Avoid Internet Theft Fraud and Phishing

•Internet Grey Areas
   by Daniel PunchThe Internet has opened up whole new avenues of freedom for people: freedom of information, thoughts and the ability to achieve anonymity while still being active in a community. This freedom has been latched onto by a large proportion of the Internet user base and has fuelled a desire for even more liberties. This in turn has given rise to the 'Internet Grey Areas', those little things that 'everyone' does but which aren't quite legally correct. A few examples are...

•Malicious Advertising
by Daniel Punch Advertising is a necessary irritant in the world today. You can't drive down the street without coming across an ad, either a billboard suspended over a road or a large poster plastered down the side of a bus. If you walk into a shopping centre it doesn't matter where you look, you see an advertisement of some kind. Even the tables in the food court now have ads embedded in them, and on my last trip to Melbourne I noticed that they were starting to embed flat screen TVs into...

•Fight 1337 Speak Please Help Save Our Language
   by Daniel Punch OMFG! W00+!!! Dat s0000000 Kewl!!!!1! Dat is teh LOL!!!!It's happening. The Internet is invading our lives and our minds and corrupting as it progresses. Shorthand is destroying our youths' spelling and grammar. In the worst cases these Internet phrases even are spilling over into every day life. I still shudder with horror remembering the day that someone actually said 'LOL' to me.I'm not some old crab fighting against the changes of the world. I'm 19 years old and studying...

•Protect Your System From the Internet Evils
   by Daniel PunchAds, Spyware and Popups: the Internet is an aggressively commercial place. Internet marketing is hugely profitable; owners of frequently visited websites can make a reasonable living just off a few banner ads placed on their site. Software was quickly developed that would attempt to block these ads from loading and being displayed leaving the Internet free from irritants so the user could just view the information that they were after. Not surprisingly the Internet fought...

•Free Legal Music Online
   by Daniel PunchAlmost everyone has heard about the massive crack down on Internet music piracy that has been occurring over the past few years. Napster was taken down (although it has now returned as a pay service), other file sharing programs now require users to pay for a license and the RIAA and other similar organizations are doing their best to hunt down copyright offenders and put an end to their crime sprees. The consumers on the other hand argue that their actions hurt nobody, that...

•Elements of Web Hosting
   by Daniel PunchWhen you first start out trying to get a site on the Internet everything seems so confusing. Obtuse acronyms flow freely through the 'Beginner Friendly' information sites and definitions can be hard to come across. The main reason for this is that the Internet and the process of getting a website online is really very simple, and once people get past the first stumbling steps they rarely remember the difficulty they once had, which leads to them being unable to understand the...

•Explore the Internet in a Whole New Way
   by Daniel PunchFor a long time now Microsoft's Internet Explorer has ruled as 'King of Internet browsers'. Like many of Microsoft's products an initially brutal marketing campaign pushed Internet Explorer into the mainstream's consciousness and from then on it was the logical, default choice. It's free with the operating system, works well, loads any page and is easy to use. Other web browsers soon faded into obscurity and sometimes even died in the shadow of the new king of the pack....

•Substitute the Internet for Your TV
by Daniel PunchI have fond memories of waking up early on Saturday mornings and softly tiptoeing out to the family room to watch early morning cartoons when I was in elementary school. Then in high school I became more interested in the action-oriented TV shows in the evening. A little while later, I found that I just didn't have the time to dedicate an hour or so a day to sitting and watching mindless entertainment at a given time slot, and so I no longer watched TV at all. Gone are my days...

•Get Started in Game Creation
   by Daniel Punch I’ve always loved video games, ever since I first played them on a friend’s computer in the afternoon after elementary school. There’s something almost magical about the fact that we can move images around and interact with virtual worlds, a living fantasy presented for us to interact with however we please. I’ve also always wanted to make games myself but, until recently, didn’t have the technical knowledge to do so. Now, I’m a second year software engineering student, so...