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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week May 12, 2005 |
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The
information you tell everyone on the internet, everywhere you go, and you
don’t have a clue you’re doing it... For over
a decade I’ve been talking about the dangers of the internet, most
recently the wave of spoofing and phishing attacks,
and over the years I’ve talked about viruses, and internet predators,
and scams, and many other dangers. You need to be aware of all these dangers
before you go happily surfing out over the waves of internet sites. But there
are other issues I’ve talked about – specifically your
confidentiality on the internet – which most people totally disregard
– but which is equally as important and as great a danger to you as any
of the other threats. Whenever
you connect to the internet, you have no true confidentiality, unless you are
using programs to protect yourself. To see a quick example of what I’m
talking about, if you go to http://www.whatismyip.com/ you’ll see what your IP address
is, and that will be a series of numbers separated by periods. Your IP address is a series of numbers
assigned to your computer whenever you connect to the internet. To see
what those numbers mean, you can google “what’s an ip address” and find dozens of sites explaining
what it means. But
briefly it’s like a telephone number and area code – assigned
uniquely to your computer by whatever Internet Service provider you use, so
that of the millions of computers accessing the internet while you are
– each one has it’s own unique ip
address, for identification. There are
2 classes of IP addresses – static and dynamic. If you use a dialup
internet service you probably have a dynamic address. This means that every
time you connect to the internet, you’re assigned a different ip address each time, so it changes. If you
use a highspeed constant connection to the
internet, you may have a static ip address. This
means that your computer has been assigned a permanent non-changing ip address. So
what’s the danger here and what’s it all mean? There are many
ways of tracking people on the internet, using ip
addresses, email addresses, and other information that most people
don’t know they’re revealing. To check
this out yourself,
go to http://showip.net/ . Here this website will
tell you not only your ip address, but also the
name of your internet service, what country you’re in, the web browser
you’re using, the operating system of your computer, and other
information. When you
send a simple email to someone, that email information contains your email
address, your ip address, and can include the name
of your computer such as Mary’s computer. This
means that even if you connect to the internet using your isp,
and then go to yahoo or some other service you may use as a secondary email
service, and send emails through a different screen name,
your ip address remains the same, and can still be
tracked. But most
people don’t seem that concerned about their confidentiality on the internet.
There
have been companies offering products to protect your internet identity for
many years now, including http://www.anonymizer.com/
. But is
confidentiality a concern? You bet it is, right up there along with all the
other bad things that can happen to you in cyberspace. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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