Email Communication and Internet Security Study Group
In opening, we thanked the Salish people for use of this
beautiful land.
The session started off with a “In the News” item. Seems
like Canada’s
spy agencies are not only saving meta data but also sharing it with other spy
agencies around the world. Amanda Connolly writes in ipolitics.ca “…a
pair of reports that slammed the Communications Security Establishment for
breaking the law and sharing Canadians’ metadata …” We talked about this
for a few minutes and generally agreed that the spy agency’s claims that they
never shared the actual content of Canadians’ emails but only shared the meta
data was completely ludicrous.
We were supposed to get a presentation from Mike. He’s a
DTES techie type that offers a $150 Smartphone with free telephone service for
life. As this seemed too good to be true we invited him to give us the
presentation but he failed to show up. The facilitator said he would try to
coax the free-from-the-telephone-companies guy into coming back to the shark
tank so we could tear his scam apart. That could be interesting.
We had a brief summary of last session’s main topics and then
started into Internet Security stuff.
We talked about the panhandler from Los Angeles who started accepting credit
cards swipes on his Smartphone as a measure to counteract passersby’s claims to
only carry plastic. It’s a free app, why not. It’s just a matter of time when
someone will figure out how to capture your credit card data with a swipe app
and then industrious homeless people will be out of luck with this innovation.
One of the participants was asking about the various types
of Internet marketing methods that are currently being deployed. We narrowed it
down to search engine marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing
and email marketing. This study group will only focus on the search engine and
social media marketing options as the other two are becoming more obsolete each
year.
We did talk a moment about robo-calling. This can be an
effective means of communication and marketing however it comes with risks. We
learned that in Google Hangouts, users can place telephone calls anywhere
across Canada
for free. The process of making Skype or G+ Hangout telephone calls could be
automated, we concluded giving a bit of validity to our free-phone elixir
salesman.
We had a demonstration on what was meta data in both an
email message and in an HTML page. One identifies locators and users while the
other is used to give the search engine or the Internet browser instructions.
We looked at the HTML Title tag situated in the <HEAD> and was instructed
that in fact this could be the most important tag in your entire web document.
We talked about how the search engine, the operating system
and some software programs are design to collect intelligence from its users.
This data was suggested to not only be used for security reasons but was likely
for sale to advertisers in order to better target ad delivery.
We looked at how easy it was to place search engine ads on
our own web pages and to generate residual income from web traffic that choose
to go elsewhere. It was surmised that click-through fraud could easily be
perpetrated by encourage others to click ads. We examined several ways in which
web pages are intended to trick visitors into clicking through ads. We talked
about “Internet visitors”, a new IT position that was created to exclusively go
to web pages and click through advertisement. It was mentioned that most of
these fraudsters have their operations overseas but do have satellite centres
clustered throughput North America in order to
appear to be more local. Unfortunately some Internet marketers take advantage
of slave and even child labour in order to profit from click-through revenue
generation.
We went through various functions of the <HEAD> and
the <BODY> sections of web pages, looking particularly at meta, title,
link, image, paragraph and heading tags.
We talked about Google's "engineering glitch" that caused its Google Mobile to capture household wireless network passwords while in the process of simply taking pictures of houses on the street. Fred concurred that if Streetview had this technology then what the heck was the Google mobile doing in our Parliament buildings? Fred also made us aware of the revelations that Edward Snowden (NSA whistleblower) leaked regarding tech companies including Google, Yahoo and Facebook that were working closely with American spy agencies by allowing unfeathered access to their servers.
We talked about Google's "engineering glitch" that caused its Google Mobile to capture household wireless network passwords while in the process of simply taking pictures of houses on the street. Fred concurred that if Streetview had this technology then what the heck was the Google mobile doing in our Parliament buildings? Fred also made us aware of the revelations that Edward Snowden (NSA whistleblower) leaked regarding tech companies including Google, Yahoo and Facebook that were working closely with American spy agencies by allowing unfeathered access to their servers.
Wil gave a very brief glimpse into his understanding of
cyber culture and its impact on contemporary society. It was a good enough
tease for his upcoming presentation on this topic February 27, 2016.
There was a brief discussion on how the search engine now uses localization and personalization to offer a more accurate search result for its users.
There was a brief discussion on how the search engine now uses localization and personalization to offer a more accurate search result for its users.
Finally, we examined a couple of the more traditional ways
that people attempt to scam others out of money using the Internet.
The module closed with a draw for two free meals at the Evelyn
Saller Centre.
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