Cyber Criminal

The action game was once the staple of the American arcade. Unfortunately the genre took many dips and turns as the sands of time passed. They’ve gotten more and more complex while simpler games are thrown to the wayside. I would never forsake the great advances that have been made with modern video games, but I feel as though many people have forgotten the simple joy of a good old fashioned action game. The retail market may have lost its appreciation for simplicity, but the online world hasn’t forgotten its simple beginning. The games of yesterday are carried on in the spirit of the Internet arcade.

New action games are constantly being released for quick play on online arcades everywhere. These follow many of the old standbys of an arcade game. They offer quick enjoyment without much strategy or planning. You run along with a few words composing the full story. The enemies are all bad and you’re usually on your own. You can just have fun and shoot aliens and Nazis. Can you really ask for more?

I guess I should really look at why you’d want to play these games when more advanced versions are available in the mainstream market. I think it all sums up to one simple reason. You can relive all the good things about an old arcade without any of the bad. Simple action games are what made the arcade era famous. Side-scrolling shooters and early FPS shooters gave the era’s its strong footing. Why was that? They were fun and they were short. A good retail video game these days will require at least a 15 hour commitment to get to the end. You can beat these games with about a half hours worth of time. They are made for quick and casual play. They’re made to help you kill some time. They may not have top-of-the-line graphics but you can at least kill some bad guys and save somebody. That’s good enough for me.

The best part is that they don’t require a constant stream of quarters. Online arcades are free now. Game over means that you click a button and start again. There is no money changing hands and you don’t really have anything in it. You can just select your choice and play. If you are tired of it after a few minutes you can quit and try another one. You have a full selection of fun games at no cost. Programmers have even ported at lot of the old classics into the arcade. You can find everything from Sonic to Contra in a good online arcade. They’re all free and available for your full enjoyment. You can now relive your childhood in your spare time.

The arcades in America are disappearing at an alarming rate, but the spirit of the penny arcade is still alive online. If you just want a cool action game that will help you waste a little time, then you’re doing something right if you check for online options.

In a highly unusual use of a federal law in which legal experts describe as “creative” and “aggressive,” a St. Louis, Missouri woman has been indicted in what may be the country’s first case of cyber-bullying. Federal prosecutors say Lori Drew, 49, and others created an account on the social networking site MySpace pretending to be a 16-year-old boy to fool her neighbor, 13-year-old Megan Meier.

According to prosecutors, Drew used the MySpace account to establish a relationship with Meier, acting for weeks to be a boy interested in forming a romantic relationship her. A short time later, Drew suddenly ended the relationship, taunting Meier and telling her the world would be better off without her. Consequently, a distraught Meier committed suicide by hanging herself.

Drew is Arrested and Charged with a Crime

The federal indictment, which was delivered in Los Angeles after state prosecutors in Missouri declined to bring charges, is unprecedented, and legal commentators believe it may seriously stretch the federal statute on which it was based. The indictment charged that in violation of MySpace terms of service, “Drew and co-conspirators knowingly and agreed with each other to intentionally access a computer … to further a tortious act, namely, intentional infliction of emotion distress.” According to the prosecution, Drew violated MySpace’s terms by using a fictitious name, among other things, and thus had no authority to access the MySpace service.

“This adult woman allegedly used the Internet to target a young teenage girl, with horrendous ramifications,” said United States Attorney Thomas O’Brien. “Any adult who uses the Internet or a social-gathering website to harass or bully another person, particularly a young girl, must realize their actions can have serious consequences.”

The Unprecedented Charges may Create a New Realm of Cases

The case presents a new wrinkle in the interpretation of federal law. Legal experts warned that such an interpretation could criminalize routine behavior on the internet. After all, people regularly create accounts or post information under aliases for many legitimate reasons, including avoiding spam and a desire to maintain their privacy online.

This new interpretation also gives a business contract the force of a law: violations of a web site’s terms of service could now lead to criminal sanctions, instead of just civil lawsuits or ejection from a site.

“I think the danger of applying a statute in this way is that it could have unintended consequences,” said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor. “An application of a general statute like this might result in chilling a great deal of online speech and other freedom.” Drew is scheduled to be arraigned in St. Louis but the trial will be held in Los Angeles were MySpace is headquartered. If convicted of the charges, Drew faces up to 20 years in prison.

If you want to effectively market online to make your Internet home business into a truly profitable, wealth-building endeavor, there are several tools and techniques for you to use to accomplish this goal.

One way to effectively market your Internet home business is with publishing articles. When you write quality articles that are punchy and chock full of great information and publish them at free online content and articles sites, you build a reputation for being an expert in your business and a generous one who can be trusted, too. People love free information and they love to do business with people whom they can trust and who share with them.

Another Internet home business marketing tool is blogging. Blogs are the people’s media outlet of today. By maintaining one or more blogs and contributing to it or them on a regular basis and using effective topics and tags, you’ll soon enough find yourself getting picked up by search engines and people who are surfing the Web for information that happens to relate to your business. This is a great way to find new prospects that you would never know to look for, and to build up a referral network. HINTS: Add a lot of links to other websites and blogs to your blogs, and ask the admins at those sites to reciprocate. This gets your blogs linked and promoted elsewhere, and the links you place make the web crawlers assume your blog is something special and it gets picked up faster and ranked higher.

Marketing your Internet home business by posting links to your site in forums is another great marketing tool. People love to chat with each other and exchange information and opinions in online forums. If you say interesting or fun things in forums related to topics that interest you and include your website in your signature people will trust you, like you, and check you out.

Market your Internet home business by submitting your site to backlink directories. A backlink is any link received by a web node from any other web node. The more backlinks your website gets from other sites, and the more relevant and important those sites are to a given niche, the higher up in the search engine rankings you rise.

Post entries and commentaries with your signature and website contact information, at .edu and .gov blogs with high page rankings. Because of the fact that these places aren’t marketing oriented, you won’t find a lot of competition and a lot of your competitors won’t think of them. Post at these types of sites that come up on the first page of a search for key words relevant to your business and make your posts there highly informative.

Also, when you are using articles and blogs to market your Internet home business, make sure you use proper SEO techniques. This means you research hot (highly Internet searched for in recent times) key phrases and key words and if they have any relevance to your business you use them at 1% to 3% density in your writings. For instance if you write a 500 word article use the key word or phrase 5 to 15 times, especially in the first sentence and final paragraph. This helps get your writing more noticed by web crawlers; but, don’t go beyond 3% density or you’ll be seen as a kind of spammer and search engines won’t carry you.

In a highly unusual use of a federal law in which legal experts describe as “creative” and “aggressive,” a St. Louis, Missouri woman has been indicted in what may be the country’s first case of cyber-bullying. Federal prosecutors say Lori Drew, 49, and others created an account on the social networking site MySpace pretending to be a 16-year-old boy to fool her neighbor, 13-year-old Megan Meier.

According to prosecutors, Drew used the MySpace account to establish a relationship with Meier, acting for weeks to be a boy interested in forming a romantic relationship her. A short time later, Drew suddenly ended the relationship, taunting Meier and telling her the world would be better off without her. Consequently, a distraught Meier committed suicide by hanging herself.

Drew is Arrested and Charged with a Crime

The federal indictment, which was delivered in Los Angeles after state prosecutors in Missouri declined to bring charges, is unprecedented, and legal commentators believe it may seriously stretch the federal statute on which it was based. The indictment charged that in violation of MySpace terms of service, “Drew and co-conspirators knowingly and agreed with each other to intentionally access a computer … to further a tortious act, namely, intentional infliction of emotion distress.” According to the prosecution, Drew violated MySpace’s terms by using a fictitious name, among other things, and thus had no authority to access the MySpace service.

“This adult woman allegedly used the Internet to target a young teenage girl, with horrendous ramifications,” said United States Attorney Thomas O’Brien. “Any adult who uses the Internet or a social-gathering website to harass or bully another person, particularly a young girl, must realize their actions can have serious consequences.”

The Unprecedented Charges may Create a New Realm of Cases

The case presents a new wrinkle in the interpretation of federal law. Legal experts warned that such an interpretation could criminalize routine behavior on the internet. After all, people regularly create accounts or post information under aliases for many legitimate reasons, including avoiding spam and a desire to maintain their privacy online.

This new interpretation also gives a business contract the force of a law: violations of a web site’s terms of service could now lead to criminal sanctions, instead of just civil lawsuits or ejection from a site.

“I think the danger of applying a statute in this way is that it could have unintended consequences,” said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor. “An application of a general statute like this might result in chilling a great deal of online speech and other freedom.” Drew is scheduled to be arraigned in St. Louis but the trial will be held in Los Angeles were MySpace is headquartered. If convicted of the charges, Drew faces up to 20 years in prison.

Web development relates to the creation of function rich web sites for the internet. Web development differs from web design in that it creates a more user interactive web experience. Examples of web development sites would be e-commerce and web content management systems. In the industry, web development is usually considered as the coding process and programming rather than the design side of web site construction.

Web developers usually sit alongside graphic designers and other in-house employees although it is common practice to see them employed as freelancers throughout the industry. Larger companies may employ several developers on their larger projects such as social networking sites and directories.

In the last 10 years the industry has grown rapidly and is one of the largest growing sectors in this time frame. The industry is still expected to grow by a a further 20% by 2010. A lot of this growth can be attributed to the demand of businesses needing a professional web presence and the ability to sell their products and services online.

There are many outlets for these businesses looking for web development and the cost and standard varies enormously. It is fair to say that the overall cost of development is gradually falling as the process becomes standardised and is eased by the introduction of many simple-to-use HTML editors. An example of these programs would be Adobe Dreamweaver which allows you to build in design mode, or WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). A considerable help in climbing the HTML learning curve.

Most web development websites are backed up by huge online databases which have made the web a viable alternative to desktop software programs and has led to the rise in web applications or web apps. The freedom of access to these web apps has helped drive the industry as users can benefit of being able to interact with the data from any location.

An example of web development shaping industry is the popularity of e-commerce sites such as Ebay etc. Consumers can shop and bid online and this process has transformed the way we shop in recent years. The rapid rise of internet shopping has had a dramatic effect on the high street store. Most retailers are actively engaged in online selling to maintain and improve their market share.,

When looking to hire a web development company it is wise to work with a reputable company as there are many security considerations and weaknesses that have to be accounted for in the development. Hackers can easily access valuable data and exploit it for their own purposes, or remove the data altogether leading to the website being unavailable until skilled people can restore it.

Keeping the web database and servers safe from access can be called server port hardening. As information gets transferred from one place to another, many technologies come into play. One of these technologies is called SSL or Secure Socket Layer Encryption. Developers may also use other forms of encryption in an attempt to keep their data safe. Web security and it’s implementation is a vital part of any successful development company.

It would be wise to ask for recommendations when looking to hire a web developer as the cost and standard varies greatly. Be sure to trust your next web development project with a company that can deliver the goods.