War Driving on October 30^th 2009

Abraham and Qurdi.

We went on 4th West North of North Temple, and we found about 18 networks open which 16 of them had security and two were completely open. The two networks that were open (Family and Linksys) did not have any security whatsoever and anybody could connect directly to the network without any problems or consequences.

All of the other networks have WEP security encryption to prevent access to the net. The ones that the name sounds like a business have security. It is extremely important that even if you don't have a business, you still need to make your access points secure by having a good firewall, a hard password, that you can constantly change (every 2 or 3 moths),turn off the network when not in use, and updating your systems. This days security means not just having a loaded gun and strong locks, but to constantly revising and changing your network.

windows xp takes too long at start up.

Insourcing

E-commerce is not safe:

           There is a high risk when it comes to ecommerce, and affects both, costumers and companies. Increasingly fraud for both the costumer and the business make the internet a hard place to trust when it comes to do a business transaction. For this reason you need to be really carefully were you perform those transactions and if it’s even worth, to invest time and money on ecommerce.  

More and more, people are trying to make ecommerce secure, but there is other points to consider before a company embarks on ecommerce. 

I.            You cannot do everything online, not all the products on the market are made for the web. Example: Buying a couch from Furniture.com. Have limitations when it comes to delivery, if you are outside their delivery area, you will be refer to a partner site[1].  

II.            Easy target for lawsuits around the world. Example:  EBay had to pay 63 million dollars to Louis Vuitton on French Court, for letting user’s sale fake perfume[2].  

III.            Even though there are millions of products on the web, only few are meant for ecommerce. The perfect product needs to be lightweight, easy to ship, and frequent reordering, most of the time even having free shipping. Example: 1800 contacts[3]. 

IV.            According to Hacker Safe CEO, Ken Leonard, 75% of ecommerce sites are not secure or do not consider security when launching their ecommerce sites[4]. 

Any type of online process or system that is capable of taking payment via credit card is open to abuse by the more unscrupulous and devious elements that haunt the Internet. It is also important to remember that there are not only credit card transactions that are under threat. Hacking into systems, which hold personal information such as: bank account numbers, names, addresses, etc. Another area that has a vast income potential for those, who would use the information illegally[5].

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[1] http://www.furniture.com/Shop.aspx

[2]http://www.bizaims.com/news/business+economy/ebay+ordered+pay+40m+euros+selling+fake+louis+vuitton+goods

[3] http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/16338.html

[4] http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/10/03/hacker-safer/

[5] Ecommerce- safe and secure, John Sherida. http://ezinearticles.com/?Ecommerce---Safe-and-Secure?&id=210451.

abe recommend this product.

The Decision Support System

Something new, that I learn this past week. The DSS, is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. But this is just the organization of a mass information to help us make a better decision, we have to gather all the other detail data that a computer can't analyze, remember sometimes there is people behind the numbers.

A perfect example to this is the DSS call "Isabel, is designed to help the doctors consider all the likely diagnoses and to make the latest medical information readily available at the point of care. The first step in developing the Isabel decision support system was to create taxonomy of more than 10,000 diseases and 4,000 drugs. Content for the system is stored on a server and consists of the latest medical textbooks, journals and other articles. When the healthcare professional enters the clinical features of the patient, Isabel instantly provides the user with a checklist of likely diagnoses, and with diagnosis-specific knowledge from medical textbooks and journals on tests to be performed, treatment options, lessons learned and recent advances. It is of great value in presenting likely options, so that physicians are able to consider all the possibilities before coming to a conclusion". (Decision support systems prove vital to healthcare By Judith Lamont, Ph.D., KMWorld Magazine).

So we can see that we have to take all the information into consideration before making a decision, especially when it comes to human beings. We have to know the facts, details, evidence, and especial needs to each situation. The DSS help us with the information and even may suggest some solutions to the problems but the responsibility to make a good final decision and implemented, rest in our shoulders.

Is the WWW secure enough?

 

There is a lot of talk about security, how to implemented, how to manage it, and if is really working or not. Businesses and home users depend on the World Wide Web to keep in contact, made business, and keep up to date on today's market. A member of the UK Parliament said on an interview with ZDnetUK; the internet is a fast moving, high tech, universal community, which needs international law enforcement and community action to increase the safety of people on the internet.

The US Government is pretty good when it comes about security, aside from human mistakes, they implement security systems and persecuted any who dare infiltrated it, like the case of Gary McKinnon from the UK, that is being extradite to the US for hacking into some military systems. When he got ask how he did it, he said used windows administrators accounts with blank passwords and no fire wall, which give him full control or access. So you see that you don't mess with the big dog, even when they make simple security (social level) mistakes. But what about the ordinary person that get attack almost every day, what guaranties do we have to protect us? There are laws to enforce it? well since the internet is international, there is a need for a www police, that would protect individuals around the globe and persecute those that violated the laws, but even with a police and legislation in place, it need the cooperation from everybody involved in that www community, set rules of behavior, norms of conduct, standards, that would glue together the www community like in any other country or nation.

It start on a local level with your own security implementation and rules, then community level with the help of the local police and service providers, next to a national level with the countries own regulations, and then to a international organization in charge of the global security, and there are countries that have already start this process, but it's far from achieve full order or control of the world wide web.