The Criminalising of Communication
Nobody really likes scam merchants, ripping of hundreds of hopeful usually shy people, who get lured into a corner to be electronically shaken down.
Here are some electronic scams you can observe as they get cracked down upon by the FBI:
- Nigerian Scam Letters - if you get a respectul, begging, possibly very genuine sounding, polite, too good to be true offer, don't worry. It is almost certainly a scam, or a scam net. Either way, it is not wise to respond to them. Perhaps keep them in a pre-trash folder so you can see if you get the same one again. Who knows, one day they may be collectable trash. Somehow I doubt it.
- Pyramid Schemes - Somebody, just on the edge of complete insanity it seems, goes through this raging fit of how to make a million dollars and believes the desperate claims now a 14 page email rave so much that they are offered for "five lousey bucks". You send your money off, and none of your friends are suckers.
- Incomplete Web sites - Someone sells a webservice that provides a web interface. It does not work on one of the Big Four Browsers.
- Pyramid Ideas like report distribution (basically selling someone's scheme. At least people do buy something but they are merely) usually propagation of scams.
- Beware of Web Black Holes. Cyberware should be tested. Even then, new users find ways to make it fail. Cybercriminals find ways to exploit those failures, and now become you on the web. Maybe do some of your on-line banking, maybe buy a few things.
- Impersonation. Identity theft can be made impossible with a few simple bits of software. How expensive to build absolute security into your next application? It is not that hard, according to these guys.
- Fake Banks - On Line Banks do not necessarily work. If they go bankrupt, who do you claim your money from?
- Solution: Deal through a payment gateway that secures you from the internet. The largest and most trusted of these is PayPal.
PayPal do pay their vendors, with a US$25 minimum transfer.
Their exchange rates are caculated in America and may cost more than you expect, and this encourages you to hold and spend PayPal (US$) dollars in credit at PayPal. Hence PayPal achieve international leverage.
We have received thousands of dollars from our websites, safely, via PayPal. Because we can vouch for their on line success, it gives the user security in the transaction. We have tried and will report on an alternative to PayPal with a similar set of rules but so far a poor response time.
Money on the web requires proof positive of identity, and that can be achieved by locking information together. This is done with complex data matrix maths that results in a one way encryption of the data, and its timestamp.
This is used as a sort of alphabet soup cypher to strain the message through. The result is a secure stamp.
Such computer forensics can employ a filter, and listening in onto the internet can find and trace connections and a history of connection. It therefore becomes also true that the citizenry are more at risk of attack by the state at this time than before.
The idea of tracking every citizen comes from a Government that feels out of control of forces active in the community.
It would seem that individual control is lost in direct proporation to the public freedom granted. Is that a bad thing? The heads of state are bound by protocol while gutter snipes snare rats. It has to be that way, according to the politicians. They need life's little luxuries to rule.
Who is actually in control, the watchers, or the watched? It bears considering that if any deed performed on the internet is verifiable; that this changes the role of the "watchers" from enforcer/restrictor to that of participator. Public thinking can be replaced with fake public thinking, just like it can on any other medium.
The politics are guided by a value to the minds that act on it.
