Cyber Crime

I have to do a presentation in my Internet class next week on the book I read (World Without Secrets). Since we divided the chapters in the book between team members. I actually only read chapters 10 and 11 that talk about music pirates and data mining or Internet crime. I found these two chapters interesting and relevant what goes on today.

To go back in history though, the author, Richard Hunter, predicts the downfall of major record label companies will fall because of cheaper venues legal and illegal ways to download music from the Internet. One of my classmates has already written about the threat of illegal downloading in his blog about Illegal File Sharing. The itunes a dollar a song make less money than selling whole albums. However, downloading music from itunes by buying it only lasts for so long. Hunger tells us that, "If fewer CDs are sold in favor of single-song purchases, or if pricing pressure from digital downloads caused CD prices to drop, or if consumers don't really want all those songs anyway, growth turns negative (172)." The example used of music pirating in this book is Napster. Who was caught and convicted of illegal music downloading. His predictions about the music industry struggling because single song downloading was correct.

Buying music online through downloading does however benefit independent artists who are trying to get their music out there and who are unable to become partners with major record companies. Andrew fry talks about these independent artists in his blog, Support Independent Musicians with SongSlide.

In the other chapter, the issue of cyber crime is brought up. "The most important cyber-crimes, the most deadly cyber-attacks, are all about stealing information (Hunter 196)." Stealing credit card numbers, passwords, account numbers, and other information about you is easily sold for lots of money by cyber-criminals. How do we avoid viruses that steal our information and software that attack our computers? Well the author gives us a couple of tips to protect ourselves. " In particular, be careful with passwords, put a firewall on any Internet-connected machine, and don't accept e-mail from anyone you don't know, especially if it's got an attachment (Hunter 201)."

I am hoping I will be able to present these two topics to my class in the following week when I give my oral presentation. I think giving tips to my audience on how to avoid being attacked by a cyber criminals and raising awareness on how single song illegal downloading affects artists and major record companies is a good goal.