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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
Thursday December 23, 2004 |
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Your computer needs those
Christmas cookies more than you do, or, it’s the Fat time of the
year “Deck
us all with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla Wash, and Kalamzoo, Nora’s
freezing on the trolley - swaller
dollar cauliflower – Alley-garoo .... “ This of
course is the Pogo version of Christmas carols, from the wonderful old Pogo
cartoon strip by Walt Kelly Complete Lyrics to
Pogo Version. Just a little humor to get us all more into the Christmas
spirit. Tis the season to be shopping – online. I think 2004 will be
remembered as the year Internet Shopping really took off. Oddly enough, one
of the major indicators of this is the amount of phishing
or spoofing attacks that are happening on the internet today, which I
recently covered in my series on The Protection You Need on the Internet
Today http://www.mtamicro.com/rb/rb110404.html You see,
the bad guys have already figured out that Joe and Josephine Q. Averageperson are now buying online regularly today, and
the bad guys are stealing financial information from people not aware of the
perils of the internet, so be aware of what phishing
and spoofing is all about before you give anyone online your information. I did buy
several gifts online this year. Most internet sites work under the same
concept; a shopping cart software program, where you can look through their
online catalog, click on products you want to buy, add them to your shopping
cart, and then check out and buy when you’re finished. At least
that’s the way it’s supposed to work. But the
first internet shopping site I went to allowed me to select something and add
it to my shopping cart, but when I went to change the quantity of the item I
wanted to purchase to 2 instead of 1, it didn’t work. When I clicked on
the little Plus 1 Icon to increment the number I wanted to buy, it actually
subtracted it instead of adding it. Thinking this was an error unique to this
shopping site, I just sent them an email saying they should check into this
problem, and went on to another site. But at the next site I ran into the
same problem; I could buy 1 of something, but not 2 or more. Again I sent an
email and moved on to still another site and placed an order, but on this
site I only needed one of the items. Later I
got 2 conflicting emails back from the sites I had emailed about my problem. The first
one went into a long detailed explanation of how there had to be something
wrong with my computer, and I was probably infected with a virus or spyware
or some program that was the problem. The 2nd
email from another site knew exactly what the problem was, and told me to
enable Cookies in my browser, which I have always turned off for privacy
reasons. As soon as I enabled cookies – in my new Firefox
browser and my old IE Browser, the shopping carts worked fine. If you
don’t know what a cookie is – not the eating kind of course
– you can find out about them at http://www.cookiecentral.com .
Cookies are an integral part of the internet’s design and structure;
initially created to make things better and easier, but unfortunately
exploited again by the bad guys into becoming one of the major privacy issues
today. So once
your computer gets all the Christmas cookies it needs for you to do your
online last minute shopping, it might be a good idea to turn that feature off
again. Hoping that you’ve been good and that
Santa leaves you that one special toy you’ve been hoping for, For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2004 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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