Everyone has experienced spam. Here we are not discussing the widely ambivalent opinions of the meat in a can, but rather the random messages to any sort of messaging center. You have probably opened up your email, and found yourself flooded with messages; either you insanely popular over night, or you have been the victim of copious amounts of spam. These messages can sometimes be completely obvious, such as a strangely titled email with many symbols with only an enigmatic assortment of oddly juxtaposed letters and numbers, something right out of the Matrix. This message was probably generated by some two bit hacker (no pun intended) using an old computer who just happened to actually hack into a system correctly, yet failing on actually sending the message. While hackers often spam people, keep in mind that anyone at any time can email anybody, so anybody is a viable victim of spam. You could do it yourself; make a message full of random stuff and send it to all of your friends and other recipients. Although it make ostracize you from virtual contact with your friends, it is the principle of the matter; anybody can spam.

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Schools are meant to enrich student’s lives and give them knowledge that may become vestigial at some point, but serves to enhance intellect while it is being encoded. Teachers are a large influence on every student they teach, and this is why great measures and tests are made to (hopefully) pick the best teachers. After all, our kids, the ones they are teaching, will be the future of our unstable nation, and maybe the solution to our economic crisis. This could all begin with an inspiring lecture in economics class; the teacher could have just created the godsend the United States has been looking for.

A ton of work goes into the successful running of a good school. There is so much information that must be spot on in order to keep a contained and safe atmosphere. If a teacher teaches about seven classes, with about twenty kids a class, this is a large amount of grades to be done! The papers must first be graded, the put into the grade system, then given back to the students, and then every student’s final grades must be calculated at the end of the grading quarter. For large schools of about a thousand students, attendance must be entered every day and every child missing has to be accounted for and possibly an inquisition if the story doesn’t check out.

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It is quite understandable to question a new thing, and want to know what it is and how it works. This is especially true of new people; our instincts tell us who is a threat and who isn’t usually seconds after we meet them or see them. Sometimes our intuitions can fail us though, and we then turn to a more infallible way to decode somebody. Employers nearly always run background checks on potential employees. Again, this is that basic human instinct running in our veins telling us to find out about people and who they are. Someone could be a great guy in the interview and completely have the wool pulled over your eyes, but when you check his background, you find out he is a convicted felon of a serious charge. Certainly not the type of guy you want working at your business and working with your customers!

While this is a safety issue for the most part, these tests may have a bit of an intrusive value to them, and could be misleading. In psychology, the tendency for people to put more emphasis on the personality than the situation is called the false attribution effect. Many employers are blind to the possible mitigating factors of the offense or the actual person’s turn around in life. Regardless, these types of tests border on the privacy laws that everyone enjoys around the world… for the most part.

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The Internet is made up of many sites that allow people to voice their opinions. For example, many news sites have a section where you can leave a comment about the page or respond to someone else’s comment. YouTube is also one where you can leave comments, but unfortunately these usually start online riots and “flame wars”. MySpace is also another good example, as your comments can be seen by anyone and can be about anything you want them to be.

Another important part of the Internet is being anonymous. This is important and necessary because people can be tracked over the Internet very easily. Criminals can find someone’s IP address and use to it to track a person’s activities around the Internet, and possibly even their location in real life. Your computer has an IP address hooked up to it that acts as a virtual nametag, and this is how trackers and identity thieves find you and steal from you. This IP address is completely public, and some people ask why.

There is a new controversy brewing on the Internet though, pertaining to comments: being anonymous. Some people believe it is unfair that some sites require you to post a name and an actual e-mail address, while others simply let you opt out and choose to be anonymous.

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The computer was once a tool that was used primarily for entertainment, with a couple of people using them for educational purposes. Soon enough, businesses began to see their potential to be used for mass production and movement of information. Soon after, people began to use them for work and play online, and today they are used for everything.

People check their e-mail online, chat with friends online, do business online, and even bank online. The computer has become a necessary part of every American’s life, and will continue to play a larger role than ever in the apex of the “Information Generation”.

The computer’s hard drive is an indispensable memory. Everything you do is stored in some part of it, and will not be deleted by just a delete function. All of this information can be accessed by people that you wouldn’t permit to do so normally. Don’t fret! You can easily protect yourself; there is a multitude of ways to do so, and many can be done right from home.

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When one uses the Internet, there are tons of little pieces of data that their computer sends out and is recorded by many different indelible sources. While much of this meticulous recording is used for good purposes such as expediting your browsing times, some of the information can be used for more malicious intent.

One aspect of browsing is cookies. Consider the cookie; it a little piece of information that is put on your computer by a website that records your preferences and other small pieces of data. These cookies generally affect you very little and simply restore personalized settings on a website you visit. Some cookies can be a bit more harmful though. These cookies can be intercepted by hackers to track your computer and possibly place viruses or other mal ware on it.

Another thing to consider is a cache system. Long ago, in the dark ages of dial-up and slow connections, a cache saves pieces of a website that you visited and allowed for a quicker load of the website when you next visited it. With part of the website already installed on your computer, you can actually just load it from your memory instead of having to access the Internet, inherently making it faster. This cache system could possibly save websites that you tried to get rid of though, and if someone were to hack into your system they could view these previously thought-to-be deleted sites. Although the cache system is outdated due to the incredible speed of Internet travel today, it is still installed on every computer, simply to create a privacy issue.

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Since the dawning of the social networking site, people have crafted online identities for themselves. It is a form of escape for the masses, and is used by nearly everyone due to its widely free state. That’s right, communication for free. These sites have no one time charge, no monthly charge, and no fees at all, what they get by is the prevalence of advertisements on their site. Any user of the social networking site can vouch for the fact that there are quite a few ads on every page, and that you usually have to click through one to get to the next page. These sites often have their own little world created by the users too; complete with its own language and celebrities. Their vernacular consists of many abbreviations of language, many phrases with all capital letters, and quite a bit of slang. Their celebrities are just every day people though. Many bands who start out playing in garages can come to selling out arenas due to their popularity on MySpace. Many people can become famous e-stars because of their online hilarity or brashness.

One such superhero is the “PittGirl” of Pittsburgh. This fiery user was an online hit due to her frankness in talking about Pittsburgh’s mayor and her disdain for him, and even more famous for her extended rants about the evils of pigeons.  Her spark and her non-inhibited sense of writing made her a complete Internet celebrity, although everyone wondered about her identity. After many people attempted to crack it, she simply came out herself; listing name, occupation, and even posting some pictures of herself on her blog.

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Your location is an important thing. Where you are determines where you will shop for groceries, how much time to allot for such a activities, where your kids will go to school, who will they play with, and a host of other obvious things. Most people don’t think of their location as being something they need to keep a well-kept secret. Perhaps not in real life or from close friends, but on the Internet it is imperative to remain anonymous and undetected. Think about the pedestrian nature of crime on the world wide web, and how unstoppable it has become. There is no attacking or catching the criminals anymore, simply to defend oneself. These criminals enjoy getting your online data, but your real life location is the pot of gold for them.

Think about it, through the knowledge of your home, these criminals could break in and get anything they want. If they have worse intentions, they could break in and kidnap your children. Maybe they are just feeling malicious and wish to do you bodily harm, and your family as well. Either way, the location of your home in real life is a hacker’s dream come true. While getting into your Internet documents is much more feasible for them, and they can get passwords, log-in names, bank account numbers and other miscellaneous pieces of identifying information, in real life, they could crack your safe without having to worry about impersonating you at a bank.

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You know those social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Xanga, etc.? It turns out (not surprisingly) that some of these represent serious privacy issues. These sites are used and signed up for by millions of people everyday. Nearly everyone is on a social networking site, or multiple of them. For many, it is a good way to communicate with friends and show the world who they are that day with the completely personalized profile system. These profiles can be customized every day to show what mood you are in, and you can even upload pictures to show everyone who you are. While this seems like good reasons to use a social networking site, there are many bad people on here who take advantage of the uneducated masses who wouldn’t mess with their privacy settings even if they were taught how to do so.

Recently, two California residents charged the social networking site “Tagged” with sending them false emails to get them to send out more of their personal information. The website allegedly sent these two people an e-mail that said that if they send in their social security numbers that they can sync their profiles with many of their other online programs. The two didn’t fall for it, and quickly reported the disturbing message to authorities. After a little investigating, it was found that someone at “Tagged” was just fishing for information and thought they could get these two users. After the email was traced and the man arrested, the two renounced social networking sites and their kin. “It is too much risk, for too little of a return.”, one of them said. “I think I will just start visiting my friends in real life, where I can be sure they are who they are.”

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Saudi Arabia women are now loading spy ware used by many malicious hackers in the U.S. Why install software onto your computer that actually harms it and that people pay to avoid? The truth is a bit grim; to monitor their cheating husbands. The Saudi Arabian culture is much different than the U.S.’s, and over there, the women citizens hold very little power. They do what they can though, and tired of their husband’s growing infidelity, they have decided to take charge. Their actions are a double-edged sword; they are harming their computer, but are getting indelible evidence of their spouse’s cheating for it. This spy ware they are using is designed to collect all sorts of information from a web session, including all sorts of information that was supposedly deleted by the original user. The wife can then collect this information through the server, and use it to confront their significant other, and have some infallible proof of their dishonesty.

Although this is an extreme use of spy ware, it is happening not just in Saudi Arabia. Many people in the United States use these programs as well, but for more insidious means. In the U.S., we call these people hackers, and they often are thought about and fretted over by Internet users. These are the people who can access someone’s system from states away, and while inside, steal all their information pertaining to online sites, and especially bank accounts. The victim’s bank account will be run dry while they are still at work, and on the way home when they are trying to get some gas, will wonder why their card is cancelled. This is an extreme case as well. They hackers will usually steal an identity and some other bank related information and use it every once and a while. While they are making small withdrawals every once in a while, the victim is less likely to notice than once huge cash run.

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