internet privacy

I wish not to share this dreadful story with you all but this is just to inform everyone where and whom to contact for reporting cyber crimes in Pakistan. On one hand it gave me immense pleasure to meet my old friends after decades through facebook, a social networking site known to all. But the  shock and sadness which results in ugly instances like the one reported by ‘The News’ overshadows …..

Kindly note that public can report such cases to the cyber wing through the website: http://www.nr3c.gov.pk/ , fax No. 926666435 and cell number: 0336-6006060.

The News-Islamabad, July 5, 2010: “I can’t face my family,” said Ms. Sana, a newly-wed girl and a victim of internet social networking — Facebook. She had an account on Facebook to share her memories of life and day to day happenings. She had added all family members, within the country and abroad. She had also uploaded her wedding ceremony pictures on her Facebook profile.

One day, while chatting with her sister, the account automatically closed without her signing it out. She tried to sign-in again but could not succeed. Assuming that server might be down she became involved in day-to-day household work.

The very next day, she came to know that her Facebook account had been hacked. That person picked her pictures and some information from it, and made a new account on Facebook using her name, pictures and other information. He threatened her and uploading nude pictures, using her name, on You-Tube — another social networking site.

Her family members — added as friends on her account — saw all that rubbish, making her a stigma for the whole family. This thwarting situation was not only faced by both the family members (parents and in-laws) but also by her sister’s in-laws who broke the engagement as soon as they got to know about it. It was an awful moment for Sana’s sister who is still unable to recover from the shock of his life. Besides, Sana is also striving hard to avoid the divorce stressed hard by her in-laws.

Our society is replete with such incidents, of which, a majority is not reported, at all. The sharing of our beautiful memories through different social networks has now the potential to raze to the ground every possibility of social networking. The way it is affecting the concept of social networking, is going to end all hopes people do have in such sort of websites and community networking groups. Fake identity, blasphemous material and the like are going to kill all the charm people might presently have left with.

“Facebook as a social forum is a very interesting concept, however when it comes to stalking and lifting of information from it, it becomes a very serious issue,” says Ms. Salma Malik, working as assistant professor at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

In her opinion, the solution is not in the banning of the website, but primarily making the security settings and the administration policies a lot more stringent and better.

To tackle this problem, the government authorities have already established National Response Centre (NR3C) for cyber crimes to curb such crimes of cyber-stalking and criminal access to data. However, only 56 cases have been reported — one year after establishment of this institution. A proper reporting can help to track down such cases. Public can report such cases to the cyber wing through the website: http://www.nr3c.gov.pk/ , fax No. 926666435 and cell number: 0336-6006060.

“Cyber stalking and criminal data access are well defined laws under PECO 2009 and knowing the seriousness of criminal intent and power of cyber stalking; heavy punishment has been kept for this crime,” founder of NR3C Ammar Hussain said.

The state authority, despite using the control mechanisms, seems failing to combat cyber crimes in Pakistan. However, the problem lies at the end of citizens too, who do not dare report it. Media can also play a great role in creating awareness against cyber crimes. — INFN

Technorati Tags: cyber crime, cyber crimes pakistan, facebook, facebook hacking, internet privacy, National Response Center, PECO 2009, privacy, social networking

Privacy on facebook

FACEBOOK AT IT AGAIN- TRAMPLING OUR PRIVACY RIGHTS

By Maryam Qamar (Guest blogger)

I’ve really had it with facebook today. While at my house,When my friend signed in to her FB account, she was surprised to see some guy’s home page open up.When she tried to logout, it wouldnt. And when she hit the refresh page button, to our utter amazement, another person’s page opened up. We tried to reopen FB in another explorer, logout, refresh and what-not. But it was with anger that I watched one after another many people’s accounts open up in front of our eyes. This is our privacy. The end of it all. If I can see so many people’s accouts I wonder how many can see mine. Gone to waste are my customised privacy settings.I do not trust FB any longer. They can and will do whatever they want and whenever they want. Whether you find out or not is a totally different story.They will always be ready to comfort you and tell you that this wont happen again. But I dont think that for a single second more will i give them the key to my account…I really cannot afford to have my privacy compromised time and again. Its high time that we understand what FB is…and what it has the power to do….and let me assure you…NOONE can stop it.I would advise everyone to think twice before handing their personal info to unknown people who have the power of the internet at their disposal. Think about what this can do to you.Before its too late.THINK!!!

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook privacy, FB, personal information on facebook

no facebook

Many people have started saying that Pakistan should not have banned facebook but I think after  reporting the  page to the Facebook we had no other option left. This will not be a lifetime  ban but was meant to say “we are hurt”.

On the other hand this page may not have got so much publicity in the first place if muslims would not have responded to it. But we made it a point to spread it among us like fire. This is why it is said that publicity of the such things make them common and more acceptable with time. we better be prepared for the such storms in future, emotionally, technically and politically.

Whatever we did benefitted facebook more then anybody else, they had their name splashed over the front pages of every newspaper and that too free of cost! This is why acting in the interest of their business they did to not respond to over 100,000 people protesting and that too according to their own terms and conditions of the “Facebook”. Still I do not think we should be apologetic of our actions like Mr Adil Najam said by “making an international public spectacle of ourselves”.

Reaction of the Pakistani ban:

Even the creator Seattle cartoonist, Molly Norris, whose satirical cartoon calling for an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” inspired the Facebook page, said in a post on her website that she meant her work only to be a commentary on the “South Park” controversy. “I made a cartoon about the television show South Park being censored,” she wrote. “I never started a Facebook page. I apologize to people of Muslim faith and ask that this ‘day’ be called off.”

Even the US has deplored blasphemous images of Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) on Facebook as “deeply offensive to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike”, saying America does not condone expressions that lead to violence or hatred. The US State Department also expressed respect for any actions that need to be taken under Pakistani law to protect their citizens from offensive speech, but expected a balance between restricting offensive material and ensuring flow of information for the Internet users. Read more.

Now when the page is removed I hope it does not resurface again in future…..I know facebook will be back. Hey I want to know what my friends are doing today, who is posting new pictures and who needs our support to lift their spirits! See you all soon

Related links

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/deannelson/100040563/ill-tell-you-why-pakistan-blocked-facebook-and-youtube/

http://findtut.com/offensive-facebook-page-removed-421498

http://www.todayonline.com/World/EDC100522-0000098/Cartoonist-disavows-controversial-draw-Muhammad-Facebook-page

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook ban, Islam, molly norris, pakistan and facebook, prophet Muhammad, Seattle cartoonist, US state department

Facebook banned

A timely decision…I am glad that our government took this action to show solidarity with the cause.

Facebook proved to be a wonderful medium for locating people and staying in touch with them regularly but this is how people misuse things and create problems for all.

The News states….

“LAHORE: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has blocked Facebook over a competition encouraging its users to post caricatures of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) on the social networking site.

Earlier in the day, the LHC ordered authorities to block Facebook until May 31..

The depiction of any prophet is strictly prohibited in Islam as blasphemous and Muslims across the world staged angry protests over the publication of satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in European newspapers in 2006.

Controversy erupted in the conservative Muslim country last month when a Facebook user set up a page called “Draw Mohammed Day”, inviting people to send in their caricatures of the Muslim prophet on May 20.

The move angered thousands of young people and Muslim faithful in Pakistan, unleashing an online campaign and isolated protests that grabbed the government’s attention and the controversial page was blocked on Tuesday.

But a group of lawyers went a step further Wednesday and petitioned the court to order a blanket ban on Facebook in Pakistan.

Justice Ejaz Chaudhry of the Lahore High Court directed the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to block Facebook until May 31, when the court will open a detailed hearing into the case.

The PTA Director told the court the government has already blocked the particular link. About complete ban, he said internet services could face problems if the complete website was banned.

However, the court ordered complete ban till May 31.

A large number of religious clerics, students and lawyers were present in the courtroom.”

Technorati Tags: block facebook, facebook, facebook pakistan, last prophet, may 20, muslims, Pakistan, Prophet Mohammad, PTA, thenews

Farmville

When I first saw my friends playing farmville on facebook  it seemed more like a  joke to me. Maybe the farmer inside me was sleeping then! later a  friend forced me to be her neighbour and thats  how it started. I started planting different crops and watching them grow in hours gave me immense pleasure. When harvesting brought virtual money the sense of fulfillment was very real. My farm crops, sheep, horses and buildings  grew in coming days and weeks.

My husband always wanted to own a farm house and leave the city for simple pleasures of natural life. I prefer enjoying city life with its benefits and playing farmville…. ) Look at my farm, those lovely fruit trees, green fields and farm animals!! They give me a sense of ownership…..I even own a house there.

Amazingly 56 million people play farmville within three months of its launch, making it the fastest-growing social game on the internet. For the company (Zynga) it is generating revenues of more than $150 million (£91.4 million) this year.

According to a report of  Timesonline “Fanatical farmers bought 800,000 new tractors yesterday and today they will buy another 800,000.These may be virtual tractors, bought for FarmVille, a hugely popular online game on Facebook, but the money that the players are spending is real.They hand over millions of pounds every day in hard cash on cows, seeds and farming equipment to make their digital smallholdings bigger.”

Technorati Tags: facebook, farmhouse, farmville revenue, farville, timesonline, tractors, zynga

I think we have become closer to the people who live in far away lands, like I could not have thought of ever meeting or watching my school friends in life again. Facebook and likes have made it possible. I can search the name of my University friends and can find all the outsanding work they are doing anywhere in the world. But the question remains, are we closer to each other than the people of 80′s maybe. People living in the same house at times talk to each other only on the mobile phone let alone sharing some peaceful moments together.

I am comparing today with the time when one household or one neighbourhood used to gather around one tv set for 8 o’clock PTV drama and khabarnama.  Can we extract so much pleasure from watching a simple drama alone in our seperate bed rooms. Ours  houses have TVs in all the rooms plus computers. I think we are missing the happiness they got from each others company.

With our mobile phones ringing all the time, we are not present with the people physically sitting in front of us. Lets try to spend some time with our  family and friends  in a far off village with no mobile phone and electricity. I bet, we will be able to know each other more in 24  hours as compared to  spending a lifetime together. (with all these distractions!)

Technorati Tags: electricity, facebook, happiness, mobile phones, ptv drama, tv

Virtual life has some very interesting benefits like if you are talking to someone and you wish to discontinue then just close the window. And we all know the magic of “delete”. This is something I always wanted to have in real life to delete some decisions, some days of life, some words spoken which may have hurt others….but our words always stay in the memories of other people.

Now I know that it is not very easy to delete things from the internet too. In fact, it is said that there is no such thing as “delete” on internet!

User photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after people have deleted them, Cambridge University researchers have said.

They put photos on 16 popular websites – noting the web addresses(URL) where the images were stored – and deleted them. The team said it was able to find them on seven sites – including

Facebook – using the direct addresses, even after the photos appeared to have gone. Facebook says deleted photos are removed from its servers “immediately”.

To perform their experiment, the researchers uploaded photos to each of the sites, then deleted them, but kept a note of direct URLs to the photos from the sites’ content delivery networks. When they checked 30 days later, these links continued to work for seven of the sites even though a typical user might think the photos had been removed.

Why do “deleted” photos stick around so long? The problem relates to the way data is stored on large websites: While your personal computer only keeps one copy of a file, large-scale services like Facebook rely on what are called content delivery networks to manage data and distribution. It’s a complex system wherein data is copied to multiple intermediate devices, usually to speed up access to files when millions of people are trying to access the service simultaneously. (Yahoo! Tech is served by dozens of servers, for example.) But because changes aren’t reflected across the CDN immediately, ghost copies of files tend to linger for days or weeks.
n the case of Facebook, the company says data may hang around until the URL in question is reused, which is usually “after a short period of time.” Though obviously that time can vary considerably.
Of course, once a photo escapes from the walled garden of a social network like Facebook, the chances of deleting it permanently fall even further. facebook defends

Google’s caching system is remarkably efficient at archiving copies of web content, long after it’s removed from the web. Anyone who’s ever used Google Image Search can likely tell you a story about clicking on a thumbnail image, only to find that the image has been deleted from the website in question — yet the thumbnail remains on Google for months. And then there are services like the Wayback Machine, which copy entire websites for posterity, archiving data and pictures forever.

Courtesy -Yahoo tech news

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Computers, Miscellaneous, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Technorati Tags: 2009, benefits, Cambridge University, computer, facebook, ghost, google, interesting, internet, IPL, ISI, life, media, memories, News, picture, research, RSS, sin, social networking site, STR, tea, time, US, WHO

A research has confirmed what many parents and teachers already feared: social networking site Facebook is damaging students’ academic performance. 

As per a new research into the academic impact of Facebook, users of the site are likely to perform poorly in exams. The researchers discovered that the majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.

In order to reach their conclusion, researchers discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work. “Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,” The Times quoted Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University, as saying. “Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon,” the expert added.

In the study, Karpinski and a colleague questioned 219 US undergraduates and graduates about their study practices and general internet use, as well as their specific use of Facebook. They found that 65 per cent of Facebook users accessed their account daily, usually checking it several times to see if they had received new messages. The amount of time spent on Facebook at each log-in varied from just a few minutes to more than an hour.

The Ohio report shows that 68 per cent of students who used Facebook had a “significantly” lower grade point average than those who did not use the site. “It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B,” said Karpinski, who will present her findings this week to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Technorati Tags: facebook, grades at school, social networking site

Study author Brent Coker, from the University of Melbourne said ‘workplace internet leisure browsing,’ or WILB, helped to sharpen workers’ concentration. ‘People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration,’ he said. ‘Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days’ work, and as a result, increased productivity.’

According to the study of 300 workers, 70 per cent of people who go online at work engage in WILB. Among the most popular activities are reading online news website, playing online games and watching videos on YouTube. ‘Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos, using social networking sites or shopping online under the pretence that it costs millions in lost productivity,’ said Mr Coker. ‘That’s not always the case.’ However, Coker said the study looked at people who browsed in moderation, or were online for less than 20 per cent of their total time in the office.

‘Those who behave with Internet addiction tendencies will have a lower productivity than those without,’ he said.

Technorati Tags: facebook, office, twitter, twittering, workplace

The number of hours people spend interacting face-to-face has fallen dramatically since 1987 as electronic media use has risen

Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims.Emailing people rather than meeting up with them may have wide-ranging biological effects, said psychologist Dr Aric Sigman. This could increase the risk of problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia, Dr Sigman says in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook allow people to keep in touch with friends over the web. They can swap pictures, play games and leave messages which explain how their day is going. But even though they are designed to bring people together, Dr Sigman said they were actually playing a significant role in people becoming more isolated.

Research suggested that the number of hours people spent speaking to others face-to-face had fallen dramatically since 1987 as the use of electronic media increased. Interacting ‘in person’ had effects on the body not seen when writing emails, Dr Sigman claimed. Levels of hormones such as the ‘cuddle chemical’ oxytocin, which promotes bonding, altered according to whether people were in close contact or not. ‘There does seem to be a difference between “real presence” and the virtual variety,’ Dr Sigman added.

Some genes, including ones involved with the immune system and responses to stress, acted differently according to how much social interaction a person had with others.
Dr Sigman added: ‘Social networking sites should allow us to embellish our social lives, but what we find is very different.

Increased isolation could alter the way genes work and upset immune
Surely there isn’t a single person who couldn’t have told Professor John Cacioppo what he took years to discover: loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking or obesity. In the Chicago University psychologist’s study, reported this week, he found that the loneliest people had blood pressure readings up to 30 points higher than those with the most active social lives, high levels of cortisol that reduced their immune system and they slept badly and felt exhausted during the day.

Loneliness even accelerates the pace of dementia. I think loneliness is second only to depression in the list of sensations you don’t want stalking your mind. It’s a hunger – not just for human contact and companionship, but for a verification of your self-identity.

The majority of letters I’ve had in my thirty-plus years as an agony aunt have been from lonely people – they don’t have a partner or feel incredibly lonely within a relationship. Most of us feel lonely at one point or another. For some it’s acute – a permanent feeling of isolation punctuated only occasionally by contact. For others, it pops in from time to time like an unwelcome guest, but goes after a brief visit. It’s not always easy to spot the lonely – a gregarious person with an apparently active social life is not immune to suffering feelings of isolation.

Courtesy: Daily mail

Technorati Tags: cancer, facebook, heart disease, loneliness, myspace, strokes, upset immune