Violet Phua 3E2

INTERNET-

ADDICTION!

Honestly speaking, I was once an internet addict who spent hours and hours sitting in front of my personal computer. My highest record was 10 continuous hours of non-stop gaming but of course, it’s during one of the December Holidays. I think that it is sort like an irresistible temptation that’s stopping me from getting myself off the seats. Surely, I had gotten scolding after scolding by my parents but their scolding only make me feel guilty for a moment. The next day, I continued with my gaming and once again I got scolding by my parents. That did not stop me from gaming.

What exactly stopped me from gaming?

It was when the date to school reopen is only one week and I am still having tons of incomplete homework! Then, I realized that gaming won’t benefits but instead harming me. Not only I got to rush with my homework but also, I lost my perfect eye sight which I have regretted greatly. But the best thing for now is , I had fulfilled the promissory I made to my mum to only use the computer during weekends provided that I completed all my homework not to neglect my studies. Overall, I really hope that there will be lesser internet addicts or in fact no internet addicts where people will not forget the existence of our real life.  

Video on internet addiction.

Violet Phua 3E2

Scams, Spams

With rising net users, Internet scams and spams have been on the rise!

Scams

                     

However, I rarely receive scam emails and whenever I received an email from an unknown email address; I will not open the mail but instead delete it from my mail box to prevent myself to be another victim of those scams and spams online.

Internet makes it easier for legitimate pursuits; it also makes it easier for scammers, con artists, and other online miscreants to carry out their virtual crimes - impacting our real life finances, security, and peace of mind. These Internet scams are constantly evolving - here are the most common today.

1. Phishing scams

2. Nigerian 419 Scams3. Greeting Card Scams

4. Shopper Needed Check Fraud Scam

5. Reshipping and Payment Processing Fraud

6. Lottery Winning Scams

7. Pump and Dump Stock Scams

8. Fraudulent Link Scams

9. Killer Spam: Hitman Email Threatens Recipients

10. Scareware Scams                                          

Spams

I have received quite a number of spams emails before and they are usually from an unknown email address claiming that they are from a particular company or organization. However, their main purpose is to sell deals or getting us to sign up which I find those mails plain annoying.

We must remember that when we received spam mails they should be ignored and we can simply delete the e-mails or click "junk e-mail" in our e-mail client so the server knows these are coming from a spammer.

Another thing to note is that we should never reply to a spammer. Even if we reply with something like "stop e-mailing me", that e-mail won't be read and instead we will simply get more e-mail and don't even click on the link that says "click here to remove your e-mail from our e-mail list" as email address won't be removed from the e-mail list but instead will be added back into their database.

Overall, we should beware of online scammers and spammers and think twice before we give out any of our personal particulars. We should be alert at all times to prevent ourselves from being the next “target” or “victim” of the scams or spams. Readers please bear in mind that prevention is the best precaution. Video on facebook scams.

Koh Jun Sheng, 4A3

Personally I feel that Cyber bullying is the use of e-mail, instant messaging (E.g. Msn/Skype/Yahoo Messenger & other messengers), chat rooms, handphones, or other forms of information technology to deliberately harass, threaten, or intimidate us. Cyber bullying is often done by teenagers, who have increasing access to these technologies. It could also be sending of malicious codes, having text wars, impersonation, flaming & bad online polls.

I have encountered a lot of cyber bullies and usually they are called Keyboard Warriors. Keyboard warriors would only talk big in front of their computer screen which is the virtual world & they are usually timid in the actual world. I was once a cyber bully, I used to scold people online, make them scared of me & I even escorted money from them but I have changed for the better and now I would always help people as much as I could when they are bullied online.


I have always take cyber-bullies as cowards & they are egoistic. I would not comment on them but I personally advice them to change for the better. It is not worth your time being a cyber bully as you can get nothing at the end of the day. The most you can get is being proud in front of your online friends.


Thanks for reading. :)

Alex Tan 2E1

Privacy is a huge concern to many citizens, customers, patients, internet users and telephone subscribers especially as the lines are being blurred between professional and private lives. My online privacy had never been compromised before. If I am not wrong, most of the people in the world had their privacy compromised before. I will explain to you about how Information Privacy is compromised.

It is the right of individuals, groups and institutions to determine for themselves, when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated to others. Many people are unaware that when we go online, we leave an electronic record of our movements—and we can unwittingly provide personal information to people and organizations that track such data. To avoid the invasion of privacy, we should always clear up Internet cookies & we should not give information to websites that is not safe especially our credit card number. Many people are simply unaware of just how much of their personal data is being stored and processed, whether that is in the form of cookie trails that track their internet usage, video from surveillance systems, such as Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), or the purchases they make using credit cards and company loyalty cards.

Hence, Individuals must take control of their own online identities if they are to avoid becoming victims of online crime.

Lawrence 2E1

Everyone knows what bullying means. It can be being called horrible names or picked on because of things like how you look or act, your family or your race and religion. It can be people telling lies about you or being left out and ignored. It can be people threatening you to make you feel scared and they might make you give them things or make you do things you do not want to.



I had a friend who had encountered cyber bullies before, I advised him to talk to someone instead of letting it upset him. It is important to talk to parents, teachers, friends and other people around you. I always remember that it is not our fault if we are being bullied and cyber bullying is not allowed, and that there is always something we can do about it. If we are being bullied, we should always start by telling someone about it.


Cyber bullying can happen through email, chat rooms, instant messenger or websites and blog-spaces, as well as by text messages. Cyber bullying can happen even when you are at home or on your own when you use the internet or have you Mobile phone switched on. Sometimes, with cyber bullying you might not even know who is doing it because they can pretend to be someone else!


Cyber bullying can make us feel very bad. Being bullied can make us feel upset, embarrassed, sad or scared. It can even make us feel ill! And I personally feel that those who encountered cyber bullies might start avoiding classes or skipping school to avoid the bullies if they are people you already know. This can make it difficult to concentrate on our school work.

About Online Privacy, my online privacy had never been compromised because I seldom give out my private information freely online as I feel that it is not an ideal choice. It is very important to keep our passwords private as if we spread our passwords around, people might be able to hack into our accounts and they might be able to use our privacy to threaten us!

More entries!

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Alex Tan 2E1

 Online Scams &Internet Addiction

Online scamming is very common nowadays & being one of their victims is easy. Scammers send you an e-mail that tries to lure you to a legitimate-looking Web site where you'll be asked to enter personal information. The thing is, 99% of them are fake. If you fall for it, someone is ready to take your Social Security Number and start opening credit card accounts.

Internet addiction is another problem of the youngster nowadays Internet addiction, or, more broadly, overusing of the internet, problematic computer use is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Online activities which are done in person would be considered troublesome. Examples are gambling and shopping online. Other such as reading or playing computer games, are troubling only to the extent that these activities interfere with normal life. Addiction of pornography, gaming, blogging and online shopping might be harmful and unsafe to student like us.
Cyber wellness education is very important for us as the internet is a totally full of danger and predator. And I totally agree to the poster of the werewolf that says “beware of the internet”.

Lawrence 2E1

Spams.

Yes I had always received scam and spam emails from unknown senders and it is still going on now. What I did was that I filtered the spam emails and I would report them. I have some ways to share with you guys on how to prevent spam and scam emails based on what I have learned previously when I attended a computer course. We should avoid posting or showing our emails online on public websites. We should always disguise our email address on our webpage, and we could also create a dummy email account for public posting. We should avoid using Hotmail/MSN/AOL as our primary mail provider as spammers just flood all common usernames on widely-used mail systems.

I’ll also share some tips with you on how I filter the spam and scam emails. If you are getting a few spam messages per day, we should just delete them as it isn’t worth our time fixing them up. I would also use built-in spam filters for Web-based email accounts. Many e-mail programs have built-in routines for identifying suspected spam. Hotmail's is particularly useful, probably because Hotmail is such a breeding ground for spam. You'll find Hotmail's Inbox Protector under the Options tab and Yahoo Mail has strong built-in, automatic spam protection.

I have never heard any of my friends telling me about people getting scammed due to the scam emails. I have only heard them talking about being scammed in games. I would advise you to delete an email without opening it when you receive an email from a person that you don’t know and especially when the title looks weird. For this case, an Internet Security virus scanner might be useful.

Koh Jun Sheng 4A3

Internet Addiction

Internet addiction is common around the world. Things might turn out serious. I have a lot of friends who are Internet addicts. They would cancel all their upcoming events and just go home after school just to play online games. I was an internet addict before but I managed to conquer it. Excessive online gaming really caused me trouble. I would scold my parents when they ask me to stop playing, I will try to drag as long as possible so that I could play longer, I always play secretly at home when nobody was around, I went to look for a person in reality when I was unhappy with him/her in a game & I even went bought prepaid cards which costed me about a total of $800 for the game which will enhance the excitement of the game. I really regretted it but if you are an Internet or Gaming addict, don’t worry. I will tell you ways to stop being an addict. It was hard but it is worth it.

Here are some symptoms that I personally feel if you are an internet addict.

1)      You would lose track of time (Amount of time that you were online for)

2)      You would have trouble completing tasks in school or at home. (Always talking about games in school during lessons)

3)      You would neglect your family members and friends.

4)      You would feel guilty and defensive about your internet use.

5)      First thing you do in the morning everyday would be turning on your computer and play games.

If you are an internet addict, these are some ways from me so that you can stop internet addiction. Parents can use these ways too. My parents used some of the ways to stop me from playing.

1)      Set goals and trim down the hours of play time slowly.

2)      Practice the opposite. Change the timelines and try to ask him/her to study before he starts playing.

3)      External stoppers. It would cause the computer to shut down immediately after a few hours of play time & you can set the hours.

4)      Use reminder cards to remind them to stop playing and what would internet addiction lead to.

5)      Ask him/her to go out as a friend. Encourage him to go out with you guys.

6)      Do not talk to him about games and online activities commonly.

7)      If he or she is really uncontrollable. Bring him/her to attend counselling from our school’s counsellor which is Mdm Persis Tan. Uncontrollable would be like attacking & locking up. 

8)      Control yourself. It is worth it… 

Thank you for reading. 

Violet Phua 3E2

Internet Security

Online Purchases

For me, for my whole life I have never made online purchases using a credit card as I knew about the danger of purchasing online. Though, making online purchases is easy and convenient where there is an increase in the number of online shoppers. However, even if we really need to purchase something online we really must be careful and check if there is a security lock on the page before us typing in our credit card’s codes on web. It is because we never know if there are hackers hiding behind the screen waiting for us to type in our credit card’s codes so if we typed in our codes “BINGO” those hackers are able to hack into our account now. Hence, I personally object the idea of making online purchases. It might be an ideal shopping net to hunt for things but the net definitely won’t be an ideal place for paying. Even if there are things for us to purchase online using credit card, we should seek permission from our parents to ensure double safeness from becoming another “victim”.

Violet Phua 3E2

 Internet Security

Click-jacking is a malicious technique of tricking web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. Vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms, a click-jacking takes the form of embedded code or script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function.

There are more and more web users who got “cheated” by click-jacking each year but definitely, I’m not one of the “victims”. However, when surfing on the net often, there will be some advertisements asking net-surfers to click on it where the advertisement seems no harm. The advertisements that I often saw on web are something like “There’s a VAIO LAPTOP waiting for you!” some users might think that it’s a great opportunities for them to try their luck and see they really can get the laptop as they see no harms to it. There was once, one of my friends who was unsure if she really became a “victim” of click-jacking as she clicked on an unknown website and she even posted all her particulars as required by the site safely, nothing happened to her. She learnt her lesson and became more careful when she need to click on any unknown web.

Koh jun sheng 4A3

have never made any online purchases using a credit card before because it isn’t an ideal way for me to deal things & I don’t have friends that purchase items on the Internet using a credit card too. I feel that it isn’t ideal based on the some of the points that I’ll state but there are other negative points.

1. A big disadvantage of online shopping is that we do not see the item physically till it arrives and it might have a defect on it.
2. We all know that it takes a few days for our items to arrive after our payment. Hence, we might be excited about the item that we bought for the first few days before it arrives. But we might be less excited then compared to the day when we bought on that day we made the payment.
3. There would also be shipping charges applied but there are also some websites that offers free shipping. This is considered a bad point if we want to save money buy purchasing items online.
4. If you computer is infected with a spy ware. People might get to know your particulars and your personal data like example your credit card information but we cannot put the blame on the sellers.
5. There are risks of online fraud too.

Koh Jun Sheng 4A3

One of my friends had encountered a click-jacking virus before & I managed to help my friend fix it by following the steps in the following website http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/firefox-stop-clickjacking-attack.html . I’ll explain what I understand about it. A Click jacking virus, or click jack attack, is an attacker to collect an infected user’s clicks use vulnerability. The attacker can force the user to do all sort of things from adjusting the user's computer settings to unwittingly sending the user to websites that might have malicious code. Also, by taking advantage of Adobe Flash or JavaScript, an attacker could even place a button under or over a legitimate button, making it difficult for users to detect. A virus scanner might be useful. I personally advice you guys to get the best virus protector which is Bitdefender and I am using it myself too. It is rated as one of the top virus scanner. It slows down your computer at times as it is updating and occurs especially during start up. Just have a scan once a month and it will help a little.

ALex Tan 2E1

                                        internet sercurity
Click jacking is essentially hijacking a click. This means that you will think that you are clicking on one thing, when in reality you're clicking on another. This probably doesn’t sound like much of a big deal on the surface, until you consider that you might think you’re clicking “submit” on your bank’s website, and really you have just given your username and password to somebody who plans to drain your account in the next five minutes.


The real sticky widget in this situation is that you could be clicking a button that looks completely normal and is even on a completely legitimate site. You can actually be on your bank’s website and still get click jacked.

But luckily I had never encountered click-jacking viruses neither my friends.

One of my friends had made an online purchase with his father’s credit card before as he had not enough cash to pay for the goods that he wanted to buy. He got scolded when his father realized that.


I personally feel that online purchases are not very secured as Internet scammers have been working very diligently on new and more interesting ways to separate you from your money or information. So, I would rather purchase goods from shops than purchase them from online.

lawrence 2E1

                                                 Internet sercurity
No, I have not encountered a click-jacking virus before but I know a friend that had encountered it before. He clicked it as he thought it was a link that was sent by his friend.


Click-jacking is able as it seems harmless features of pages can be used to perform unexpected actions.

A click-jacked page bluffs a user into doing undesired actions by clicking on a concealed link. On a click-jacked page, the attackers show a set of dummy buttons, and then load another page over it in a transparent layer. The users think that they are clicking the visible buttons, while they are actually performing actions on the hidden page. The hidden page may be an authentic page, and therefore the attackers can trick users into performing actions which the users never intended to do and there is no way of tracing such actions.

These are the things that I know about a click-jacking virus.

Brandon Yue 2E1

                                              Scams,spams and internet addiction


Yes, I have received spam emails very often. But usually I ignored them as they might have contained of such dirty stuff or viruses. I do not bother about spam emails because I am afraid that my computer would have some technical problems. It is sad to say that I have a friend who clicks on this “email” and unfortunately for him, his computer has virus. I felt sad for him and I felt so useless because I could not be of any help to him. Fortunately for me, I am not an internet addict. I do not even want to be an internet addict as I am afraid that it would affect my grades. I think that those who spam the emails should stop because they are only harming the other people. They should think twice before spamming the emails like me.

Luckily for me I had studied the benefits of cyber wellness.

Thanks

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Durga 4E3

Yes! I do agree that like any other ordinary person, i am inevitably addicted to the internet. but, not exactly for gaming but rather for simply surfing the net. it is one of hobbies to allow myself to get transferred from one website to another in the name of links. it is quite fascinating to me that by just one click, one can actually get to know so much more about other people out there in the world. i was and still am addicted to Youtube where you can access so many videos from all over the world. all i have to do is click a certain keyword and there i have with me hundreds of videos suiting my taste.."simply great! wow!"would be my thought every time i view such videos. however, i was spending too much of time on surfing the net. my parents did get me a laptop with the promise that i wouldn't abuse my privilege. i did remember the ultimatum set on me and i tried my best to limit my internet usage and also keep that usage specifically for my studies. it was quite a struggle when i found myself being unable to avoid sufring the net.. somehow, with the help and distractions of my family, i managed to balance my time between necessary web surfing and leisure surfing! now i am perfectly capable of managing my time on the net and using it for the right reasons!

Durga 4E3

I do receive spam emails often but thankfully they are always properly done away with by my email service provider. So, the only way I see them is by going into my spam emails account. Otherwise, there is never any contact with spam emails in my case. However, spams are always a regular sight in most websites where they do not support proper security formats while creating their web page. spam emails are really unavoidable. But they are not too strong to fight off as well. Whenever there is a spam email in my account, i simply shift it to my junk mails account where all emails are deleted after a time limit of three days. Many of my friends are smart enough to respond appropriately to spam emails.. However, there are some who fall prey to such scams. Recently, many people have been victims of such spamming activities. It is quite sad that even though we use the internet almost every day to cater to our various educational needs, we still have to encounter such irresponsible behaviour online. Well, it is an undeniable truth that not everything in life can be perfect.

Evan Koh 2E1

Cyber-bullying is well-known around the world. Some of my friends were victims of cyber-bullying. I've never been cyber-bullied before and I'm not a cyer-bully either. My friends were cyber-bullied mostly because of them accidentally insulting the bully, accidentally did something wrong to the bully, and sometimes the bully does it just for "fun".

Anyone can be cyber-bullied, even friends, relatives and teachers maybe. Cyber-bullying can come in forms of threats, insults and more. So just be more careful of offending another person. You might just get cyber-bullied. But if you are being cyber-bullied, consult a counsellor like Mdm Persis, a teacher like your form teacher, close friends or your parents.

I feel that cyber-bullies are cowards. Cowards I say. If you want to bully, why not bully in reality? Why bully using the internet? Cyber-bullies are cowards, usually timid and bullies to get back at the person they hate or just want somethings valuable that they can use like informations. Cyber-bullying is known worldwide and is known to be one of the most cowardly acts. Cyber-bullies usually insult their victims or threaten their victims. Such childish acts can cause victims to go under depression from non-stop insults which may cause them to do foolish things like cutting, starving, and more horrible outcomes. That's why I know that cyber-bullies are cowards and if you know any of your friends are being cyber-bullied or you are cyber-bullied, don't be afraid of telling someone that can help. Don't worry, cyber-bullies are cowards..