CyberWatch & You

CyberWatch is an organization that is built around educating as many people they can about computer information.  One way they do this is by posting challenges or competitions for college students such as myself and allow us to create informational projects that we can submit into the competition, these projects can range from slideshows, to interactive flash videos. I think this is a great idea for an organization to do, it makes students work harder on the projects and dig deeper into information and they are bound to find out new and interesting things, that they themselves or possibly even the teacher didn't even know.  
CyberWatch and their competitions can be found at:  http://www.cyberwatchcenter.org/

I decided for my project that i'm going to be doing Computer Security, mostly because I know much about the subject because I have been taking two semesters here at NCC for computer programming ,so I have a strong base for the project which will allow me to look into deeper aspects of computer security such as which aspect of a computers operating system programming is most susceptible to hackers/viruses and how they are patched.
Some resources that I am possibly going to be using consist of articles of world famous viruses and how it worked and effected the world, how to prevent viruses, how to remove viruses, what are Bot-Nets, what the difference is between a virus, worm and a other bad programs.

This project is a great way for us the students to take it upon ourselves to learn more about the pat of the course that we found most interesting. Because of this it allows students more free thought and creativity in their field of student that they think is the strongest, which in itself will make for more informative projects and presentations.

Argg Are You A Pirate?

When people think of pirates they typically think of the old days with ships, gold and parrots. Unfortunately that is not the case, pirates these days can be almost anyone and they may not even know it. By downloading movies, music, games or even a book off the internet you are literally stealing money and sales from the company.

Most people think that if you download a song or two it won't hurt the company because they make a lot of money off of DVDs and other merchandise. WRONG! Millions of people are doing this, which when added up the companies are losing an excessive amount of money. You could even potentially go to jail for up to 5 years and/or pay up to $250,000 per song downloaded. If that isn't the worst of your issues by downloading random materials off the internet you are opening yourself up to viruses or identity theft.

The most common way people download music and other popular items online is by using a Peer to Peer (P2P) network. By using a program such as Limewire or BitTorrent you can upload or download a song and other people can download the song from your computer. By doing this you are able to be tracked quite easily by the police because you aren't masking your IP Address in anyway. That way the police are able to track your IP Address back to your house, as you might know now, that method isn't very effective. Torrents are too easy to track unless you use masking programs which allow you to download through a proxy server. Additionally if you want to be truly safe you can download through a file hosting server site such as RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile ect. This makes it so it obscures your IP Address when you download a file from them. So if you are too every download an illegal file, use a file hosting server site.

One of the biggest sources of illegal downloading is college students on campus, the campus regulates files that are being downloaded through their network which makes downloading illegal files very risky. If they catch you they have the option to turn you over to the police, disconnect you from the network or even dismiss you from the college on the grounds of theft.

So the moral of the story is not to steal things you don't own, even if you don't think you will get caught, it is still illegal and the chance of getting caught is always there.

(Additionally the part of posting our SSID, I do not own a router since I am directly plugged into a modem and therefor I do not have an SSID.)