Day 24

What are some common internet scams? Example: click scams, international modem dialing, paypal fraud, pump-and-dump stock fraud, advance fee fraud. Nigerian 419, Spanish Prisoner, craigslist pay first scam. How do these scams work? How does the internet/web make this kind of fraud easier to perpetrate?

I don't know much about internet scams, so I'm excited to learn about them. When I was doing some preliminary research I found that internet scams can also be referred to as internet fraud, which is a more proper title. Internet fraud "refers generally to any type of fraud scheme that uses one or more components of the Internet - such as chat rooms, e-mail, message boards, or Web sites - to present fraudulent solicitations to prospective victims, to conduct fraudulent transactions, or to transmit the proceeds of fraud to financial institutions or to other connected with the scheme"(http://www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/internet/).

Here are some sites that I found:

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/common-internet-scams.html
http://www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/internet/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_fraud***
***Spanish Prisoner and Nigerian 419 examples of these
http://www.chiff.com/a/dotcons.htm
http://www.419legal.org/internet-scams-general-discussion/#

Day 22

How does email work?

An email is simply a text message being sent over the internet. Originally they were fairly small, but with the technology of attachments, email messages can be quite large now. All email messages go through some sort of email client. These clients include Microsoft Outlook, Eudora and more. Regardless of the type of client you use, they all do 4 things: display the header of your message, select specific messages to read full body text, create and send new messages and lastly add attachments.

Here is a diagram of simple email server--if you have an email server, you can send and receive emails.









A someone wanted to send an email over to someone over a simple email server, this is what would be going on:

the person would connect to their email client and write an email. The email server would have a list of accounts that could receive emails. Every account would have a text file, meaning the server would have a text file in its directory. Mine would be layfield.TXT. Someone who wanted to send a message to me would write up their email and select me as a recipient. Then hit send. When send is it, the email client connects to the email server and give it the receivers name, senders name and text of email. The server formats the email and adds it to the layfield.TXT file.

Once more emails start coming in, the files are saved in the order they are received. Then when I go to check my email, I can click on the headers and decide what I want to read in full.

Today, people use the real email system to send and receive emails with 2 different servers. These 2 servers are SMTP server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and POP3 Server or an IMAP server. The SMTP deals with outgoing mail and the POP3 or IMAP handle incoming mail.

here is a diagram of the real email system:
















information gotten from: http://communication.howstuffworks.com/email.htm

Day 18

net neutrality basics:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2108558&page=1
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/102209-fcc-takes-first-step-toward.html
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/174296/net_neutrality_faq_whats_in_it_for_you.html

opponents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality#Opponents

verizon's point of view:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10379932-266.html
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Government-IT/Verizon-Net-Neutrality-Is-a-Mistake-Pure-and-Simple-665943/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHTt0vW4bmE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9jkFX3ncTE
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/verizons-seidenberg-blasts-net-neutrality-debate-continues/2009-10-21?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss&cmp-id=OTC-RSS-FW0

FCC:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/fcc-net-neutrality/
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/net-neutrality-announcement/
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/fcc-expected-to-announce-support-of-net-neutrality-monday/

Compromising?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10380709-265.html
http://policyblog.verizon.com/Tags.aspx?tags=net%20neutrality