Summary and Reflection
The second week of lectures included, " The Rise of the WWW" and second article was "Don't Believe Everything You Read." I thought the second article was much more interesting than the first, as we are faced with all sorts of scams in our life. The messages we recieve on our cell phones, the pamplets we get, or even stickers of beautiful half naked girls, found on our car windows or even stuck onto our motorcycles with a cell phone number included, are all too common in our lifestyle. This article concentrated mainly on the scams that exist on the internet. As the title suggests that we can't believe everything we read on the web, as things are often exaggerated. One of the main scams that I believe every Net surfer has always recieved in his or her email is a letter saying "Congrtulations You won..." or the most common scam I have been recieving this month is an email subjected "Gain inches - Guaranteed!", and, "Lose 50 kilos - Guaranteed". It sounded so funny as how would the sender of these scams know that you need to gain inches or you need to lose 50 kilos?
One of the most common scams that is mentioned in this article involves a person who wants to give money away. It often states your full name and contain information that is quite accurate. However, once you fall into the trap you might be asked to give your bank account or to wire an amount of money first than you get the big prize. This reminded me of my grand mother, as she recieved a call on her phone saying that someone in the family was kidnapped and in order to free him she would have to wire NT$20, 000. So, as she was innocent and old she rushed to the nearest ATM to wire the money. The only problem was that she didn't recongnize the numbers on the ATM and asked her neighbor to wire the money for her. What a nice neighbor! As more and more people are getting used to this type of scams new scams are being invented everyday.
The end of the article stated that internet scams are difficult to trace with various problems. It's difficult to regulate crime on the WWW because crimminls live in many different coutries. You might recieve a scam from India to Alaska. So that is why its so difficult to catch these crimminals. Moreover, it would be too expensive to fight fraud. Finally, if you just ignore these messages and press the "Junk Mail" key on your email, it might just cut down your chances of being caught up on these scams.
Outside Reading
This is an article on the the 10 worst Internet hoaxes. It's an article that contains the worst 10 scams on the internet. Most of them included forwarding the scam to another user, so these scams keeps on circulating. The scams I found funny were no. 8 Bill Gates Reaches Out to You. Yeah Right! Impossible, why would Bill Gates want to reach to a second year English Major in Stut? To give me some money? Ha! Some scary scams included Dialing 809 for trouble and I am amazed at the number of people who fell to this scam. A lot of people did dial this number and at the end they were charged $25 a minute. So we can't really believe everything we see on the internet.
