Demotivation

I did this one with despair.

Iconic You

You can't really say it's an iconic picture but at least it's me. I just played around here with a few different programs here such as picnik, photoshop and wordfoto. 

Future Wars are Fought on the Net

An attack against Estonia took place at ten o'clock in the evening without bombs, without tanks and without soldiers. Instead an army of computers sent in 2007 was the first wave of electronic "denial of service" attacks against government sites. The Estonian defense minister Jaak Aaviksoo discovered the attacks when he tried to read the news on the country's biggest online newspaper. When he tried to enter, nothing happened, and just like with most of the countries other sites, the newspaper's website was overloaded and had collapsed. In the following days the attacks intensified against the government websites and against banks. Estonia was the victim o a cyberattack. The attack against Estonia in 2007 was the first cyber war but certainly not the last.

In 2008 Israel and Palestine hackers was at war with each other and Russia invaded their neighbor country, Georgia. In 2010 Chinese hackers had hacked Google and gained access to a number of email accounts of human rights activists and journalists. I believe Hillary Clinton said something along the lines that an attack on a nations network is an attack on everyone.

There is no definitions of cyber war and many questions therefore arise; can you compare attack in cyberspace with an attack on the ground and is a war without physical destruction at all a war? Iran and China is blocking public access to the internet for instance. War is not only about wining the battle on the battlefield but also about controlling the information available and people's opinions. In cyberspace we can  see the blocking of websites to keep people in some sort of restrain. It therefore seems important that there is a cyber defense developed since our lives are more and more taking place in cyberspace.  

Google Translate Fail

Just like a lot of poeple out there, I find google translate quite useless. It's good for translating single words sometimes or to get the gist of a sentence or text, but to translate something 100% correct is almost impossible. I started off translating a few words and sentences from Swedish to English that I would imagine to be difficult to translate. Those were words and sentences that you find in all languages but that cannot translate into another. Some languages simply have their own words for things based on what culture and traditions that country has. This culture or tradition might not exist in a another country and is therefore impossible to translate into that other language.

The sentence I have translated here are "denna rätt är lagom kryddad", which kind of means; this dish is well spiced. The word "lagom" is a word that only exist in Swedish. It means something that is in between too much and too little, in other words it's something that is middle-ground. Sweden is the country that is famous for always being in the middle. You should not make more money than anyone else, you should never do better than anyone else, never be louder, funnier etc. And if you are making more money, doing better, being louder, being funnier, God forbid that you let anyone know about it. This is why living there can be quite frustrating. Everyone should be equal and the same to the point where it become ridiculous. In many ways it is similar to Japan. I thought therefore that a sentence containing this word would demonstrate this. The very simple word for dish has also been mistaken with "law".

A classic example of when google translate has been suspectedly used is when going to restaurants, bars and shops here in Japan. Some of the signs that have been put up is hilarious and has clearly not been double checked by anyone.. This is very funny..



   

Spubble

This assignment was pretty fun to do, and also very easy. I used Picnik to upload, crop and put the bubble and text all together.

Question for final

As an addition to my previous blog post, here is a question for the final exam.

Q: What is "Websense" and what does it offer?

Privacy & identity online

It's scary to think that everything we do online can be tracked or watched by someone else. Everything we do online is stored and saved and can get back at us at any time. Malware in programs and apps that we use are also getting much more common and increasing with an exponantional rate as internet is used more and more for everything we do in daily life. There are a number of things that can be tracked about what we do online and I thought I would write about some of that here because although this might be old news to some, a lot of people don't have a clue.

They know where you live:
Open your browser and type www.google.com in the address bar. When you press enter, the page that appears is the Japanese google page, www,google.jp. How can google know that you live in Japan? Google cannot only figure out in which country you live, but also in what city. Other sites may be able to do this too. The technology that makes it possible is called geo-location. There are companies that specialize in helping sites to link geographic information to Ip addresses. The companies have large databases with information on where routers and servers are located and what IP addresses they have.
Even if your IP address is not in the database, companies can still make a very good guess on where you live.

They know how you surf:
Whois, is simply stated, a directory of information that makes it possible to determine to which internet supplier a certain IP address belongs.

They know how your computer looks like:
When you visit a website, your web browser gives out information about your computer. The idea is that the website will be able to to use the information to customize web pages for you. The information disclosed is on what web browser you use, what operating system you have and what resolution and how many colors your monitor is set to display.

They can see what you're looking for:
The American security company Spi Dynamics has shown that with simple means, a website can find out which searches you've done on the internet and what sites you've visited. Having said that, maybe there isn't such a big reason to worry though. Technology cannot find out all the sites you visited or all searches you have done but can only be used to confirm that you visited a particular site or have done a particular search. Spi Dynamics says that it is bad enough and provides a frightening example of how technology could be used. The FBI would secretly be able to check if a person who visits its website at some earlier time have done a search on the word "bomb-making" on google for example and would then be able to register the person's IP address.

They can see your clipboard:
A site can also see what's on your clipboard in windows. In this case it is best to have in mind for next time you cut or copy information in windows, otherwise you risk that any website you visit snaps up the information without you knowing it. Enter a piece of text in Word or Notepad, highlight the text and copy it to the clipboard. Open your browser and go to spyber, a little way down the page is now displayed the content of your clipboard. Basically never have any important personal information such as user name, password or account number on the clipboard because it's very easy for others to view that information.


The question iv'e been asking myself though lately, when you come to the point where you are scared of being tagged in a photo from previous weekend every monday for the whole world to see, is it worth using anymore? The problem with social networks like facebook and twitter are also of course that there are so many malicious links and virus spreads. Basically, every single step we take out in the world of cyberspace is being watched. I've tried keeping my facebook usage to a minimum these days and have privacy settings for everything and everyone and I intend to keep it that way.