Emily wrote : I'm with you Bob. I don't want any more of that material out there : and hackable than I can possibly have. The absolute minimum. : : At some point people have to weigh the value of convenience against : the value of their privacy. I wonder whether the majority will ever : figure that out. Your web site (not yours specifically) - aside from making images available for pinching, is also vulnerable to being hacked.. and also can be used to illegally host material you'd rather not be associated with. Your computer can be compromised by a keylogger, and it's not just PC's affected - here's a nice package available for Macs: http://www.spyready.com/mac.html http://www.topsecretsoftware.com/typerecorder.html etc etc etc.. Then there's even physical keyloggers: http://www.keyghost.com/USB-Keylogger.htm Greypage searches are avaialble online http://greypages.mazzanet.id.au/ to reveal your address to anyone who might find your phone number on the web. Email addresses are frequently spoofed. In times gone by people were paranoid about putting 'unknown' floppies in their computers due to the risk of viruses - many of which had the sole goal of trashing your machine.. I'm not sure what all these mac viruses do (below), but the goal these days seems to be to steal information and so unlike the old viruses which alerted the user to the infection (largely by magling things!) the new ones sit quietly doing their thing will little or no evidence that they're there.. http://antivirus.about.com/od/macintoshresource/Macintosh_Viruses_and_Mac_V irus_Resources.htm http://antivirus.about.com/library/virusinfo/blmeliss.htm And now operating systems themselves monitor what people do, what software they have, where they go and what they look at - couple this with the fact the EU* and the US are logging ALL internet traffic, emails, telephone calls etc and it's apparent that privacy is something that isn't in the process of being eroded, it's actually gone. Computer convenience has allowed this to happen karl * http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1683944,00.html interesting that this breaches existing laws pertaining to the delivery of conventional mail.
