Here is another popular rouse some folks fall for just while browsing the web or news sites:
Someone is browsing a subject let’s say early American history and a survey question is presented.
“Are You Smarter Than A 7th Grade Civics Student?” as an example of one survey that presents 100 questions about Civics, aspects of American History and general citizenship questions.
I did a Google search for the phrase “are you smarter than a 7th grade civics student” and in 0.56 seconds I had 7,290,000 potential places returned…. See graphic below.
- Sample Quiz Question Sites.png (60.5 KiB) Viewed 22882 times
I fully expected what was coming at the end of the questioning, and was not disappointed….
At the end of the 100 questions, which I and suspect most over 50 here in the forums could ace. I did anyway. Some were just way too simple, and the photo attached on some were intended to take your mind away from the subject, and some spot on subject.
Congratulations (Your name inserted here) you scored a perfect 100%!!!
You were browsing right? Logged in to Google Chrome perhaps…..
How did it know your name? The browsers have unique bits and pieces about you cached in records they store on your machine. Some are in Cookies, a file that has something of your browsing history. You go to a site to order something and the site knows what you last looked at and provides you with links to what you last reviewed and often presents eye candy of something similar they want to sell you.
Did you ever fill out a contact form and your computer had all the information to populate the fields for you, ready for you to click and fill them in automatically? Form Fill data they call it. You get the idea.
Your browsing experience is shared for them to reference the next time you visit. That may not be all that is shared for they may not be the only ones looking at cookies data.
Let’s presume you are a proud citizen and want to show off your Civics prowess and it just asked you;
“Would you like to share your results?”
You clicked Yes, and it prompts you to login on Facebook - hastily you do, not thinking about what the application you are running on the internet is doing in the background.
The application presents you a place for your Facebook login name and password, and even opens a second browser window to Facebook and uses that information to log you in, sharing your 100% score, just as you instructed it to……
Wait just a minute…. You gave your Facebook login name and password to an application that did that for you. What else did it do with your information? …… You don’t know… and when you close that quiz screen, any record of what was done may disappear on your computer…. It was never written there, but it darn sure may have been transmitted around the world to a system harvesting login information…. Let’s see Twitter, and any other places it might suggest are in play too…..
Whether on the computer, your phone or any other device (especially when connecting through public WiFI) are danger zones.
Millions of folks do these things every day. Some are innocent and do what they suggest, and others are replicas of those sites, and do whatever they want.
Think about your on-line activity more... You may well be knowledgeable in Civics or Music, Movies, Celebrities or whatever the in-vogue subject of the day is…. Question is: are you smarter than a hacker?
In the 1983 War Games movie, it was about a kid accidentally hacking into NORAD while looking for games using a dial-up modem.
The most relevant dialog came after the computer, playing itself, learned while formulating Global Thermonuclear War Game Strategies.
It, by playing tick-tac-toe a game that ends in stalemate after stalemate when computer played both sides, presumptively learned strategy that it forecast into the running Thermonuclear War Game….. the dialog went like this;
Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
It is sort of the same thing only different….
Everett