computers

      Today for my quiz in Computer Sciences (yeah, I'm a Health Sci major and I have a Com Sci class), I had to hack into a Yahoo! mail account. It was a new, unused account that my teacher had just set up solely for the purpose of being hacked into. (But it was a legit email account nonetheless.) The first to hack into the account would get 10 points. Everyone else gets 7 points by default. 

      My teacher, Sir Coronel, never actually specified a method to use, and my classmates and I have never received real hacking lessons. But people managed to hack the account anyway. (Micha and I came really close, but were out-hacked by Garri and Dia.)

      It's surprisingly easy. Sir Coronel made it easy on purpose, but the whole point of the exercise, I think, was to show how vulnerable we really are online. You have to be really careful about the things you say on the Internet. 

      After the quiz, Sir Coronel gave us a really cool seatwork: using the Internet, dig up as much embarrassing information and funny pictures from a classmate as you can. Now guess how many people picked me to be their victim.

     10? Did you say ten!? Er... let's not overshoot things...

  

     It was four. Yeah, not as significant a number as ten, but it was still enough to set off a tiny alarm in my mind. All of them had the same reason for picking me: I was a very visible person online. 

    It's not something I can deny. I have a Formspring, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and of course, Blogger. And with the exception of Facebook, none of these things are private websites. 

    I don't know what those four people managed to dig up on me. I think Diane and Karl opted to pick someone else because there was just so much of me online, they didn't know what to do. I did ask Mico about it, and he said that he managed to dig up a grade school picture of me. Yikes.

    I doubt that anyone was able (or will be able) to dig up anything horrible from me. I never post things I don't want the Internet to see. I'm really careful now, after learning from my mistakes.  

    Here are my mistakes:

    1. I used to have this blog on Friendster. It was the first blog I ever had, and I started writing in it when I was in fifth grade. I continued to do so up until Facebook became a thing. In my freshman year of high school, I used to really... dislike a certain girl in my school. I would complain about her a lot on my blog, and when my friends stumbled upon it, they would comment and agree with me and say good things about the way I wrote. That encouraged me to write even more unpleasant things. 

 

   Eventually, this girl became less and less of a pain in the butt to me, and I just stopped writing about her. People forgot about the mean posts. So did I. I don't know if she ever read one. If she did, I don't know if she ever figured out it was her that I was writing about (I had been tasteful enough to avoid revealing any telling details about her, other than that she was a girl). 

    Nothing came of those posts either. There was no big fight. No broken friendships. No hate, no anything. If she had found out, she probably just dismissed the whole thing as a petty rant, and continued to be friends with me. That's pretty cool.

   2. This one also takes place in my first year of high school. I was really into this guy. I blogged about it. I spelled out his name. My relatives saw it. The end.

    I can't believe how complacent I was back then about who would and who wouldn't see my blog. I was pretty confident that the only people who ever read it were my few friends. In the middle of a session at the Internet cafe with nothing else to do online but read junk on Friendster blogs. 

   But I dunno. Word spreads. Nothing you post on the Internet is private. 

   Of course, these two little mistakes are really nothing more than minor mishaps. Nothing bad ever came of those two (well, except maybe the second one). They're nothing compared to the things that other people have gone through. I have heard of instances where cyber-bullying and hacking have made people's lives a living hell. It's terrible. I wouldn't wish that upon my worst enemy.

   So to all you bloggers out there, Sotto and Enrile are actually right in saying that there is a need to regulate blogging. (But I still think that blogging bill is bull crap.) Be careful what you say online. Never reveal too much about yourself. 

. . .

  

   Sorry to leave you on such a grim note. To lighten the mood I'll tell you something trivial.

   I've been meaning to change my blog layout now, but I can't seem to find a new layout that I really like. I'll miss this template, but I want to go for someting cleaner and more minimalist. I still want it to be pink.

   That's all. :))