These changes can be considered useful or catastrophic depending on our particular viewpoints. Whatever the consensus may be, we should all be ready!

1. The United States Post Office. Can you imagine a world without our mail service? This enterprise has become so deep in debt that there is absolutely no way to continue the way they are. Computerized e-mails, Fed-Ex, and UPS have taken away many of the post office’s means of money: their customers! Most of the things you receive in the mail today are considered junk or random advertisements.

2. The Check. Large countries with complicated infrastructure are making plans to do away with checks by at most the year 2018. Financial practices lose millions of dollars a year processing and sorting checks. Credit card payments and Internet purchases will inevitably amount to death of the paper check as we know it. The Post Office will also take another hit by the loss of checks: much of their business now stems from delivering checks!

3. The Newspaper. Members of the younger generations just do not read the paper like past generations have. Few and far between are they signed up for a daily subscription. The newspaper may die out just as the milk delivery man and the laundry delivery services have. For those who enjoy reading the news online, it will soon be a paid service. The rise in availability of Internet-ready equipment and online readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine writers and publishers to create alliances. They have been working with big names such as Apple, Amazon, and the many cellular phone organizations to develop a system for paid-subscription services.

4. The Physical Book. Many vow they will never surrender the physical book that they hold in their hands and flip the leafy pages. Many tried to adhere to same principles with iTunes. Soon though, the convenience won out, and I began trading in my discs for money for online buying. The breaking point was getting all of the latest music without even leaving my computer. A similar thing is bound to happen with our literature. Users can peruse a bookstore through the Internet and even preview a small chapter before the purchase. The prices will be unbeatable as well! As with iTunes, the convenience will be the deciding factor. Once you start  clicking the mouse instead of turning the pages, the magical sense of being engrossed in a novel will take over, and you lose track: you forget that it is not a physical book you are reading off of.

5. The Home Phone. Provided you don’t have an incredibly large you have a large family and make tons of local calls, they are unnecessary. Most people have a home phone because they simply have always had one. In doing this though, you end up paying double fees on your phone bill. On top of this, cell phone companies are offering better rates than ever, so the need is driven even further down.

6. Music. This is perhaps the most tragic of these impending changes. The music business is having a very tough time, and not only due to Internet pirating. Indeed, it is the difficulty of having music heard and appreciated due to record label practices. Money-mongering and dishonesty is the true problem. The record companies and the radio organizations are going to pieces. Over 40% of the tunes bought now are “catalog items,” which means popular music most people would know, by artists who have been around for a while. Not just the recorded music, but concerts as well. To do some research into this downward spiral, read the book, “Appetite for Self-Destruction” by Steve Knopper, and the movie production, “Before the Music Dies.”

7. Television. Television networks are not making as much as they used to. This is not just due to the recent economic downturn. People are viewing TV and movies downloaded from their personal computers. Now we are playing online games and doing all sorts of other things in the time that used to be occupied by television. Prime time television shows are suffering, and people are getting the bad side of it: incredibly long commercials trying to make money. It is hard to want to keep it alive with great alternatives such as NetFlix and YouTube.

8. Your Possessions. You may own many things now in your house, but soon, perhaps they will not exist physically, but instead inside of a computer. On the computer’s hard drive you store all of your memories and things pertaining to your life. Also, your music and DVDs are there. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are polishing up their newest
“cloud services.” This means that when you store information on a computer, your data will be stored directly to the Internet, not on your hard drive. All of the major operating systems are converting to this type of storage. Anything you may want to save will be written on this “cloud”. Don’t be surprised if you see a monthly fee attached as well!

In this online universe, you can have access to your songs or your reading, or whatever you have from any computer or hand-held device. This could be very useful. The problem is, can you really own any of your documents, or can it all float away at any time in one large “Poof?” Will many of our possessions in our daily lives be losable and intangible? Such an idea makes you want to run and put all of your physical things away, hidden safely.

9. Privacy. One outstanding concept we will look back and long for is privacy. That is slowly fading though. It might scare you, but try a quick Google search with your name and see how many results are pulled about you. There are now surveillance cameras on street corners, in many buildings, and some even built right into your laptop and cell phone. Count on it that every day, “They” know who we are and where we are, with exact longitude and latitude. GPS does not lie! Your identity is filtered into millions of profiles all over the Internet. It seems all we really have are the memories in our head. Nobody can take those away…. But perhaps one day they could be downloaded into your computer for safe keeping!

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Over the past month or so there have been a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, that frankly, scared the bejeezus out of us.  We knew that surfing the internet exposes us to identity theft and that third parties of all kinds can, do, and are probably in some cases legally required (like our ISP) to monitor all our online activities.  Now we believe our internet use is a private matter (doesn’t everyone?).  And we don’t feel that by tracking our internet preferences third parties can “better” market us through more targeted advertising to create a “better” internet experience for us.  Call us old fashioned but we would rather make those choices for ourselves – privately.  The WSJ articles made clear that ANY internet usage by an individual can both expose that user to invasions of privacy and outright dangerous – like going to a gun fight with only a knife.  All this got us thinking about ways to protect ourselves.

We were, and still are, doing a number of things already.  Each weekend we run a program on each computer called “Evidence Eliminator” which cleans our computers of traces of where we have been.  We run registry cleaners, disk defragmentation software and SpyBot.  We also surf with IE8’s “in Private” turned on, but that does nothing to protect our identities online.  Where we were not covered was with our IP address out “in the wild” on the internet.  And the WSJ articles made it clear to us that exposing your IP address to third parties on the internet is one of the prime ways to “be at risk” on the net.

That got us looking into anonymous IP address alternatives.  The first place I looked was my ISP provider – not surprisingly they did not offer such a service.  Next we looked at using those free services where you go to an anonymous IP provider’s website and from there plug in the place you want to surf to.  That was a non-starter out of the gate – just way to messy and time consuming and bothersome.  The next alternative was companies that provide a paid for service to give you anonymous IP web protection real time all the time.

So I fired up “The Google” and started researching these companies. A handful surfaced to the top and were each similarly priced.  I ended up going with PrivateProxy even though it was slighter higher priced than its competitors: A) because it offered IP address changes every 30 minutes, versus every 24 hours by its nearest competitor, and B) it offered 128 bit encryption on my web traffic – this seemed to me to be very secure.

Having now used the PrivateProxy service I am very satisfied.  Installation of their software was easy and simple – very intuitive.  My surfing experience has also been excellent.  Web surfing speeds did drop slightly but I could only tell if I run a YouTube video in 1080p mode around peak hours in the evening.  During the day I can’t tell any difference in online speed experience.

So on the three most important items, PrivateProxy is a winner for us:

1)            Gives us peace of mind with 30 minute ip address changes and 128 bit encryption

2)            Easy seamless installation and behind the scenes operation

3)            A virtually zero effect on internet speed experience.

Lastly, to finish this review, customer support from this company has also been excellent.  I have had professional and quick responses by a real person each time I’ve had a question.

Rob, Boston

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Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing

Take Control of Your Internet Privacy

Here are  3 simple steps to control your privacy on the Internet:

1. Never post personal information on the Internet.  Once information is on the web, it can be copied and shared without your permission.  Once posted, you’ve lost control over where it can appear.  What may seem harmless can lead to the wrong people having your information.
2. Use an anonymous proxy to hide your IP address.  Your IP address is one identifier that can lead back to you.  By hiding it you can throw would be stalkers off your trail.
3. Clear your cookies.  While normally cookies are not harmful, they do provide information back to websites you visit about your habits on their website.  This may or may not be something you care about.  It depends on the websites you visit.

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The stated purpose here is two-fold. First, the Obama administration wants  the government’s websites to be easier to navigate, and to become useful. Secondly, it wants to monitor your behavior on its websites to figure out what information was accessed the most and hence, potentially the most useful.

Privacy issues are crucial to the topic of government tracking and targeting, so much so that the government memorandum the Obama administration issued discusses it in the introduction. The government is assuring  people that they shouldn’t be concerned about the US government watching their every online move.

“Any such uses must not compromise or invade personal privacy,”states the document “It is important to provide clear, firm, and unambiguous protection against any uses that would compromise or invade personal privacy.

I’m sorry, but given how well the government does most things, do we really think they will get this right?  I’m not assuming ill intent or malice on anyone’s part.  I just assume that this is an area that we really don’t want them to get wrong.  If they do, and if the data is breached, this could be a privacy nightmare.

This is yet another reason why using an anonymous proxy is a good idea.  With a proxy, your identifying information, your IP address, is masked so that your specific information can’t be tracked.  However, even with an anonymous proxy, if you fill in information on a government website, they then know who you are.  An anonymous proxy can’t help you if you provide your personal data willingly.

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This scared the citizens of that era, around the 1950’s. They grew up in a time where they did not question authority, and this meant the government. This surrender of their will to their government would have made it easy for them to be controlled. Since at about this time  technology was going places that mankind could never have foreseen, Orwell’s fictional world seemed more imminent than ever. Ever since America broke off from the British rulers those decades ago, we have always had a healthy skepticism for any sort of government power. Although the government is not all controlling, people still are prone to views of it taking over and of martial law. The biggest problem and fear people have though is with privacy, and to this extent the government is the least of their worries.

The government has the power to invade our privacy, no doubt about it. Would they really use it though? Probably not. Although 1984 is an excellent novel and recommended reading for anyone and everyone, its ideas did not come to fruition. We have long surpassed the year 1984 and our society, even today, is nothing like Orwell predicted. What he nailed head on though is our dependence on technology, and for this we have to applaud him. Orwell described great systems where people could interact, but it would cost the public most of their anonymity and privacy; sounds like the social networking giants of today? To this end, it is not the government that is going to strip us of all of our privacy, it is ourselves. Instead of the cameras being on every street corner, watching passerby, they are on our web cams, projecting our faces to friends all over the world.

Why did Orwell pronounce these social aspects as a bad thing then?  He saw the dangers of OTHER PEOPLE seeing everything about our lives. This certainly rings true today: think of all of the kidnappings and other crimes that have stemmed from an overly revealing online profile! Unlike the conscientious writer, people do not think of their audience when they put up all of the stuff they do on their personal sites. Many, to complete strangers, leak many sensitive details of their life, and get burned for it later. These sites are arguably the best way for a criminal to find out about you and find out where to strike you. Your Internet site can reveal ways to get into your life that you would never think to tell anyone.

This is due to a principle where humans cannot limit the output they have in non-face to face contact. Nearly everyone suffers from this deadly syndrome, and strangely, no one seems to notice. No one ever seems to think before they post the information they want on their site; no mental screening process occurs. Only the criminals realize, and before you know it, you have just told them your address, and that you won’t be home for the weekend. When you get back, your stash of cash and other valuables might be with a new owner. Although Orwell wasn’t completely accurate in his message, there is still something to be learned. Big Brother is always watching, and alongside him is a crafty hacker, watching, waiting, biding his time till the opportunity for a strike presents itself. Be mindful, don’t give Big Brother your information, and he won’t pass it too the criminal.

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This type of criminal would have a starring role in an old gangster movie, the ones so overplayed they would be in a stark non-color and grainy version. As with their movie persona, these bad guys committed some atrocities. The film portrayals simply scared the viewers, but real street crooks are the ones to be held accountable for almost of the fright and damage to people. These bad people are the ones who make the cities unsafe at night, and are bait for most news reports adding to the hysteria.

These men and women were the most evil of the bad in their era. They were the outcasts of society, the ones that, when friends and families saw them in court, would avert their gaze, as if their gaze had some strange and hypnotic power. These were the reasons that the United States treads lightly with its prison system. It is a strange thing that such an accepting society conjures: you have these boundless rights and freedoms, yet it is just assumed that you will not abuse them. Unfortunately, while most of us take care of these rights, guys like these don’t and it tears at the very foundation of our country.

The criminals of the olden days, the kind that would stop you in a desolate corridor with their weapons and then steal all of your goods, although were at one time the worst of the worst, are child’s play to our bad guys of recent. The criminals of today have a huge advantage: they have assimilated today’s technology into their misdeeds. One might at first consider that this technology is with the boys in blue, making it simpler and more efficient to get these scum, but in fact it helps the crooks to hide themselves. The criminals have become one with the high-tech technology and have become very skilled in its use.

Think of any average crime scene.  A sly criminal who wanted to steal some money would see a rich-looking person, and decide their odds of winning. Weapons brandished and in a brazen attack they would confront their target, wave the gun around, and rob their victim. Once they get all of the money out of the wallet, they would tell the the poor slob not to call the police. They would then sprint all of the way to their hideout and lay low for a little while, until the police were off of them.

It didn’t matter though: with a well staffed and skilled police force, the thief was usually apprehended in a timely manner. There was not any tools of the trade they could use to hide themselves or clean up the scene of the crime. Once they were caught, there was no DNA markings to put them at the crime scene then, there was just a simple line-up and the victim, who tentatively singled out the criminal.

Technology is our hero then, right? Unfortunately, this is often not the case. While our rapid success in producing DNA tracking, fingerprints and other technological advances, these tools can also help in the suspect’s runaway from justice. A running car is the most high-tech equipment a criminal today needs to disappear; it doesn’t matter is they know exactly who did the act. If they can’t go out and get them, all of their information on them is quite useless.

A crime where there is no scene; the perfect crime. These online perpetration’s are quite difficult for law enforcement, as there is no real site of the deed, and a criminal can conceal while online. Another harrowing fact is that these identity thieves and hackers, as was stated before, are not usually caught and carried to justice. So not many reliable ways through to effectively thwart them, we can only hope to preemptively hide ourselves from their attacks. Always be very wary online, and protect yourself with a variety of online safety tools. Steer clear of darkened alleyways!

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People’s lives around the globe|world] today, especially those of the United States citizens, are of a highly mobile type. We use our cars to go anywhere, work a whole bunch of separate shifts to augment our bank accounts, and have more entertainment in our house than does a whole circus. Consider going out to the movies in the present day; in the prehistoric days, before the VCR player, you would have to buy a ticket for the theater playing at your time. Now you can simply download movies temporarily whenever you choose by taking your pick from an on-demand service. Our homes these days are like the best place to relax and have fun; it almost defeats the point of going out. This self-containment is a must today though because we have more going on in our lives than ever before.

Regardless of lackluster sleeping patterns, we beat back the sleepy with huge glasses of coffee and energy shots. As much as we might try and believe otherwise, we can’t change or avoid the obvious fact that there is only so much time in a single day; you can only plan so much in the time you are allotted. This leads to idea of making the shopping errand much faster. For many people though, and not just the ones who stereotypically enjoy spending, shopping is a fun reward for working hard. People like browsing for clothes, trying on every last article for optimum stylishness. So why would we take this pleasure away from them? A single word, in summation: time. It is time consuming to drag out to a store and lug your shopping bags around all day, and most would like to avoid it.

Online shopping is a relatively new phenomenon and began in a variety of sites. Most people first reach for massive marketing sites like Ebay when this type of shopping comes up, but they are just some of many. Through these sites, you could actually become quite the Internet entrepreneur, pedaling your old junk online. Some people make themselves rich selling their old knick-knacks to collectors! Whether or not you choose to participate in these transactions is up to every person on the site, but it was the public that took this process to the next stage. The Internet suddenly became the place for selling and buying, and all of a sudden we are bombarded with ads all over our explorer box. Unfortunately, the number one rule of the Internet rang true with this new online shopping market; any sort of economic prosperity, and bad people will catch on.

These new scam artists were witty people though, it was a shame they wasted their intellect on crime. They would make a credible name to use on Ebay and other sites. They would then post some sort of item for a great price that everyone would want. Once the customer bought, their credit card would be charged, and the scammer would send them an empty crate or maybe nothing at all. As is the nature of the Internet, the criminal packed up shop and was never heard from again. You may have known people to whom this happened, or been a victim yourself. Don’t get disillusioned; Internet shopping is a great tool; just watch who you are buying from. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Try and read their profiles on these sites too, and scan the buyer feedback. If it is bad, turn tail and run! Even if it is good, it still could be a hoax. Use your intuition and don’t let your money go to waste; or rather, to some low life who blatantly stole it.

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Anonymous Proxy usage is on the rise. This is because an anonymous proxy can help you bypass Internet restrictions or Internet censorship. An anonymous proxy is an Internet server that you connect to and that appears to be your ISP’s Internet server to any site that you visit. The websites that you visit when connected to an anonymous proxy see the proxies IP address and not the IP address of your ISP, or employer. This helps bypass restrictions based on IP address. If your IP address is banned or blocked, then by using the IP address of the anonymous proxy, you are bypassing the ban.

Anonymous surfing is slightly different. In addition to hiding your IP address, anonymous surfing is the process of being invisible on the web. With an anonymous proxy that encrypts your website traffic, you make virtually impossible for someone to monitor your Internet surfing. All they will see is the encrypted traffic which is almost impossible to decipher.

When you surf anonymously by using encryption, then the data that you send not only can’t be read, its hard to block. Let’s say that you are in mainland China and researching democracy. By encrypting your searches, the Chinese government won’t know what you are looking for. This bypasses the block on those searches. Let’s also assume that the New York Times website is blocked by the Chinese. Again, the URL that you enter into your browser is encrypted so it cannot be monitored. This also means it can’t be blocked.

Anonymous Proxy and Anonymous Surfing are keys to being safe on the Internet. Safe from hackers and thieves. And safe from repressive governments.

For most of us, we don’t worry about being anonymous because we don’t live in a repressed society. However, governments aren’t the only ones watching you. Hackers and thieves are watching you too. Using an anonymous proxy can also protect you from would be thieves.

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What is an anonymous proxy, you may be asking? First of all, there are two types of anonymous proxies. The one that most people use is the web-based. This is because it is simple to find. All that is required is a search on the Google site for “anonymous proxy” and a vast amount of results will be shown. Choose one of the results and go to the site. An empty URL box will be shown and you need only type the web address of the place you want to visit. The anonymous proxy will then take you to this address without showing your IP address. When you leave the website there will not be a record of your having been there. The anonymous proxy acts as a combination protection and retrieval tool. It gets the website for you and keeps anyone from accessing your IP address. Your IP address can tell a thief where you are located. How many people do you want to know your name?

The second type of anonymous proxy is a software proxy. This is somewhat like the web-based one however, software proxies work by downloading a program to your computer. Many of the software programs are set up so that when the traffic from your browser goes through the IP servers to be changed, they are put through encryption.  This encryption protects the data stream so that a hacker cannot read what you are sending over the Internet.  Without encryption your data stream is wide open for anyone using a packet sniffer.  Unprotected Internet communications is one way that people lose their identity or their money.

Setting this up is a very simple process. All you have to do is download the software for the anonymous proxy server. The software you are using will have an icon on your desktop. Open the program from here and put in your user name and your password. The next thing will be to choose the anonymous proxy from the ones available that you wish to connect to and hit enter. Your computer will be connected to the server you chose. The browser you use can be opened and your IP address is changed to one from the software program. Eliminating your IP address from showing on whatever site you choose to visit is a terrific move. The electronic trail that is left by your computer every time you go online no longer leads back to your computer. It goes to the server company that has the program you are using. This type of anonymous proxy has more servers to handle the traffic they are getting so it is faster than the ones you can choose free from the Internet. In addition, you are not inundated with the advertisements often put on free proxy servers.

The whole process makes for a safe and secure way of doing anything online. Instead of them being able to have full access to all your pertinent information, the IP address is routed through anonymous proxy servers. This eliminates the chance of a hacker gaining control of your information while you are online. Using a wireless router or a laptop on a hotspot allows everything you are doing to be seen by those who are just waiting for an unsuspecting surfer to come along. Did you know that your ISP even has a log of everything you do on the Internet? The law says they have to keep a record of the sites you visit. Do you think this is anyone’s business besides yours? The best way to make sure no one knows what you are doing while you are online is to make use of the anonymous proxy software that encrypts your communication and keeps them private.

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