War and warfare are living things; always evolving. Long gone are the days of pugilist combat, replaced by sword to sword, replaced by musket to musket, replaced by AK-47 to M16, replaced by tank to tank, finally followed by wireless to wireless. That’s right; the war zones have changed and have undergone a strange metamorphosis: the e-battle.

The modern battle is not one of brute strength and the strongest guns winning out; it is one of skill and intellect: who is the most computer-savvy. Unfortunately, now that the skirmish is brought to such a public area, we might see a new rise of the Patriot Act.

President Obama was the first to reveal this new way to do battle, and our new agencies and strategies to be successful in it. He has repeatedly insisted that nobody’s privacy will be breached in this massive new undertaking. His senior officers agree, but do think that a bit of privacy compromise is inevitable.

The National Security Agency (NSA) will be at the forefront of this new battle. This scares a few though, as the NSA is notorious for having some ambiguous privacy ideas. The nation’s security is not a matter to be compromised on though, and the NSA knows that better than anyone.

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Don’t be thrown off by the strange sounding name, “PogoWasRight” is a wealth of internet security and privacy information. The organization is done very well on the site: everything is listed right on the main page, and is topped off by a rotating image screen that shows the hottest news.

Instead of dealing with the convolution that log-in names and passwords bring to users, Pogo has a great system. The recent news is right on the main screen, a big search bar in the corner will allow you keyword access to a huge variety of topics.

In case you were looking for older pieces of news, Pogo has a great Archives system. This allows you to re-visit any old piece of news you were interested in, or just catch up on something you missed. Either way, it is very useful.

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The Herald Tribune (Sarasota’s newspaper) recently reported that slightly more than 88% of 38,000 students that attend school in their district had private and personal information placed on the Internet for approximately two months.

Princeton Review was contracted by the school district to maintain the Sarasota County Planning Tools database to track student grades and help teachers develop tests.  The information contained student ID numbers, which often were Social Security Numbers. It also contained birthdates, names, test scores, disabilities, ethnicity and sex.  It was a simple matter to find this information by using a search engine.  The Princeton Review says the error occurred when they switched Internet Service Providers.

More than the students of Sarasota were affected by this snafu.  Almost 74,000 students of Fairfax, VA had their information posted on the web as well.  The company that was hired to measure the students’ performances nearly cost them their identities.  Hackers would have been dancing on the rooftops at finding all of this information on students, because it takes the average person three months to find out something is wrong.  But students don’t have a reason to check their credit ratings, so it could be years before they find out their credit is shot even before they applied for it.

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Every Internet user leaves behind a trail of information every time they log onto the web. Most of us are blissfully unaware of this, and for this reason, Internet crime has been on the rise. Viruses, spam, and spyware are prone to attack anyone’s system, and it is time to fight back.

Installing a virus scanner and a firewall can be a great tag-team and give a one-two punch to internet criminals. When choosing which product to use, keep in mind that your computer might already contain a firewall or virus scanner. There are much better and stronger programs available on the web and even the best ones can be free. Norton, McAfee, AVG, and ZoneAlarm are just the big names. A Google search should yield a wide selection.

A change IP proxy server is also an essential player on the Internet security team. A proxy will actually change your IP address. This stops you from being tracked and throws off future trackers. These proxies also conceal your identity. They can create the appearance that you were not surfing the website you were actually on, but just going on the change IP site over and over.

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The market and demand for internet security grows daily. It would be a bit simplistic to believe it is simply due to people enjoying security, and a bit more realistic to attribute it to the fear of hackers and interlopers.

Anyone with access to your IP address (pretty much anyone) can get the scoop on all of your internet activities and learn personal information about you. This is a blatant invasion of your privacy and you shouldn’t have to stand for it. An anonymous proxy service will allow you to bypass this IP recall and can protect your privacy while surfing online.

Why do people offer free proxies you might wonder? Running a proxy is very expensive; a bunch of bandwidth, and it could become a huge security risk if configured improperly. With all of this money on the line, what defender of good would be so selfless as to pay for everyone else’s security?  The truth is it doesn’t happen a lot. Often, these servers don’t even offer any protection, and they are actually some poor guy who just set up his network wrong!

If the proxy isn’t an accidental occurrence, and there is not obvious way that the proxy makes money, then it is often a criminal one. To pay for the bandwidth charges, hackers and identity thieves will spy on their users’ activities and steal bank information, log-in passwords, even identities! It would be wiser to pay a small monthly fee than to pay a hacker’s whole vacation!

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A while back, China had been making headlines all over the world with its string of internet-related scandals. One recent one refers to a Chinese milk company called Sanlu that bribed China’s largest search engine (Baidu) to censor any negative information about their milk…. Twice.

Sanlu offered to buy $640,000 worth of advertising in exchange for the mass cover-up of their most recent foible; thousands of infants hospitalized, four deaths, and recurrent kidney illness, after consuming Sanlu’s milk. Sanlu attempted to make up for lost profits by “enhancing” the milk with melamine, rather than actually adding in satisfactory amounts of protein. Melamine is NOT a replacement for protein, and is actually found in plastics and is flame retardant.

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When searching for an IP changer, there is quite a variety to choose from. It may seem tempting to go for one of the free ones, but internet security is not the place to be thrifty.  These free IP changers are often amazingly slow and offer little or no internet security.

Keep in mind that servers are quite expensive to run, especially due to the large number of people requiring  bandwidth to surf the Internet. So why in the world do people supply these free servers? Often times, these suppliers don’t even realize they are doing so! A simple problem in the configuration of their server or accidentally leaving out a small patch in their operating system can lead to a proxy hackers delight while the poor owner could left to pick up very large fees for bandwidth usage.

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Forget about the Man from U.N.C.L.E. or the C.I.A.  According to OhMyNews, there’s some real undercover action afoot across the waters. The United Kingdom and a few other European countries are working on developing a technology that will spy on Internet searches and cell phone records, including calls and text messages.

These Internet records, cell phone calls and text messages will be used for “security” purposes. Yes, routing out criminals and terrorists.  The idea is to store all of this information in a central database to be accessed by hundreds of public organizations.  Some records, which consist of times, dates and cell phone contacts will be stored for at least a year. Internet searches and instant messages with be recorded and tracked as well. It’s claimed that none of the actual content of this information will be saved, just the information that identifies who sent what, where, and when.

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It is hard to define exactly what a “secure proxy server” is, even harder to find one on the even the vast internet!

Although this seems like an obvious point; don’t be fooled by names. There are dozens of “Elite” proxies, “Mega” proxies, “Best” proxies; super-duper awesome adjectives that don’t improve the quality of the proxy one bit.

Other than the grammatical integrity of the name of the proxy, an important question to ask is what context the change IP proxy is running in. Always be careful when using a change IP proxy. Any internet traveler seeking anonymous internet fare that travels through a change IP service is seen by the operator of the change IP service. So, while you may be hidden from others, the owner of the service has access to everything that you do.

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When you surf the internet, you leave a trail of information which can be accessed by anyone with the right tools. Internet security was not a big issue a couple years ago, but internet surfing has increased, exponentially recently, so a new need for privacy was created. Thus, the change IP proxy was born.

The change IP proxy is a computer that allows users to surf the internet incognito. The user requests a file from the change IP proxy, and the proxy retrieves it. Therefore, the user is anonymous and the website believes it is the change IP proxy requesting the information, not the user.

If you wish to keep yourself anonymous on the internet, or access sites that are blocked, a private proxy is the solution. Using a proxy is simple: turn it on and connect to the server, then type the address you wish to visit, and you will be no longer “you” to the destination web site, but become the proxy server adopting their IP address.

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