QotW5: Online Identity

Online identity is defined as, “a social identity that network users establish in online communities.” (Online Identity, 2007) Social identity is used to represent oneself in the virtual world. I have an online identity which is in my MSN Messenger; “Hapy tots always.” is my name. In a way it represents my character, which I want to tell people that I am jovial, and thinking positively is better than thinking negatively. Everyone who has me as their contacts in MSN will see this name whenever I am online, therefore promoting my “inner” self to them every time the see my name. Of course I have gotten different reactions to it. Some have asked me why I have put up that name, and some have asked me why have I put up such a “gay” name? My response for the first question would be “it’s me; I like to think that way”. Whereas for the second question, I would put up a huge defensive wall around me proving that I’m not “gay”.

Many online identities do not show the true identity of the user itself. As said in Judith`s article, “In communication, which is the primary activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. Yet in the disembodied world of the virtual community, identity is also ambiguous.” (Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community, 1996) These people are usually separated into 2 groups, those who assume different identities just for the fun of it, and there are those who do it for malicious purposes. For the latter group, they take on the identity of someone and use that identity to frame them, steal their money, make enemies, and many more. This is called Identity Theft. “Identity theft is the new crime of the information age. A criminal collects enough personal data on someone to impersonate a victim to banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions. Then he racks up debt in the person's name, collects the cash, and disappears. The victim is left holding the bag. While some of the losses are absorbed by financial institutions -- credit card companies in particular -- the credit-rating damage is borne by the victim. It can take years for the victim to clear his name.” (Schneier on Security, 2005) Steps have been taken for this to be rectified, for example; more secure information are passed on through the internet via a more secure channel, companies are investing in certain sites which help to track down these people who steal identities. An example of a site which helps is http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/ . It actually gives you steps to take if you think your identity in the virtual world has been stolen. More websites like this are available throughout the net, but somehow identities are still being stolen.

As far as online identities are concerned, it looks like the criminals are always one step ahead of the good guys.



References:

(2007) “Online Identity” Wikipedia retrieved February 20, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_identity
(1996) “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” Retrieved February 20, 2007 from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html, S. Donath, Judith
(2005) “Schneier on Security” Retrieved February 20, 2007 from http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/mitigating_iden.html, Schneier, Bruce

COM 125 Assignment Week 2 : There is No Distance...

The internet has much evolved since it first began more than a decade ago. Of course, its history spans even further back than the 1990s. An average engineer named Douglas Engelbart, thought of the idea of the computer actually functioning to help people think faster, and find solutions to problems easier and quicker. From that idea, things started to work as planned for Engelbart. “By the 1990s, as a direct result of Engelbart's crusade, tens of millions of people around the world use computers and telecommunications to extend their abilities to think and communicate.” (http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/3.html, 2007) Thus the internet was born, but that is another story for another time.

With the birth of the internet, where information can be shared to almost everyone who has a personal computer with an internet connection, many other web-based programs sprouted as well, programs that we take for granted today. Take email for example. “E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Internet&oldid=70771572, 2007) It was around even before the internet started out. Compared to “MSN Hotmail” of today, this was a very primitive form of email. In that era, email could only be passed on to one another, only if the users were on the same net. At that time, there was no “World Wide Web”. There were different servers, for example: ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet. However, things changed soon after the internet started to plow its way through the world. “The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one report indicating experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after ARPANET's creation. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet e-mail address format, using the @ sign to separate user names from host names. A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed this way between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Internet&oldid=70771572, 2007)

In 1980, the medium we call the “World Wide Web” was created. “The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_World_Wide_Web&oldid=73974490, 2006) Soon enough, after the “World Wide Web” was established, “MSN Hotmail” was created. This changed the entire face of emailing. It was free and was easy to use, compared to the primitive way of emailing. “Hotmail, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1995, was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, Independence Day in the United States, symbolically representing freedom from ISPs. Jack Smith first had the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world, originally in order to get by corporate firewalls blocking regular mail services. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in "-mail" and finally settled on Hotmail because it included the letters "HTML" - the markup language used to write the base of web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing, which is still styled in that format within part of the URL of the user's email inbox when signed in.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail, 2007) Hotmail has since been bought over by Microsoft has been thriving ever since.

Emailing has literally, shortened the distance within two people communicating, or even communicating with many at any one time. Information or personal messages can be passed through email, and received be the recipient/s almost immediately. Messaging or the exchange of information would have taken days or months before, if the recipient/s were far away, now taken no less than a few seconds. Now, as long as your recipient/s has a personal computer with access to the “World Wide Web”, time is no more a problem. Email has virtually wiped out distance and time forever.

A Response Post

Hey anoynomous(did i spell it right?) person who left a comment on my first post, how are you? Is it a blogging thing to respond to comments through a post? Or must i post a comment again? Ok nevermind, anyway, yup im not malay, ive been mistaken for being malay alot, sommore i can speak malay, so it dosent help with me looking like one. But hey, ive been mistaken for others, for example (im serious on this):



A Taliban Terrorist
















A Nepalese


















And a Korean so far,

(the fella who mistook me for a korean said the lights must have been dim, yeaaaah riiiight, he must have been color blind)















Damn this picture is so gay...

Anyway, my army buddy used to ask me this question, "Oi, your father indian, then your mother chinese........HOW COME YOU MELAYU?!"

yup....(indian + chinese = malay), what a wonderful formula!

yeah...coming back to the response thingie, mr/miss anoynomous, who are you? Thats the question....

Well thats all this time, i seriously have not gotten used to this blogging thing, so till the next post.....

My - Bu

MY OWN BULLETIN

What’s all this bulletins ...cud someone enlighten me...sometimes they are informative...but sometimes they’re just 100% freshly squeezed crap.... where do u guys get this stuff...funny to think of it you know.... bulletin...n why do they call it bulletin...bullet coz its fast...or bullet because people discard it fast??? Hmm things to ponder about huh...same goes to me.... I don’t even know why im writing this.... may be coz its 12 midnight n I have nothing to do...then again it might be that everyone that posts a bulletin has nothing to do at 12 midnight that’s why they post a bulletin...I cant believe im writing this...but...maybe its a way to give people information...like all at one go...instead of one by one.... maybe i can talk bout things for example...i watched SURIA last week n it was the morning show.... that was like one in a rainbow coloured moon i wud watch that channel....anyway it was the morning show....n u guys knoe SUHAIMI...the guy who acts in the sitcom "Police n Thief"...yah hes the policeman....he was doing this lucky draw thing.....n then he pulled out a name...."Khamsiah binte Md Jedi".....Md Jedi? JEDI??? I mean what a name.... ive heard of Md Hitler before (im not joking) but JEDI???? Its like "May the Force be with you" kinda thing u know...what the crap...there look bulletin = crap...hah! Wow.... if u guys find any strange names please let me know I like this strange but true thingies...damn I still like got 2502 characters left on this bulletin...im trying to type as much crap as possible so I can finish it up...so lets see...who’s a Man United fan???? Well the girls wud say "yah.yah.... soccer...soccer,soccer" thats what all the guys talk about nothing else...no definetely not...how bout sex.... ahh now thats a hot topic...but i dont think itll be good talking bout sex in a bulletin right? Right?........................right? Okok we shall not discuss that.... hmm.... gimme a topic to discuss about.... how bout "Who invented the Bulletin?"...A guy named Mr. B. Ullet In who really had nothing to do one night at 12 midnight and decided to send his friends a message...seeing message wouldn’t be the right term to use for a mass distribution...he used his own name! What a genius! Genius my *$%#! ...Talking bout geniuses.... did u know that Einstein only used (was it 2% or 10%) of his brain capacity...and he came out with the godforsaken formula E=mc2...just imagine how much of our brain we are using now...but I believe that there r some people who can unlock that other parts of the brain to accomplish a higher usage of their brain capacity...that’s why I believe that there r people who can move objects with their minds alone...interesting huh...think bout that...enough about believing...lets state the facts.....in a way a bulletin is helpful coz it helps one person convey a single message to many people at 1 time.......in another way the bulletin is NOT helpful is because its full of shit......simple?...Hey I didn’t know I cud write this much.....just putting your thoughts down .....Whoa...I seem to be thinking a lot.... a lot of crap...so what am I doing sitting in front of my pc at.... 12:18am typing this? Hah.... its because I see almost everyone posting a bulletin not me.... so I decided to post one...looking at other bulletins for reference...didn’t help much.... why? U said it.... coz its a load of crap...so I thought why not type in a huge load of crap...which I doubt people are going to read.... and post a bulletin...I know ive bored u guys but bear wit me a bit more.... u know why coz there’s only 315 characters to go...that’s as much as a 3 page sms.... hah... but unfortunately this did not get thru as a bulletin.....the server said it was loaded with stuff that cannot be sent in a bulletin .....nvm...ill post it as a blog!

My First for this one....

I have never really started on a blog before. I tried on friendster once, got 2 posts up, then gave up. So for this first one i am going to post both of those 2 posts up... lazy huh.....what can i say....that i am....


My - Self

Lets see.....im supposed to say something bout my self?....or describe my self......lets see....im not a malay....im half indian half chinese.....surprised?
im crazy bout soccer.... n playstation games.....fine im in the army i dont get out much...stuck on an island......u want physical details>?.....1.78m or 1.79m...ard there.....70+kg......tanned......medium build......short hair.....on the head...lots of hair everywhere else......and yes i do trim "over there"....for hygenie, neatness and comfort....jovial guy....straightforward.....a bit more daring than last time coz of army......oh yeah...brown eyes....well u wanna knoe more....plz u knoe what to do....