Paul Dowjat

Professor Booth

Internet Communications

24 April 2006

Staying Safe Online

This article focuses on nine steps that describe how to be safe online, as the title state, when you are dealing with viruses, spam and things of that nature. These nine steps include protecting your email address, using spam/spyware filters, using a firewall, block instant message spare, to resist from clicking on any pop up windows, blocking images that appear in emails, be suspicious of email attachments, read and understand privacy polices, and forward spare to your ISP (Internet service provider). Spam and viruses are a big deal and can cause a lot of harm to your computer and the programs that are on it. These steps will help computers users be able to cut down on spam and viruses that appear on their computer at home or work. This article is from a reputable source and is published by the State legislatures in 2006. This brief article focuses in on spam and nine details steps that will help a computer user be safe from harming their computer.

Online Safety at School

This article relates the safety of the internet with children at school and at home. As shown in this article, children are safer online at school than they are at their own home. In most schools, children are closely monitored by librarians, teachers, and specialists while they are on the computers, which is only for a short period of time. Schools also usually block instant messaging, which most sexual predators are contacted through, and they also filter out and deny access to certain websites, such as pornography and violent sites. To be safe, this article strongly enforces to know what type of protection your child’s school has by asking what their privacy policy is, what type of filtering they have, what is the consequence if they is misconduct of any kind, and if they do and how they monitor and record children’s activity online, which shows which websites they were on.  This article goes into detail of how to still watch your child and be involved in their internet use even at school.

Protecting Privacy

This article mainly focuses in on privacy on a computer. It talks about how actual persons are not directly linked, only the computers used. As the years have been going by, computers and the people that use them are becoming easier and easier to identify. Things like finding the local weather through your zip code, and receiving your horoscope by entering your birth date, and putting this information together make it easier to put together a persons identify. The rest of the article goes into detail about how to protect your privacy by using cookie control (rejecting them), never putting any type of information in anywhere, whether is be your zip code birth date and of course your name, and lastly through services and be very careful of where your sign yourself up to. People are stealing someone’s else’s identity all the time, and there is no law against it online, as this article shows. There isn’t any internet privacy and not to much is being done to try and stop it.

Top Ten Spam Control Tools

This article is similar to Online Safety. This article directly looks at spam and its effects on your computer. It gives ten steps on how to cut down and get rid of the harm. The steps are to get an advanced email protector, scan your email, bounce back spam emails, the next four steps all involve software that you can buy to kill and eliminate and control spam, and to get a spam scanner and filters all spam that runs in and out. 

It pays to be Paranoid Online

This website is a little different from the others but shows how much privacy has decreased and there is little protection on what still is there. There have been all types of laws and alliances that computer companies have been trying to make to be able to protect their consumers and make the internet safer, but as it seems to be nothing is working. This article takes specific example from the 1900’s that show the efforts of companies to protect privacy and consumers and to improve privacy policies.