Jason’s Random Thoughts

^{This is the second of a multi-part series focusing on the many different forms of internet crime. I plan on looking at several different ways people use the internet to profit from various illegal activities, as well as examine different solutions that have been presented over the last few years. The final post in the series will be my potential solution to the problem.}

We’ve all heard the phrase “crime doesn’t pay” but, when we look at all of the scammers and illegal activities on the internet that generate huge sums of cash for anyone greasy enough to do the work, it’s hard not to be a little bit jealous. That said, there are a few ways that police are trying to crack down on internet crime. Today’s topic is on the Big Brother Approach, and why it won’t work.

If police forces around the world are serious about combating online crimes such as child pornography, money laundering, sex slave trading, or any of the other highly illegal online activities for that matter, they need to start attacking the problem from the inside. Several police forces around the world have taken this idea to heart and tried to implement a very Orwellian approach to fighting crime in cyberspace. The only problem with the idea, though, is that it would need to be universal to have any chance of success. This means that the various national and municipal law enforcement agencies would need to get support from internet service providers, concerned citizens and, most importantly, each other.

The idea that some analysts have proposed is to employ a series of storage servers at ISPs all over a specific nation (any nation, it really doesn’t matter) and monitor every user connected to that one data center. The system wouldn’t be used to store every online file download, of course, but would instead be designed to look for specific usage patters. These patterns would likely include the following things:

• monitor for excessive bandwidth to and from a given site or IP
• monitor the amount of encrypted data being transmitted and received
• analyze every email, text message and video chat

This is only a partial list, but it’s enough to give law enforcement agencies the ability to perform complex data mining in order to determine which person is most likely a secret child molester or engaged in some other socially unacceptable human behavior.

Because the system would be pattern-driven, the storage servers could be called on to collect and store a random portion of a person’s transferred data only if a suspected pattern match is made. From this point, a series of distributed computers (concerned citizens who donate their spare processing cycles, much like those involved with the BOINC Project) around the world would analyze the data looking for particular patterns with technology licensed from Quaero. Using a media pattern-recognition package would allow simple background searches of data without the need to have a human manually examine potentially sensitive or classified information. This would also make unencrypted data validation incredibly quick.

Naturally, encrypted data would require quite a bit more computational horsepower as many of today’s technologies are designed to be resistant to brute-force attacks. However, with a potential processing capacity approaching that of over 1 PetaFlop (1,000,000,000,000,000 FLoating point OPerations per second), assuming this project became as popular as BOINC, this can combated quite effectively. With such incredible measures in place, it would be possible to quickly track down some of the worst offenders before they go deep underground. The technology could then be adapted to look for other forms of digital media such as DRM-free audio and video files. The internet could then, in theory, become a crime free region fostering an open exchange of ideas.

In theory.

Everything Works On Paper

This is a great idea for anyone who enjoys the poetic justice of cause and effect. Data encryption is an incredibly important element of security and, if cracking today’s algorithms became a trivial matter, the ever-resourceful online community would simply create something so complicated that the raw processing power required would be several orders of magnitude higher than the Big Brother project could realistically accommodate.

Government bodies, bureaucrats, and public services have a terrible habit of ignoring the lessons learned in the past, so are destined to forever repeat the same mistakes. Since the days of Caesar’s shifted-character encryption method, people have looked for ways to crack codes.

If a company was connected online and sending excessive amount of encrypted data across the internet to a single IP, it could be discovered that the encrypted information is sensitive company-specific data that is being shared across two disparate servers, or backed up at some alternate location. It could be successive credit and debit card transactions from a huge department store. It could be a bunch of people chatting through a secure tunnel because they’re a little paranoid about Big Brother watching their every move. Would we really want to put so much processing power towards cracking encryption and reading data contents?

Of course, if we didn’t have a choice in the matter, then it wouldn’t be our decision to make.

Advantages to the Big Brother Approach

Like many crazy ideas, there is an element of genius involved with implementing a scheme like this.

By monitoring people from their ISP’s nearest relay, law enforcement agencies would save themselves the hassle of tracking most IP spoofing activities, as well as complicated tunneling operations. While it’s true that people who actually know how the infrastructure works could still get around the tighter monitoring, 99% of all perpetrators of illegal activities have neither the skills or the tools to get around the blockade. With such restrictions in place, many private producers and distributors of questionable material would be forced to rely once again on their local contacts.

On top of this, internet subscribers would finally have a reason to lock and protect their wireless networks. It would only take a few high-profile news reports of a family being arrested on allegations of accessing or distributing illegal digital media before the majority of networks became WPA encrypted.

Disadvantages to the Big Brother Approach

There are problems, though. Many of the professional producers and distributors can afford to hire the technologically adept to protect the organization and their best interests. Thousands of innocent, but naïve, internet users will be rounded up due to false positives and other technological gaffes. Perhaps worst of all, instead of making the police’s job easier, such a system would only send net users to darker corners of the internet to get their fix.

Going further with a worst-case scenario, much of the diversity and uniqueness that we see online would be lost by the end of the first year. Nobody would write anything that could upset Big Brother in their country. Fewer people would develop new web technologies for fear of being a party to some crime. If that’s not bad enough, existing technologies such as online gaming and chat could become targeted as enterprising individuals begin to “piggy back” data to each other while using another well-known data streaming technology as a cover (an example would be to hide an image or data file in the video stream from a webcam).

To make matters even worse, tens of thousands around the world would shout, holler, and scream about the gross invasion of privacy as well as the new “guilty until proven innocent” mentality. Online freedoms, if there ever was such a thing would become a thing of the past and quickly fade into the realm of myth and make-believe.

Fun? Wow!

More Trouble Than It’s Worth

At the end of the day, any effort to police the internet is only going to end in ruin. Mankind has continually sought ways around the laws imposed on us, regardless of their justness. While most will do their best to follow the rules, human nature is hard to ignore. If the police truly want to capture the people responsible for most of the crimes committed online, they need to start employing some of the best and brightest computer wizards in the workforce. This means sending out the head hunters to entice well-respected, well-educated individuals with plenty of experience to back up the huge paycheques they would undoubtedly receive.

That said, it will likely be another ten years before we see any police force start to make any serious dent in the online crime industry.

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^{This is the first of a multi-part series focusing on the many different forms of internet crime. I plan on looking at several different ways people use the internet to profit from various illegal activities, as well as examine different solutions that have been presented over the last few years. The final post in the series will be my potential solution to the problem.}

Child pornography; the two words we never want to see next to each other. It’s yet another crime that preys on some of the most vulnerable people in the world and, like adult pornography and prostitution, it’s not going to disappear anytime soon. This shouldn’t stop us from trying, though.

The Tokyo-based Internet Hotline Center identified 1,600 web sites as repositories of child pornography in 2007. Of these, only about 300 have been shut down in response to the IHC’s “cease and desist” requests. Of course, it doesn’t help that downloading pictures and movies of children in various states of undress, perhaps while “pleasuring” someone, is not a punishable offense in Japan. This is considered one of the major factors behind the availability of such material online, and has drawn the ire of several nations as they try to eliminate this socially unacceptable and psychologically damaging criminal activity.

A Worldwide Problem

Japan’s IHC was set up by the National Police Agency to collect information, in the form of complaints and tips, on objectionable material online. In 2007 alone, 1,600 sites were reported by concerned citizens. Of these, 543 are hosted on servers overseas, which puts them outside the jurisdiction of the Japanese authorities. Five hundred of the sites operating from inside the nation were then asked (a little too politely) to remove the illegal content or otherwise shut down. Only 298 have complied.

As for why the IHC could only request the shut down of 500 sites, the organization does not have the legal authority to force operators to cease and desist, even if it can identify the operators. To add insult to injury, for every site shut down, two others are launched.

Naturally, with all the sites available and the audiences that follow, once an image or video is posted, it can circulate online for dozens of years. There are some victims of this heinous crime that have said they can never move on with their lives so long as these digital reminders exist in cyberspace.

Definition of a Crime

Many nations consider just the act of seeing child pornography as a crime, regardless of whether a person had intentionally sought the material. However, in Japan, only those who distribute or purchase the porn are punishable under Japan’s law on child prostitution and pornography. People who obtain the stuff for free or simply in possession are not punishable.

Because of this, lawmakers are working hard to revise the law in order to penalize everything from full scale production, to simple possession.

Blocking The Distributors

In a bid to counter the ready availability of child porn, the IHC is pushing for the introduction of a blocking system, much like the one currently used in several European countries since 2004. If a blocking system is implemented, people would not be able to view these sites, including those hosted overseas. This system has proven to be incredibly effective in Sweden, where 30,000 attempts to access illegal sites are blocked every day.

That said, the introduction of a content blocking system could undermine the police’s ability to track, trace and otherwise bait child molesters. If that’s not bad enough, we need to remember that the miscreants who visit public sites to get off on children are the dumbest of the dumb. These are the mouth-breathing bottom-feeders that are too inept and unconnected to matter. If governments want to seriously start going after the villians involved with child pornography, they need to set their sights on something bigger: the content creators.

However, in order to be mostly successful with this, people may need to give up some of the freedoms and liberties found on the internet.

How far would you go to protect children from this kind of exploitation?  Is it enough just to combat the problem online?  When it comes to defending human dignity and rights, how many freedoms would we be willing to give up for the greater good?

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There comes a time in our online writing careers when, after some time of using an alias, we decide to start using our real name in an effort to draw attention to ourselves. The advantages to doing this are about as numerous as the disadvantages, but it doesn’t stop many of us from making the leap and trying to accomplish a seemingly impossible task: being ranked #1 for our names from the major search engines.

In my case, the transition started earlier this year when I had decided to start submitting guest blogs using my full name, as well as having my name appear on several links that come to this site. A few months back I had even managed to get my hands on some extra domains in order to point people in the right direction, while simultaneously ensuring that nobody else would have my name in certain online arenas. What’s amazing here is that, after four months of minimal efforts, I’m in the top 5 for a few variations of my name on Yahoo! (Image), and numero uno on Ask.com (Image).

Unfortunately, it will take quite a bit more effort on my part to get into the top ranks of MSN’s Live Search (Image) and Google (which I’m not even in the first 50 pages of results for).

Yahoo! Says What?

If you clicked on the link to the Yahoo! screen shot, you probably noticed their suggestion to also try “Jason Irwin killed family”. Though I would never do such a thing, nor would I have even mentioned doing anything so horrific on this site, I decided to follow the link to see whether some other Jason Irwin had one day snapped and killed his entire family. Considering just how many people share the very same name, it wouldn’t be too surprising if one turned out to be a killer. That said, I show up second in the results, with an American DJ and musician taking top spot. Nowhere does it say that someone with my name had killed a family.

I won’t complain too much about this odd distinction, though, as any publicity can be good publicity
Why The Disconnect?

What interests me, though, is why I can rank so well on Ask and Yahoo! for my name, while being relatively invisible on Google and MSN. There are several other words and phrases that one could type into Google to see me right up at the top, so why not for my name, also?

For this, we need to examine the strengths and histories of these four big search engines.

We can say the following things about Yahoo!:

• they’ve been around forever
• they’re better than MSN at determining link relevancy, but nowhere near Google
• they have an incredible amount of internal material, and the search results show an obvious bias for this content
• viral link strategies still work

Google has the following strengths:

• they’ve been around for a long time
• they’re the online kings of determining link relevancy
• carries strong bias towards “information resources”
• trusts old sites without question
• viral strategies no longer work to build PR, and could actually hurt a site’s chances

MSN has very few strengths, but I must say something about them:

• relatively new to the search business
• really poor link quality determination
• has strong bias towards commercial sites
• new sites rank quickly on MSN, while being sandboxed on others
• viral link strategies still work

And finally, Ask’s strengths are as follows:

• look at communities
• due to their use of communities, they’re very slow to rank a new site unless they have John Cow like rising stamina
• has a small but loyal following

All in all, these engines aren’t too bad. The problem, of course, is knowing how to rank well in each of them.

Do You Yahoo!

Yahoo! has to be one of the easiest companies when it comes to earning a decent spot in their results page. So long as we follow standard SEO practices, we can expect to rank reasonably well after 60 to 90 days. That said, if your key market is heavily spammed by everyone trying to make a buck, don’t expect too much. For highly lucrative search results in the “Make Money Online” niche or other highly competitive corners, Yahoo! has been known to manually select the best five or ten results to show.

Although they’ve lost quite a bit of market share in the last 10 years, Yahoo! is still incredibly popular outside of North America. If your content is not specifically for a Canadian or American audience, it might be worthwhile to make sure your SEO practices are in order, and that you are ranking well on Yahoo!

Ask, and You Shall Receive

To tell you the truth, Ask has always had such a small market share that I’ve never paid much attention to them. However, with almost 3.9% of all search engine-based referral traffic coming from Ask, I figured I’d check out how well this site ranked. If I were in a niche where they drove significant traffic, then I might do a bit more to make sure that I kept my #1 ranking for my name, as well as a few other key phrases that I use to identify this site. That said, if you’re in a niche with a very narrow scope and subsequently tiny community, Ask will likely be one of the least important search engines for you.

MSN’s Live Does Not Live Up To Its Name

SEO for Live should be, if I’m reading their suggested optimization tactics correctly, just about the same as Yahoo’s. So long as a site follows standard textbook SEO practices and actively builds links within the online community, it’s reasonable to expect a decent ranking within a few months. Of course, if you’re goal is to enter into the highly-spammed keyword market, it will be quite a bit harder. One of the most promising benefits to site owners is MSN’s speed in ranking new pages with high inbound link bursts. This is likely done in an effort to capitalize on “the most important news on the web”, so that web surfers come to expect the most current and meaningful data to be found on MSN. Whether this is the case or not has yet to be seen, but it’s an interesting bit of information for anyone who’s trying to capitalize on their MSN visitors.

Another interesting note is Microsoft’s webmail market share. Hotmail is one of the world’s largest email providers, and anyone who conducts a search from their email screens will be using the Live search engine. While it may not be worth the time or effort for most of us, knowing that we can potentially capitalize on a user-base of several hundred million sets of eyes can be motivation enough to check our rankings.

All Hail The Mightly Google!

Google. The name means something different to everyone, but one thing is certain: they’re the most important company on the English-speaking corner of the internet. Without Google and their incredible search engine, most of us wouldn’t have a tenth of the traffic we’ve enjoyed for so many years.

That said, if your site is relatively new and you’re trying to get into a fiercely competitive market, it could take upwards of a year for your site to start ranking. Thousands of people have opted to buy older, more established sites in order to capitalize on their trusted credentials and domain age. That said, if you offer something better than the competition, are a strong online marketer (the more viral, the better), or can afford to mix SEO efforts with traditional marketing techniques, it’s much easier to force your way into the top index.

Google is always making changes to their ranking system, which makes it difficult to know how to please the ever-powerful G. But some constants are known to work for most: use an older domain name, write quality content (length is irrelevant), earn at least a few dozen links a month, keep the content “fresh”. By following these four simple points, many site owners have found themselves in Google’s good graces and rewarded with a top spot in their search results pages.

What’s This Mean For “Jason Irwin” and the Rest of Us?

Google is definately the search engine to please when it comes to building traffic through search engine results, but we shouldn’t forget the various alternatives on the market. Microsoft is making some inroads (slowly) by integrating MSN Live Search into Windows, Internet Explorer, Hotmail and the MSDN site. Yahoo! is pushing to be the sole search engine used on mobile phones around the world. Ask also seems to be a common source for educational institutions, with 87% of all Ask users visiting my various sites coming from a .edu. Because of this, it’s important to remember the little guys when planning to take over a specific key word online.

As for me, I have some ideas picked up from Ms. Danielle, Courtney Tuttle and Vic on how I can go about defeating my online doubles. Their suggestions have certainly helped me quickly rank and earn money on other sites, so it’s time I put the ideas to work here.

To that end, I’m going to go after the big guns on Google first:

• Jason Irwin, of Phillips Head and WEQX 102.7 FM in New York
• The Donelian Family
• The ICA Folkfest
• Jason Irwin (the artist)
• Jason Irwin (the author of Watering the Dead)

There shall be no mercy….

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There has been some talk over the last few years to put weapons platforms into orbit for use as a nation’s defense against missiles. Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan wanted to do this with this “Star Wars” program (a.k.a. the Strategic Defense Initiative), and Japan’s opposition party has even gone so far as to approve the use of Earth’s atmosphere for defense purposes. But why would any nation want to put missiles or other non-nuclear weaponry into orbit?

To protect our satellites, of course.

No Laughing Matter

Satellites play a key role in our daily lives, from delivering TV signals, internet, phone calls, and GPS coordinates, to performing reconnaissance on the Earth or extra-terrestrial bodies. Going back to a time without these incredibly versatile devices would be next to impossible at this stage, as it would mean telecommunications companies would need to lay hundreds of millions of kilometers of fiber optic cable in an attempt to keep up with demand for information.

Both the U.S. and China have proven without a doubt that destroying an orbiting satellite is as simple as calculating when it will be overhead, and sending a rocket to intercept the object. The potential for warring nations to knock out a satellite has become so great, that many nations actually conduct space war games and tests of how a military unit would operate should their lines of communication become compromised in the heat of battle.

Thanks to the 1967 Space Treaty, placing nuclear-based weapons in orbit has been banned, but it doesn’t explicitly stop countries from putting other effective military devices on standby high above the clouds. This has been a hot topic of debate ever since Sputnik, the very first satellite, made it to orbit on October 4th, 1957.

In all reality, however, defending a nation with an orbital platform would be insanely difficult to accomplish. Objects, such as the International Space Station, flying in the upper atmosphere take approximately 90 minutes to complete a single orbit. Considering how most missile threats to nations require less than 90 minutes to reach their destination, this would mean that several dozen to several hundred of these weapons bases would be needed to ensure an enemy missile could be destroyed in time.

The Money’s No Longer There

According to this ancient Industry Insights page, there were approximately 800 satellites in orbit of the Earth at the start of the 21st century. This number has certainly changed over the years as some have been decommissioned and sent plummeting through the atmosphere to burn up safely, while others have been added to the already crowded regions of Low-Earth Orbit, High-Earth Orbit, and Geosynchronous orbits somewhere inbetween. Half of these are owned and operated by American companies or their government. So with the amount of debris and other objects we already have surrounding the Earth’s gravitational sweet-spot, it would be difficult to add several hundred weapons platforms. On top of this, the costs of putting an orbiting system to use would be prohibitively expensive when compared to the ground-based alternatives.

Of course, if one nation were to start sending dozens or hundreds of weapons bases into space, then others would feel the need to balance the power. With military tensions already high in some nations, we wouldn’t want anyone to consider doing anything they might later regret with such a superior destructive delivery system.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

While some political leaders and military strong-men try to motivate us by painting a bleak picture and warning us that our communications satellites are largely undefended from terrorist attacks, the truth of the matter is that there have been no attempts by any nation to willingly take down an enemy satellite. This, of course, could change in the blink of an eye, but space has been one of the few areas in the universe where man has not yet taken their wars. Nations have an unsaid understanding that, because of our dependence on these technological wonders, there will not be an all-out attack on a nations orbital assets.

This isn’t to say that rogue nations or incredibly well funded and connected terrorist groups couldn’t get their hands on a weapon capable of taking out an orbiting satellite, but the odds of such an occurrence are quite low. That said, if they did have something that could take out a critical communications relay, our best chance of destroying it would be from a ground-based station.

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Does your website rely on a MySQL database? Are you tired of using a web application my phpMyAdmin in order to run some custom queries and accomplish some simple tasks?

I used to hate using phpMyAdmin to accomplish simple tasks like querying a database, creating a table or doing some basic maintenance work. However, these regular events have become quite simple thanks to the Microsoft Query Analyzer-like application for MySQL, Query Browser.

Query Browser is a great little application available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. I’ve been using the program for a while now on both Windows and Linux platforms and it hasn’t disappointed yet. The advantages of using Query Browser rather than the web-based phpMyAdmin are plenty, so here are some of the key points that matter to me:

• Cleaner Interface - Query Browser, at one time, was considered a joke due to it’s poor user interface. However, those days are in the past as you can see in the screen shot here. The query window is separate from the results and, like Query Analyzer, colour coded keywords make quick code debugging possible. There’s nothing worse than typing a complex query too quickly and then seeing that you entered “SLEECT” rather than “SELECT”.
• Great Scripting Interface - Interfaces are very important, as they have the power to keep someone interested in a product, or make something appear so cheap that we look for alternatives. What I really like about this interface is the error-checking that goes on. Should a particular line bomb for any reason, the application will take you to that line and highlight it. This should save people quite a bit of time in the long run if they plan on creating and maintaining complex queries and functions.
• Easier for New Users - People who are not familiar with databases or how to write queries can now drag and drop their criteria into the query window. After a few hours or days of doing this, even the most reluctant of people would see enough of the basic MySQL syntax to know what to type and in what order. This is no excuse for not learning how to work with a database directly, of course, but anything that makes it easier can only be a good thing.
• Query Browser has Very Helpful Inline Help - Without an easy to use help system, most people would give up on directly accessing a database. While it can seem a daunting task, the more skilled we are with all aspects of our websites (or other applications), the more likely we can solve our own problems as they crop up. Tabs in Query Browser’s help panel allow us to choose from Syntax, Functions or Parameters. Given the sheer number of options with database commands, this is a unique innovation that will likely become part of future query interfaces in competing products.

All in all, the MySQL team has certainly come a long way from what they offered back in 2001 when I started working with the product. There are some areas for improvement, of course, but that could be said about any application. I’d really like to see some more customization options so that I can reposition the elements of the screen to what I’ve come to expect and enjoy with Microsoft’s Query Analyzer. However, when it comes right down to it, I can’t complain too much.

Connecting to a Hosted MySQL Database

So, if MySQL Query Browser is so great, how do we connect to our website’s databases with it? Believe it or not, this is remarkably simple.

If you can manage your MySQL databases through a cPanel account, you will first need to add your computer’s internet IP to the “Access Hosts” section of the Manage Databases tab.

From here, you simply add your computer’s internet address (you can use a % as a wild card if you have multiple sequential IPs for any reason) and submit the change. Direct access to the MySQL databases will be immediately granted at this point. One word of warning, though: Do not delete the 192.168.1.% address that you see, as this will create some major headaches about 3 seconds later.

Once you’ve granted access to your computer (or computers, depending on where you want to hammer out some SQL queries), you can connect to the database through MySQL’s Query Browser. The login screen will look something like the image below.

The login is relatively straight forward. Server Host would be our domain (e.g. yourdomain.com), and the username would be a specific MySQL login that you’ve created. If you have multiple MySQL databases on your server, you might want to create a single account that has permission to all of the databases. This will save you the hassle of disconnecting and reconnecting any time you want to change databases.

Default Schema, though not always required, is recommended. This is the default database that you would like to log into. You shouldn’t have to change the port, and the options available in the Details tab will likely not be necessary for most of us, either.

Once all of this is entered, you can hit the big “OK”. Depending on the speed of your connection, you’ll be able to start querying your databases within seconds.

Using the Query Browser

The Query Browser is incredibly easy to use. The top of the screen is dedicated to writing the query, as well as having some over-sized buttons in place for those of us that prefer to use mice rather than keyboard shortcuts (though I prefer keyboard shortcuts as I “grew up” with DOS and even used Windows 3.1 for two years without a mouse). Queries can be executed either by pressing the big “Execute” button, or CTRL+Enter.

To the right you will see a list of all the databases the login can use. Naturally, I’ve removed the names of my databases, but you would see all of yours without problem. The big area is, of course, dedicated to the results. Much like we see in other query editors, this data can be multi-selected and brought into other applications either through a Copy+Paste, or with a drag and drop.

The Unforeseen Consequences of Power

However, the real power of this tool isn’t in the software itself. Instead, it’s in the minds of the people that will use the application. When a person starts working with databases, they start to see the world a little differently. Things become a little more logical, and humans make much less sense. In exchange for this alternate state of mind, we’re often rewarded with the ability to cut through the “garbage data” from our everyday lives and extract just the most relevant and accurate information we have available. This alone makes me want to force the public education system to introduce database management as a required part of the curriculum rather than whatever archaic programming language the high schools are trying to attract kids with.

Of course, this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

Do you access your databases on a regular basis? How do you prefer to do it?

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