A Perfect Example
April 23rd, 2009 by ComputerBob
Regular readers of this Journal know that I’m a domestic violence survivor and I work as a full-time volunteer for a domestic violence center and shelter. If you didn’t know that before now, and you’d like to hear “the rest of the story,” check out my articles, speeches and poems in this site’s DV Information section or click on the red Domestic Violence Journal Topic in the right column of this site’s home page.
Yesterday afternoon, all of the staff and volunteers of the DV center, the shelter, and related departments were supposed to have 2 hours of training on hurricane preparedness, led by a member of the local fire department. But about 3 hours before the scheduled training time, he called and cancelled.
So I volunteered to fill the training time myself. I spoke on the topic of technology safety. Having dealt with the subject myself for decades, I didn’t need much time at all to prepare my presentation. My training covered the following topics:
- Why we need to understand technology security
- Descriptions of technologies that are currently in use (GPS, Twitter, cell phones, email, etc.)
- How each technology can be used for good
- How each technology can be exploited by abusers to harass and/or stalk and/or exploit their victims — our clients
- Worms, viruses, keyloggers, pinhole cameras and other technological threats
- Legal precedents and ramifications
- Who do you trust with your private information? — “Safe computing” is like safe sex
- Some ways that we and our clients can reduce our risks of having technologies used against us
After lots of lively discussion, most trainees said that they felt very paranoid, and were very leery of using some of the technologies that they had previously trusted.
That told me that my training had been successful.
Then, this morning, I received a new issue of the Windows Secrets newsletter. I printed its top story to pass around at work today, because it’s a perfect example of what we had talked about yesterday:
Gmail accounts hacked via unpatched hole.
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Tags:
Consumer Info, Domestic Violence, Google, Security, Survivors