http://www.wtop.com/?nid=267&sid=2729726

The Internet is addictive and there are many clinical and scientific reasons for it, but my concern has always been for the moral and spiritual impact.  Any compulsive behavior can be harmful.  Internet addiction is harmful not only for the time wasted, but because it is a powerful visual media that strikes deep into our personality.  We think in images and visual presentations have more impact because we think in images.  And the visual message we get from the Internet is often self-destructive.

I am not speaking only about pornography and extreme violence, although those are certainly at the top of the list, I am speaking about the subtle messages we get from the Internet that are disguised as humor or entertainment, but are really bad, destructive behaviors.  I am certain that if a study were to be done on rudeness, we would find a significant increase in the bad behavior of children because of the Internet.  The same is true for bullying.  Stories of Internet bullies are now commonplace.

Add all this to the impact from movies, television and advertising and it is no wonder the church is losing ground.  With all these addictive pulls on our children, how can they not be affected.

There is a solution.  Some might disagree with me, but I still think parents can have the most power to guide if they are willing to take the time and make the effort.  Of course that also means that as a parent, the dangers have to be recognized and their own behaviors modified.  If dad is viewing pornography online or mom is feeding a buying addiction online, don’t be surprised if little Sammy or Susie are doing the same thing.

Be proactive, get educated on technology (you can do it) and get involved.  The best way to protect your family from the dark side of the Internet is to stand between them and the Internet.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/26/dont-use-our-product-symantec-warns-customers/

As an ISP (American Family Online) and a filtering company, we see lots of issues with Norton products, but this one goes beyond performance or efficiency.  Apparently code has been stolen that will allow a hacker unimpeded access to your computer if you are running pcAnwhere.  The article above does not give a lot of technical detail, but it looks like it might be wise to uninstall pcAnywhere if you are using it for remote access to your computer.  I recommend you read the entire article because it has some good suggestions regarding the issue.

As remote access and functionality continue to improve, so too does the security risk.  I know a lot of folks just don’t want to bother with security or may be overwhelmed by the issue, but folks it is not optional.  Unless you want to add to the complications of life, you need to be concerned about computer security.

Wow!  This happened even faster than I thought it would!  A quote from within the article above says it all:

“There is no way anyone expected this,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group. “There is no way a user can comprehend the implication of Google collecting across platforms for information about your health, political opinions and financial concerns.”

Folks, forget the spin from the Google people and the government about how this will help privacy.  The information collected by Google will virtually allow anyone with authority to know exactly where you are and what you are doing at any time.  And it is well known that Google is tightly connected with the current administration.   On OpenSecrets.org, Google is listed as the top contributor to the Democratic National Committee (DNC).  Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the room that no one is talking about.

I will try to keep you informed as more detail become available.  As for me, I have officially stopped using Google search, email and document services.  I also turned off all GPS functions on my android phone and will find a phone that has nothing to do with Google (if I can).

Developing …..

http://allthingsd.com/20120112/facebook-gives-politico-deep-access-to-users-political-sentiments/

This excerpt was taken from the above article and WILL result in your personal and private Facebook information/thoughts becoming exposed!

“A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts. It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters.

Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.”

So I am often told I am paranoid about Internet privacy.  It is not paranoia when it is true!  Bit by bit, drip by drip, your privacy, your security are being eroded.  Give it a rest I am told?  My response is I can’t give it a rest.  Two many men and women died to give us that privacy and freedom!  And we are squandering it away by letting technology rule our lives.

Read the book ’1984′ by George Orwell.  What he wrote as fiction is happening today!  And folks DO NOT BELIEVE IT when they say no employee will see the data, it JUST ISN’T TRUE.

More proof that nothing you do on the Internet is private.  This is very unfortunate, much as the recent Facebook hack, because once again folks tend to use the same user name and password for all their activities.  So once again if you were one of the 24 million Amazon subscribers, someone has your password, email and a lot more.  Fortunately they did not access complete credit card data, at least they haven’t said they did.  But still what they did get has potential for great harm.

These hackers are immoral thugs and bullies and are looking to steal and maybe get their 15 minutes of fame.  They are a product of an immoral and lawless culture.  When anything goes, everything goes.  They DO NOT have any higher moral objectives, no matter what they try to tell you.  They are criminals, selfish and self-centered.  Do not believe for a minute that they are fighting “the man”.  All they are doing is stealing like common thieves.  AND THEY ARE STEALING FROM YOU!

Besides taking steps to protect your own online accounts, I would encourage you to report any suspicious activities you discover to authorities.  Maybe if we target enough resources we can take down these hoodlums and show them crime is crime.  Protect yourself if you have an Amazon account, change your password TODAY!

The article above describes a very serious security breach through Facebook.  Although 45,000 accounts out of 800 million doesn’t sound like much, the significance of this hack is much larger.  Why?  Because folks often use the same username and password for everything they do online, which means if their account has been hacked, suddenly everything they do is vulnerable.  To make things worse, often the username is a person’s email address which when hacked now becomes part of the effort to spread spam, viruses, trojans or spyware to other victims.  It quickly grows exponentially!   Forty-five thousand can quickly become 45 million and I guarantee some of you reading this will be in that group if you aren’t already.

My recommendation, change your password on Facebook and if possible your user name.   Hackers are aggressive with no morals and eager for their 15 minutes of fame at your expense.  Consider yourself warned ….

Forgive me Neal Armstrong for corrupting your famous quote as you stepped onto the moon for the first time,  but on a more sinister level the following article describes a major step in the direction of TOTAL government control of our lives!  As portrayed in the book classic “1984″,  Mr. Orwell saw this coming and unfortunately his prophecies where extremely accurate.

The article linked below describes a plan already in process that will expose every twitter message you have ever sent or received.  Now they claim private messages will not be recorded, only public messages, but I am willing to bet that some day soon, quietly and under the radar, the private messages will also be captured, stored and made available under the guise of “National Security”.

Twitter and The Library of Congress have teamed up to archive every public tweet.  So now any words with two meanings, any tweet sent out of frustration, and any other content deemed a security risk, no matter how innocent, becomes that much easier to find and use against you.  Is it that hard to imagine some political hack in an administration using the data out of context to compromise opponents.  Is there any doubt law enforcement will have complete access to ALL tweets to persecute the “threat of the month”.  If we lived in a perfect world, maybe there would be no need for concern, but folks we live in an imperfect world and I GUARANTEE this action is bad news for all of us.

One might also ask, “who is paying for this?”.  I am willing to bet you and I are paying for our own demise.  This is a bad, bad move and another sign of the times!  Our reign as a God fearing and moral nation is coming to an end.  We will go the same destructive path as the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Aztecs and Chinese before us.  Only God can intervene to save us now.  But be forewarned, unless He does, we are doomed to the same fate as the others.

Here is the story:    http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=247&sid=2658996

We talk a lot about social sites and email scams here.  But one thing we don’t mention often are scam web sites!

These are sites that take your money and deliver defective, used or copy cat products, but not what you ordered.  Sometimes you get no product at all!  This Foxnews article talks about 150 such sites that where online scams.  Unfortunately for every one they catch, there are probably hundreds more (my guess) that have not yet been caught.  So read the article and just be careful that you are visiting reputable sites to make online purchases.  If they do not have a valid phone number and address, they are almost certainly scams.  You can also look up their domains at http://dnsstuff.com to verify location, address and phone number.

Also I would recommend using a low balance credit card for online purchases.  That way if the card gets compromised you have limited your loss.  For debit cards, you may want a separate checking account just for debit card purchases.  I know it is a lot of extra hassle, but it is easier than trying to recover money and credit from stolen credit/debit cards.

All that aside, please have a blessed Christmas this year.  It really isn’t about the stuff, it is about the season!  God bless!

Still think Facebook is safe, benign, just a harmless social site?  Many of my readers are Facebook users and I always take some heat when I expose another Facebook risk.  I use Facebook myself, it has been great for keeping in touch with family members in Colorado who are going through an extremely critical medical situation.  But so many people are unaware of the significant risks and fail to monitor themselves or their children.  That’s why I keep beating this drum.

Facebook is a magnet for pedophiles, predators, stalkers and scammers!  Even Facebook ,with it’s legions of security people, cannot prevent hackers or scammers from destructive  attacks because by definition a “social” site is an “open” site.     Now, with this latest incident, you could open your Facebook messages to be assaulted with hard core pornography regardless of how careful you are with your profile.  But what is even worse, this latest attack does not care about age or values, so your 14 year old daughter or 12 year old son will now run the risk of exposure to something that should not be carried in their young minds.  IT IS EVIL and it is on Facebook.

I would prefer folks not use Facebook, but I also realize I am somewhat of a loner in that arena.  However, if you must use Facebook, at least make very, very sure, you know what your family is seeing.  Unfortunately, the only way you will know is AFTER they have already seen it.  The results is sort of like protecting against the flu after you already have it, but at least you can discuss it with your family if you know what is going on.

Please don’t be the next victim, take some time, educate yourself and get involved.   I have considered doing a free webinar on Facebook and preventative safety measures that folks can use to help protect themselves.  If I get enough folks interested, I will try to schedule the webinar soon.  As always, thanks for listening to my rants.  I really do care about folks.  I am no profit, but it doesn’t take a profit to see a big hole in the road ahead!

This is incredibly bad news!  If you thought I was down on Google and Facebook before, then increase that by a factor of ten now.  Here’s the bottom line folks, if Google actually does start to index Facebook comments, every comment you ever make on Facebook will be indexed, stored and easily found in the Google search engine!  Everything!

That should absolutely scare your socks off!  Talk about a gift to predators!  All predators (sexual, government, bullies)!  Mark down this date, because it will be looked upon in history as a dark day for the Internet.  If you thought you had any privacy at all, that has all now gone out the window.  The linked article says that private comments won’t be indexed, but don’t believe it!  If they can record any comments, all comments can be recorded and someday they will find an “reason” to make private comments searchable as well.

Folks, when George Orwell talked about “Big Brother” in his book 1984, this is exactly what he was talking about and it wasn’t good.  The potential for misuse here is so incredibly high that it would be down right stupid to think it won’t happen.

Here is the link:

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/11/03/google-to-index-facebook-comments-as-search-results/

Seriously, I would now consider whether it is worth giving up your privacy to be on Facebook.  I for one will refrain from making any future comments.  It isn’t worth it!  Lord help us!