Transaction privacy and security: How does e-commerce affect my privacy

E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web (www). When we, as a consumer buy or sell thing online which involve registration, IP address, we are actually involve in e-commerce or in other word, we are part of e-market.

How does transaction privacy and security affect our privacy? 
As we involve in e-commerce, when we access to some website for free, we usually click on agree to all during our registration or signing up session. Yet, in the term and conditions, there is a condition where we agree to receive targeted ads. With this, the company or that particular website can track your online activities and determine which ads to show you.
This is actually using SPYWARE.

So, what is Spyware?

Spyware is Internet jargon for Advertising Supported software (Adware). This usually involves the tracking and sending of data and statistics via a server installed on the user's PC and the use of your Internet connection in the background. It is a way for shareware authors to make money from a product, other than by selling it to the users. There are several large media companies that offer them to place banner ads in their products in exchange for a portion of the revenue from banner sales. Adware is the product of spyware but it is not all.
There are also products that do display advertising but do not install any tracking mechanism on your system. These products are not indexed in our database. Some users who didn't notice the term and condition might think the advertisement is annoying, however, it is not an illegal software. Due to privacy concern, users might object to it and prefer not to be tracked. 

Cookies?

Cookies on internet is not like what we always eat during tea-break. It is not as nice as that.



Another affect on consumer is due to cookies. Cookies are inherently harmless. They are simple text files that help coordinate the remote website servers and your browser to display the full range of features offered by most contemporary websites. These features include all your activities on internet. As cookie technology evolves along with website publishing and advertisement technology, privacy issues are sure to arise time and again. Third party (people who supply the cookies) will be able to access to users’ personal information and figure out their behavior. 

As a conclusion, cookies and spyware do have bad consequences to users as people usually don't like being tracked. Even though there is no harm, people like to have privacy and didn't want other to monitor what they are browsing. However, they have some benefit towards users as well. It makes us to use computer more convenience as it helps us to stored our ID and password on computer in cookies. Besides, if I am the owner of webpage, I can easily approach to my potential client using cookies.


Not feeling comfortable with cookies and spyware? Get rid from it. There are few websites suggest how to remove or prevent it. As shown in below.

Related links:
1) http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/spyware-remove.aspx

2)http://www.pcworld.com/article/129094/how_to_remove_spyware_from_your_pc.html

3) http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser%27s-Cookies

Cyber Crimes in Malaysia

    Cyber crime is a criminal activity done by using computers and the internet. Although Internet is a great place for working together and building a better world, it also has its dark side. Every year billions of dollars are made in a number of different cyber crimes and the victims are usually people like you and me.

    Based on the articles found, the most cyber crimes in Malaysia are love scams and fraudulent online purchases among those 403 cases that reported within the first three months of the year. The statistics shows that in year 2011, the frequency of cyber crime has increased by 348 cases and incurred in losses by RM16 million as compared to year 2010. For the love scams, it usually falls under women especially single-mothers, unmarried woman and women with marital problems as African nationals love affairs with local women.

     As for fraudulent online purchases, the reported cases are commonly reported by those who bought goods and services through common websites such as alibaba.com, e-lelong.com and mudah.my.  People leave a lot of personal information online and such information can leave the people vulnerable to let others stalked. Apart from that, another cyber crime was online financial fraud whereby customers were asked for their bank account number.  The simple concept for those identity thefts is, get access into people account and use their personal information for their own benefit. So, never connect to your bank account on a public computer, or using Wi-Fi access point that are not trusted.

                In conclusion, computers and the Internet do made our lives easier in many ways yet it is unfortunate that people use these technologies to take advantage of others. Hence, it is smart to protect yourself by using antivirus and must be careful whenever enter any personal information.


Related Article:

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/cyber-criminals-scammed-victims-of-rm16m-in-q1/

Electronic currency

Electronic currency also known as e-currency, e-money, e-cash, digital money, digital cash, digital currency, cyber currency. It is the money represents a system of debits or credits used to exchange electronically, to exchange value with another system. It involves the use of computer networks, Internet and digital stored value systems.

We have 3 kinds of electronic money systems:


1. Centralised electronic money systems - Quite a number of parties use centralized system, such as PayPal, WebMoney, cashU and others. They use this systems to sell their electronic currency directly to the end users, but other systems sell through third party by using digital currency exchangers. Some community currencies work with electronic transactions, such as local exchange trading systems and Community Exchange System.

Example is the Hong Kong Octopus card. The electronic money deposits work similar as regular bank deposits. When users of Octopus card deposit money, the money is deposited into the bank. It is similar to debit-card-issuing banks.


2. Decentralized electronic money systems - It includes the Ripple monetary system, which is a monetary system based on trust network. Bitcoin is also one of the decentralized systems that is a peer-to-peer electronic monetary system based on cryptography. The last one is loom, a commodity exchange system that is digitally encrypted.


3. Offline 'anonymous' systems - when using offline electronic money, before accepting the money from users, merchants do not need to interact with the bank. Merchants can collect money that users spent and deposit the money later. This could be done offline,which the merchant can go to the bank with his storage media to exchange e-money for cash. E-cash is usually refers to anonymouse e-cash in cryptography. The first offline e-cash system was proposed by Chaum and Naor.


Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_money

Green E-commerce: How can you contribute?

In today’s world, online shopping is every useful and common for every consumers. Consumers using e-commerce to reach everything they needs or wants. But, did e-commerce go green? And, how can users contribute to it? Before answering the two questions, we would like to explain “what is green e-commerce” actually meant? Green e-commerce means that people buy and sells products through some effective ways which is not polluting the environment.

First of all, we can contribute e-commerce go green by moving towards the paperless society. While not completely eliminating the paper trail, online retail presents significant opportunities to reduce the amount of paper consumed within the retail process by using email communications and paperless invoicing. It's your choice whether you print it out or not. Besides that, we can also provide consumers to look for the catalogue though online but not paper catalogue anymore. Since paper catalogue is polluting the trees and it is wasting the cost for us.

In addition, we can contribute e-commerce go green by reducing wastage. Once a batch of product has been put onto the shop floor of an off-line retailer, a predictable proportion of that batch will be dropped, damaged, broken or simply shop-soiled. Either way it's "dead stock" that will probably end up being thrown out by the store owner - simple wastage. Online retail does not suffer the problems of in-store wastage, or the need to have stock relegated to the usually unsellable category of "display stock". Supporting online retailers is supporting the move towards the more efficient usage of the planet's raw materials by reducing unnecessary wastage.

Last but not least, we can contribute e-commerce go green by the effective way of product packaging. Off-line retail is a marketing environment where product presentation is critically important. Products are dressed up for display in a variety of packaging materials that involve the use of unsustainable or non-renewable materials like plastics and acetates, or cardboard and paper products covered with chemical inks and dyes purely intended to attract the attention of the consumer at store level. With on-line retail the presentation is done on the website using only an image of the product itself, allowing online retailers the flexibility to move to more minimalist and materials-efficient packaging, and to make greater use of boring white, beige and brown recycled cardboard boxes that wouldn't stand a chance at the front-line of offline retail. Online retail is significantly more environmentally sustainable when it comes to point of sale packaging.

Throughout the three ways above, we have full of confidences to bring the e-commerce go green.


http://www.ecommerce-marketing.com/index.php/green-ecommerce/

Who governs the Internet?

No one governs the Internet, but they have bodies which are maintaining the Internet.


Internet Society (ISOC) - It is a voluntary organization which promotes global information exchange through Internet.


Internet Corporation for Assigning Numbers and Names (ICANN) - It is an International self-governing bodies not a government agency. It was being established to represent a wider range of countries and interests. It begins to address emerging public policy issues in the E-Commerce I period.

The bodies that are maintaining the Internet:

1. Internet Architecture Board (IAB) - a group of volunteers invited by ISOC to come out with standards and allocate resources, such as addresses. It is divided into 2 groups, which are Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). IETF develops and maintains the Internet communication protocols. It addresses the problems and coordinates new services. Working groups are appointed to define the standards and coordinates all the activities. IRTF research on the long-term research problems which will be critical in 5 or 10 years.
2. Internet Network Information Center (InterNic) - It is a project sponsored by NSF and is conducted by AT&T and Network Solutions. Various registry services needed for the Internet to operate effectively is provided by InterNic.
3. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - The laboratory for Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology manage the W3C. It is a joint initiative between MIT, CERN and INRIA. It is forms to develop standards for the evolution of the web.

Refence:
http://www.mkatoh.net/who-governs-the-internet

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a modern technology model for enabling convenient network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such as networks, servers, storage, applications and etc that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort.

         One of the benefits of cloud computing is that it does not require a user to be in a specific place to gain access to it and thus, it is convenient to be used in any places. As for companies, set up cost is almost zero because all the expenses that the company would have incurred do not exist. 

For examples, cloud computing allows them to reduce the cost of information management since they are not required to own their own servers and can use capacity leased from third parties. There will be no hardware purchases for servers and spending on labour man. Besides that, since such cloud computing applications can be accessed from anywhere and at any time, it would be easier to collaborate with employees who are not in the same country and makes it easier to manage a global workforce.

          However, there are some drawbacks which arise in accordance the cloud computing technology. Although it is true that there is no upfront cost to many cloud computing applications, there are other ‘soft’ cost that cannot be ignored and the server do have an ongoing monthly subscription to pay. Moreover, the limitations for mobile cloud computing with wireless carriers are not totally reliable while offices and homes are fine so it is quite unstable for those who use cloud applications through mobile. 

Meanwhile, the loss of data and the risk of unauthorized access have cause cloud computing lack in security as the data is important to any business and organization. For examples, as cloud computing is about keep data on a web based, when it comes to security of data in a country, the country won’t be able to risk even a little of the confidential data within a country such as citizenship and monetary banking records to be exposed to computer crimes likes hacking.

          As a summary, there are no exact ways to measure whether cloud computing bring more harm than good or vice versa.

Related link:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Deploying-OpenSource-Cloud-Systems-5-Pros-and-5-Cons-295321/

Phishing : How can me PROTECT ourselves

                                                             Fishing = Phishing???   (o.O)??

PHISHING is pronounce like FISHING, however, it is not some relax, good like fishing.

Phishing is a broadly launched social engineering attack in which an electronic identity is misrepresented in an attempt to trick individuals into revealing credentials. In other word, phishing is THEFT.

                    




         PHISHING   =

Phishing is a technique used to gain others' personal information for purpose of identity theft using fraudulent phone call, website and e-mail message that sent by a legitimate firm. 

How does a phishing email looks like?

 As shown in the picture, a phishing email can be identified by looking in few ways. First, there is always some grammar error, secondly, there must be a threat contain in email and usually they will said that they are from some popular company like bank, government or some other well known website.

How can we as a internet user protect ourselves from phishing?

There are few suggested ways for us to learn.

1. Be skeptical

Internet is a place where everything can be virtual, whereby there is nothing real online. People pretend that they are not who they are in real life, doing everything that they are not going to do in real life via internet. Hence, as a internet user, we have to be skeptical. Never trust anything easily even the email or the private message is sent by some of your close friend because their account might be hacked. Besides, if the company send you an email with threat and you really worry about it, do call to the office of that particular company to double confirm the situation. Never think that we will never hurt in internet since it is virtual. Yes, Internet is virtual, yet people are real. Analyze everything clearly and carefully to prevent ourselves get trapped.

2. Using website to warn us 

Latest version of browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome is now come with built in phishing protection. We can protect ourselves by surfing internet via these browsers. These browsers will analyze web sites and compare them against known or suspected phishing sites and warn you if the site you are visiting may be malicious or illegitimate. 

3. Use the keypad, not the mouse

If you really afraid of the threats that stated in email, do type in the URL by ourselves instead of clicking it direct;y with the mouse. We cannot guarantee that the link provided in email is real one, so instead of taking risk by clicking with mouse, please use your keypad and type the URL of the particular company manually.

4.Look for the lock

Valid sites that use encryption to securely transfer sensitive information are characterized by a lock on the bottom right of your browser window, NOT your web page. They also have addresses that begin with https:// instead of the usual http://. Do observe carefully.

5. Different is the keyword here

Use DIFFERENT passwords for different sites; I know it’s tough task as most functions of the brain are being passed on to technology, but this is a good way to prevent phishers from getting at all your sensitive transactions, even if they’ve managed to compromise one.

The five ways mentioned can be a good ways for us to protect ourselves from phishing threat. Do remember, Do not trust what you see online. Do not trust what you think it is true. Pick up phone and make a call to confirm is always the best way.

Here are some others websites that provide opinion on how to protect ourselves from phishing.

1) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505144_162-57388953/5-ways-to-protect-yourself-from-phishing-attacks/

2) http://www.fraudwatchinternational.com/phishing-fraud/phishing-protection/

3) http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/phishing.htm