Friday, August 24, 2007

Freaky Friday!

It's Friday! YES! I just celebrated by ordering a double pepperoni pizza from Papa Johns. (thats a lot of P's). While I wait for it, I thought I'd post here...
First up... I was one of the first to get involved with this whole internet things. Ok, granted, I was like Al Gore who invented it, but I was a member of AOL in 1993 (And I can barely remember things like BBS's and Telenet and "The Well"). Well, it's been close to 2 years now since I finally cut the ties from AOL. I still have a free account with them where I can keep my emails, but I never use them anymore. When I started on this internet thing, I heard a lot of warnings of stuff to be careful of (hackers, phishers, phreaks (not really internet but still), scams galore, etc...) So I made a real effort to stay anonymous with my AOL identity. In the past year or so, my incoming email has practically dropped to zero. Even the spammers got tired to emailing me. Well, guess what someone recently got my identity... I've been getting a TON of spam with my first name attached to it, and some have my city in the message as well. (This after getting my credit card info comprised about a month or two ago - connected?) Either way, I've just recently had an epiphany over protecting ones privacy on the internet... No matter how careful you are, you are really at the mercy of every business/website you have given your info to. I know that somewhere, somehow, my info was hacked/scammed, whatever you want to call it. I suspect it may be directly connected to AOL but I can't prove that.
I'm now going to be that much more careful who, and how much personal info I give to companies. I may even resort to using some alias' where I can get away with it. All that time of me being so careful, and it is ruined by another company with some sort of security hole. Grr.

I was going to post the second item, but I think I'll separate the posts, because it will probably be long :)

Enjoy your weekend Nation!

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