back-Up?

Tell me – When was the last time you backed up the data on your computer?

Can you remember?

I’m not just talking about the documents, but the photos, the family history, that you always mean to organise and never quite get around to doing.

Those images, those documents are IRREPLACEABLE.

Johhny’s first birthday party or Grandpa’s 80th birthday. They will all be gone if you have a hard-drive failure or similar. Refer Here as to what this similar might encompass

Back everything up – I don’t care what media you use – just back it up and move it off premises. That way if something catastrophic does occur – you will have lost little. Make a habit of it – and do it perhaps once a month, Alternatively – if you can afford it, get off-site data back-up, depending on the connection and the data volume, will determine the cost.

I use plain old data CD’s and copy everything to CD-RW and take a copy to work and the switch that with the 2nd copy and maintain the backwards and forwards, Emails I have set up to automatically be forwarded to a third account, which is used purely for storage. There are many cost-free alternatives.

Use them and by thinking outside the square – you will lose little if your hard-drive fails or flooding, or fire. You have taken another step to protecting yourself and ensuring your family history lives on!

The Wireless Modem and Children

I have found a new point of torture for my children. I’m sure you have the same problem, they turn deaf whenever something needs to be done. They suddenly acquire Alzheimer’s when you ask them to do something as you head out the door. They won’t go to bed, they basically refuse to listen and you are sick of it.

Most often the cause seems to be a conversation via MSN or a computer game. (we only have computers and PSP2 here)

I’ve found a solution for us and possibly for you!

We run a modem with an aerial, which allows the kids, via dongles to access the internet.

I unplug said aerial and thus instantly remove internet access!

Suddenly I have mild, co-operative, non-combative children begging to do as I ask.

Try it – you might be surprised at the results. If they really peeve you off – try taking the aerial to work with you, BUT make sure you have password protected your PC or they will just use that as an access point!

Good luck!

Social Media and the Personal Attacks (Trolling)

Some people call them trolls, some people call them sick. I call them people who are bored with nothing better to do.

Often their claim to fame as having completed a BA (bugger all) in something that is really nothing, in that it hasn’t gained them useful employment. They are angry that this is the case and blame everyone around them.

They think they are better than everyone else on the planet.

They believe it is their god-given right to attack people who disagree with them, people who have opinions are considered dangerous as they can see through the garbage the attacker is spouting.

The attacker will claim they are being victimised, they will claim they are the one being hard done by. Yet they fail to see that they caused the problems in the first place.

People who attack via social media – I consider them to be psychopathic with regards to real world behaviour, so much so that they have often isolated themselves behind a computer with little thought for the outside world.

Many people say ‘don’t feed the trolls’ this in essence is difficult because as the name suggests – they are ugly creatures and even if you don’t offer food (responding) they will find crumbs to feed off (another topic)

Some people claim that opening up and removing the anonymous nature of forums, twitter etc. will remove the threat of trolls.

I have personally experienced a personal attack, the nature to this day, still can’t be disclosed, but the reprisal was the publishing of all my personal information, phone numbers, email accounts, residential address, all in one location. In a forum that is not your average ‘nice’ guys forum.

Trolling or personal attacks whatever you may call them are vicious, uncalled for and people who instigate such attacks, should be sanctioned and possible removed from the media they offend in.

Until laws in the real world catch up with those on the internet, it will be hard to police, but perhaps the medium being used, needs to address and enforce their own rules BEFORE they become liable under current laws.

Trolls, think before you leap – with the court ordered disclosure against Google of information, anonymous is no longer as hidden as you think.

Old friends in a new world

Was talking to someone the other night. Someone who I never met before. We had ‘talked’ online but nothing more. This meeting came about because we both had cancelled commitments and figured waste not want not! We organized a meeting place and enjoyed several coffees. We discussed many things from book likes and dislikes to attitudes of society to employment records and likes and dislikes relating to our areas of employment.

We covered almost everything in a very short amount of time.

We had both worked contract work. We both enjoyed learning, we both disliked forced leave, we both enjoy learning new things and doing new things, or projects. We both enjoy computers, the hardware and the software and enjoy learning as technology advances.

One thing we both found hard to believe is that there are people out there who dislike change, who refuse to use upgraded programs and hardware, simply because they don’t want/can’t be bothered learning.

We realized that we were both ‘outsiders’ in a mundane world. We both enjoyed learning, we both enjoying challenges, we are unable to sit at home and veg in front of the TV.

Some people who are not computer literate, can’t understand why people, strangers want to meet and talk. It is not only networking for business purposes, but meeting like this enables people of like mindedness to discuss openly without judgement, topics that can be considered taboo within ‘normal’ friendships.

This is not the first time I have gone out on a limb and decided what have I got to lose. I have met people in outback NSW, cafes in shopping centres, bistros of hotels (where EVERYONE except me turned up late!). Some interesting people, some interesting times and you know what? I enjoyed every single meeting and maintain contact with everyone.

We all lead busy lives, perhaps it’s time to get out from behind the computer screen and meet real people in the real world and discuss real topics and find people of similar ideas and ideals and smell the roses a little more.

There are often groups that meet up, once a month or similar – but the very busy people will often find these times don’t suit family or work commitments.

Often a one on one meeting in a public place is more comfortable AND more enjoyable, simply because you are not vying for attention with others.

Try it – It can’t hurt, a public place, a place comfortable and local to both parties.

I enjoyed my second ‘offline’ meeting of an ‘online’ friend – Try it – you might actually like it!

Good luck.

Kids and the internet

We’ve heard it all before – put the computer in the main part of the house, monitor the time the kids spend on the computer. Discuss with them all aspects of cyber-bullying.

The government some time ago – supported a program called K9 – now what is K9 you ask? It is a program that allows you to monitor what your children are doing, where they are going and what times they can access the internet and what they can access.

K9 web protection as it is called can be located here - http://www1.k9webprotection.com/

I have used K9 and I can recommend K9. Once the program has been trained it is an excellent nanny – regardless of where the computer is located. It barks when something is accessed that is not permitted. It blocks access to the internet when directed to do so.

Overall it is a good simple program that is understandable and easy to use.

This doesn’t mean that your job as a parent now ceases, it is a tool ,that enables you to be a ‘better’ parent. So that you can have a shower and not wonder if the kids are checking out the ‘biggest willie’ site or similar.

You can access the program directly and check where the children have been.

The only thing that you are not warned about – make sure that email address used to join is not accessible by the people you are trying to monitor – That is the only warning NOT issued and perhaps should be.

I have used K9 and can recommend it as a tool – remember it does not replace real parenting, it will not stop cyber-bullying – but it may help assist you with these problems.

Good luck and best wishes! – Kids will be kids – but with you as a parent – I am sure they are better for it.