Monday, November 19, 2012
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Online Privacy
In today’s young generation everyone is online. Many parents,
teachers and guardians worry about their children being a victim to criminals
searching for easy targets online. Online privacy is a growing fear on the mind
of these caretakers. Having your identity stolen is much easier nowadays than
50 years ago. Furthermore, now it’s even easier for pedophiles to come in
contact with the children of this time. Therefore, online privacy must be put
at the top of the list to protect our young people.
However, according to the article, “Teens and VentureInvestors Demand Online Safety and Privacy” written by Lora Kolodny in the Wall
Street Journal explains that many teens are aware of the importance of online
privacy and intend to protect themselves. This is a very admiral thing to do as
a young person.
According to the article, “Forty-four percent of teens
surveyed count identity theft as their top concern, 32% worry their social
media posts may create college application problems, and 30% worry their online
behavior may get them in trouble at home. A majority of them use, and seek out
privacy controls when they use social media.” These teens are taking pre-caution
on their social media sites and protecting themselves not only from creepers, but
protecting them from themselves. This may not make sense, but these teens are
aware that what they display on the internet and on their personal sites can and
will be detected by future schools and employers, therefore they must not post
inappropriate things because it ultimately reflects back on them.
Due to these privacy issues, social media sites like
Facebook developed intense privacy settings to allow their users to control who
saw their information and who did not. But many users not only do not trust these
social media sites with their personal information they also may not understand
how to operate such controls. Therefore, many users’ profiles lack such
information.
In addition, social media sites should offer helpful tips to
educate their users on how-to set their privacy settings to further protect
themselves. Because, privacy online is a growing factor in today’s world. According
to the article, “Earlier this year, as VentureWire previously reported, a
venture-backed San Francisco start-up called Skout–the creators of a
mobile-social network, commonly regarded as a “flirting app”–decided to shut
down the Skout teen community when pedophiles used it to target their eventual
victims.” These instances happen and they happen often. Thus, we need to
further educate ourselves to protect us and the ones we love.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Cyber Warfare
An article in the New York Times titled “Iran’s Hand IsSuspected in Computer Attacks” written by Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger
explains a recent attack of cyber warfare. Iranian government developed a cyber-attack
on Saudi Arabia’s oil industry’s computer systems. Due to this silent and
killer attack, Iranian government successfully crippled about 30,000 of Saudi
Arabia’s systems by erasing files and overwriting them.
Even though Iran’s attack was not as powerful as something
Russia or China has the potential to do, it still wreaked havoc among the Saudi’s
systems. This has become a new threat to the world. Instead of going to war
like we use in the past centuries, now we have a new threat through the
internet. Due to the internet’s potential access to confidential files and
special ops systems that is dealt with our government and military, our enemies
could possibly have access to these files information. Or they could even erase
essential information for America’s well-being.
According to the article, James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote Friday in an essay
for ForeignPolicy.com, “Iran has discovered a new way to harass much sooner
than expected, and the United States is ill-prepared to deal with it,” thus, we
as American’s need to become more aware of these potential cyber threats, and develop
constructive ways to help protect ourselves from these enemies.
Iran is only one of many potential cyber threats. These attacks
are not only happening between countries governments, but also between regular
people and ordinary companies. These viruses can be conducted by anyone and sent
through emails or websites, consequently putting everyone in risk. Unfortunately,
this is just the beginning of cyber-attacks. It has the potential to get
stronger, more destructive and ultimately more frequent. Therefore, it is
important to protect yourself, your files and your information kept on your
private or work computers.
Hopefully, in the near future America’s government and
military will develop stronger fire walls to keep these threats away. Possibly even
create a new style of protection for the civilians as well. Ultimately, now as
a nation we not only have to worry about terrorist attacks consisting of plane
crashes, bombs or shootings, we also need to be aware and possibly worry about
attacks over the internet. This can be attacks from other countries or even
attacks from within the own comfort of our nation.
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