Are You Concerned About Your Online Privacy?

There is every reason to be cautious online. While I am not as cautious about hiding my stuff as I should be, I am careful about the things I act on. I rarely read my email, other than the subject line and sender name, but every now and then I look at some of them as I am deleting them, and there are a whole lot of obvious scams and some that are not so obvious, such as the fake notices from PayPal or Amazon about large purchases that I know that I didn't make. By looking at the details of the header, it's usually easy enough to spot the fakes, but there are times when I have logged into my PayPal or Amazon account just to be sure. When doing so, DO NOT click on any links from the email, but go directly to your account in order to look for recent activity. With a scam, you will be sent to a fake site that looks like PayPal or Amazon, and the scam might be as simple as a request to log in with your username and password. Otherwise, the scam might be about getting a refund for these purchases that you never made and were never actually charged for.

Also, watch for virus or hacker warning popups that you might see on your computer. I got one from McAfee that looked very real last week, and I might have fallen for it, at least a little ways, if not for the fact that I knew that I didn't have McAfee installed on any of my computers. Rather than clicking on the link, I copied and pasted it into a text browser. It was to a domain that had "McAfee" in it, but it wasn't to the McAfee site. Since I visit strange websites all day, every day, for my job, somewhere along the line the domain found its way into my list of sites that are allowed to send me notices. For that matter, it may have been a legit site at one time.

Although I sometimes come across what looks to be good deals online, I am very careful about making purchases online. Several months ago, I purged nearly every online shopping account that I had except for Amazon and a few others. It's not that I love Amazon that much but I can get pretty much anything that I need online through Amazon and having only a few shopping accounts reduces my exposure.

However, when you come across a great deal online from a company or website you've never heard of before, keep in mind that scammers sometimes set up fake shopping websites, and they may even sell actual products there, at the price advertised, but what they're really interested in is your credit card information. I think if I were to find a deal that I couldn't pass up, I might just purchase a one-time-use Green Dot card or something if they still sell them.

 

I've had people tell me that "they" can find out anything about me pretty easily, so why bother.

I remind them that if someone really wants to get inside of your house, they'll find a way to do so...but you still lock your doors.

 

Here's a video that many of you won't care to watch, either because you don't watch videos at all, or because you like your information in bite-sized chunks and this is a long video, or because you won't watch anything that isn't from the mainstream media, or because you refuse to listen to any information that isn't obtained legally, or because you're simply not interested, and that's fine. This isn't for everyone.

To the best of my memory, I have never watched the Shawn Ryan Show or watched only a part of one of his shows once, but I quit because he cusses a lot (he does). He looks familiar, but I don't remember having watched his show before. That's okay, his guest is the one with the information and he doesn't cuss a lot.

In this video, the guest is Ryan Montgomery, who describes himself as an ethical hacker, but he wasn't always ethical. Maybe he isn't now, but that's okay too because it's the information that I'm interested in. He looks like he might have been on The Waltons.

A few different topics are discussed here. As is often seen, the one on the blurb, the child predator thing, comes last in the video. To me, although interesting, that wasn't the part that I was most interested in, anyhow. He is a hacker and he talks a lot about hacking, online security, and computer security in general, and that's why I am posting this in this part of the forum. I trust (hope) that no one here is in favor of child predators, so that wouldn't make for much of a discussion. On that topic, though, before I move on, I will say that I disagree with both the host and the guest when they imply that law firms that take a child sex offender on as a client should be doxxed. Although this principle is often abused, a founding principle of our legal system, in the United States, is that someone is innocent until proven guilty, so if we support a system in which no competent law firm will take a sex offender on as a client, we are violating this principle and potentially subjecting people who are innocent of the charges to a conviction, not because they are guilty, but because they couldn't get a reliable law firm to defend their case. I just wanted to put that out there before moving on to other subjects.

The show begins with a some talk about Ryan Montgomery's childhood and background. I don't think it's mentioned in the video, but I suspect he is on the autism spectrum, which might account for his being something less than a dynamic speaker, and it could also account for his early interest and mastery of computers and computer hacking.

There is, then, a discussion of drug abuse and recovery, as he was addicted for a time, and co-founded a drug treatment center while in his early 20s. Feel free to fast-forward past any topics you're not interested in. You might want to fast-forward past the advertisements, too. Since this video is not monetized through YouTube, due to some of the topics, there are a lot of ads presented by the host, and some of them are lengthy. I fast-forwarded through them.

Then, the center section talks about computer and Internet security - and that, through the internet-of-things (I don't remember either of them using that term, but that's what it's known as), hackers (particularly Chinese government-sponsored hackers) can get into your whole system through your refrigerator or electronic mop. He explains that some of these devices, manufactured in China, which offer such handy features as letting you know when your electronic mop needs cleaning, do so through Chinese servers that are built into them, which may have open doors.

Not necessarily discussed in the show, while a Chinese hacker might have very little interest in what I say or do in my house, or even in my meager bank accounts, DDOS attacks are primarily routed through computers owned by people who don't know that someone else has accessed their computers. They might use 20% of your computer resources while you're on the computer, which will be unlikely to affect your computer's performance noticeably, and then use 100% of it while you're away from your computer, which might be considerable if you're like my wife, and never shut your computer off.

He also shows some of the devices that can be acquired by hackers to enhance their ability to get into your iPhone or mobile devices, then, because many of these devices are synced with your computers, they can get into your computer.

This section is followed by the child predator part of the show, which you may or may not find interesting. They don't go into any graphic details, by the way. It's more about the technology and techniques that are used.


This is the second part, also the Shawn Ryan Show, with the same guest. I haven't watched it yet and, since the first one was long, I'm going to take a break from it before watching it.

 

Rob Braxman's YouTube channel includes several tech videos that explain, fairly clearly, a lot of issues that come up over Internet privacy, search engines, browsers, and so on. Here's one example.