Internet I spend a lot of time on the Internet, mainly on Facebook and IRC. On days off, I can spend 10+ hours at it. I like to be “close” to my friends world-wide and chat with them. During the years, my contacts/friends around the world have increased a lot. With the Internet, it happened even faster and, now-a-days, I have many friends, some in important positions. I enjoy a lot searching for updates of the software I like or use and be up-to-date with the software, hardware, and news relating both and also relating other subjects. Internet is a dangerous place, though. When I was a newbie and had a dial-up modem, I was nuked several times and also got infected with trojans sent to me by persons from IRC claiming to be films or other things. I was also the target of identify theft. I learned the hard way about the evil people out there wanting to ruin others' lives. I have been disappointed with IRC, since now-a-days most people have broadband connections and are connected 24/7/365 and just idle there. The IRC channels seem ghost rooms. No one talks and only lamers are active saying or doing stupid things… it is really annoying. Decades ago I learned about  malware (spyware, adware, viruses, worms, trojans, ransomware), spam and phishing, after having problems. The more time going by, the more unsafe I felt about the Internet. Internet is a dangerous place since all kind of persons get in and try to take advantage of others. Regarding my computer safety, I would rather lose a good e-mail than risking the security of my system. So, in case of doubt, I delete e-mails without opening them. SPAM: Spam is generated in many ways. There are web crawlers, which are programs that search the Internet for e-mail addresses and generate a list with them, which is used by spammers. Also, people infected with spyware will make the malicious programs spam the persons in the address book of their e-mail clients or in the pages visited by the infected people. Also, chain letters which are forwarded with the e-mails of the senders in the body, or the whole destination e-mail addresses visible, will end up in someone along the way collecting the e-mails and later spam. Some malicious programs even log everything one types (keyloggers) and send the logs to criminals. Phishing: Phishing is an attempt by criminals to try getting personal information about you (like real name, credit card numbers, addresses, usernames, and passwords) which can be used later for fraudulent purposes like identity theft. This is achieved through e-mails pretending to be from real companies, websites, financial institutions, etc. but they link to other sites owned by the scammers. Some sites may even infect your computer with viruses and alike. Expired Domains: There are criminals out there waiting for known domains to expire to register them, and add adverts or other bad things to the sites. I have noticed this happening with numerous sites which used to belong to friends in the past. The criminals usually activate the option “catch all” so that old companies and users who e-mail the domain become known to the criminals. They also try to keep the look of the original website to get the login information from old users. Botnets: Botnets are 100s or 1000s of compromised computers (“Zombie Computers”) controlled by criminals to mass attack other systems. In such a scenario it is almost impossible to track the IP of the criminals since the IPs in the attacks are the ones of the compromised computers. There are also criminals selling “packs” of compromised computers. Even my homepage's guestbook was attacked by nasty persons who flooded it and flamed me. I had an old guestbook which was flooded a lot and because it had a limited number of entries, the older entries got lost. Thereafter, I asked my friend Robert Bergström to create a guestbook and, after several improvements, it became the current guestbook. In January 2012, I got a fresh guestbook based on the previous one with some enhancements. A funny thing happened on IRC on 22.May.2006: a friend from PTnet whose nick is ugly_gypsy_ noticed that my real name, “Marco”, was in sequence with my IRC nick, “Master_of_Chaos”: (M) (a) s t e (r) _ o f _ (C) h a (o) s . It is really strange and funny… I keep getting surprised. On 13.Oct.2009 I was banned from an IRC channel on DALnet because a channel operator claimed that I was a BOT. He said I typed too fast to be human. This is so silly! I have been a DALnet regular for decades, and I am treated like dirt? I had to add this here.

LAST UPDATE: 10.JUN.2022