Without data, a 'phone is just a 'phone

Those of you who are unmoved by sport may be disappointed to learn that this blog post concerns the Olympics. As I have just spent eleven days camping in London and attending the veues, this should not be a surprise.

For a sport-obsessive, it has been a kind of heaven. For a writer, it has been hell. My volunteering has put me close enough to the action to hear the cheers, but out of the loop enough not to know who they're for. I've been on a shifted sleeping pattern approximating that of someone living in Moscow and thus missed all the most exciting evening action. Worst of all, I have no internet.

The internet is roughly the same age as I am, and yet has achieved far more global significance than I could hope for in my wildest imaginings (where I am the unicorn-riding warrior heir to the throne of a magical kingdom). The internet has revolutionised our lives to the point where we even carry it around in our pockets.

I do not. I am far too tight-fisted for that. My mobile contract is £10 a month, which covers 500 minutes and unlimited texts and absolutely no data at all. Not bad- if this was the noughties.

It seems an exaggeration, but in the last five years, information has become accessible instantly and anywhere. This has changed journalism particularly, entirely and irrevocably. If you want to know what's going on in the world, you don't open a newspaper- that's about what happened yesterday. You log into Twitter. Once you've overlooked the utter non-news being peddled by the Beliebers and Directioners, and dismissed the likes of #PeopleIWouldDestroySexually (which led Mila Kunis to become a trending topic), you can probably find something up-to-the-minute regarding, say, whatever's been happening in Syria since I lost the internet.

See? I can't live like this any more. Much as I hate plebeian journalism, the patrician kind is becoming increasingly out-of-touch. The fact is that I broke the news of the death of Michael Jackson ahead of CNN, the BBC and Sky. Because individuals have less face to lose than major news corporations, in the social media age, we the people have the edge.

I have a smartphone, but without data, it's about as technologically advanced as a Nokia 3310- without the durability.

Some people pay 50p a day (and twice that on a Sunday) for a quality daily newspaper- full of obsolete information and a crossword that makes you feel like a moron. That works out at £416 a year. However, for an extra £60 a year, I could bring myself into this decade and buy a data package.

It's an easy decision, I'm afraid. I only wish I'd realised two weeks ago.

What have I done?

So, citizen journalism. It's dangerous stuff.

Well, it is. People are paid to do a job. They are qualified. They study the law, they study their craft and if deemed worthy, they are given a position. Yet, when it comes to journalism, this is being subverted.

Citizen policing is called being a vigilante. It is generally frowned upon, not to mention illegal. You can't just decide that one person needs punishing and another does not. So why can a person be targeted by "guerilla journalists"?

Before I ever get paid work, I will have to get work experience for a few weeks. Then I will have to undergo training. I will be trained to write without bias. I will be trained to understand what I can and can't write about, what will get me into trouble. I will be trained to seek out reliable sources and to verify the factual integrity of anything I try and publish.

Yet, much of the reporting on the events of the past couple of years, particularly those unfolding in journalist-unfriendly parts of the Arab world, has been done by members of the public. Like me. Except, unlike me, they're not me, so I don't trust them at all.

Every time you read some anonymous contribution on the internet, what you are effectively doing is listening to the ramblings of blokes in pubs. Except, because it's online, you can't see the fact that they're having a pint, and that what they've just told you has been directly influenced by that pint. You don't know if they're wearing trousers. You don't know if they've got bits of twig in their hair. What I'm saying is- what makes you trust somebody online when, if they tried talking to you in person, you'd probably jab repeatedly at your personal attack alarm?

I'm not saying that "democratic journalism" doesn't serve a purpose. It is essential, particularly in places where events are unfolding quicker than professional journalists can get to the area. It is also essential to add a splash of colour, a personable note to an otherwise dry news story. However, as in most things, when people contribute their opinions, the opinions are not worth it.

To elucidate this point, I have ventured onto the pages of The Daily Mail Online, which is to the Daily Mail what the Daily Mail is to a quality newspaper. I don't care if I have reduced my chances of employment with that statement- I have a soul.

At the bottom of a perfectly innocuous article regarding a black woman who was not allowed to be adopted by her white foster parents sit the following comments:
"How is this even an article?"
"Social service are a***holes!"
"a lot of social workers are damaged themselves and don't like to see people happy and apart from being dysfunctional they are often thick"

The last one sums it up perfectly. When asked to provide elucidating comments on an article, the gormless masses will leap at the opportunity, for the simple reason that the world owes them something, and that means they can voice their unfounded opinion, and polish said turd until it resembles fact. From my research (actual research) I could find only a handful of insightful snippets, based on real life experiences or statistics.

The rest of it was a vomit-inducing concoction of ignorance and trolling. Trolling ranges from the funny to the downright evil. As Richard Bacon described it, it is "the cowardly new world of internet abuse". Much as I agree with their sentiments, a large proportion of Daily Mail Online commenters read an entire article and, rather than get bored half way and stop reading the website for it's abysmal content and substandard reporting, pretend they are so outraged by the grammatical mistakes and minor spelling errors that they feel the need to post a response. "You should be locked up-preferably with no further access to writing materials" said Jon from Warrington. "awful writing" said Gemma from London.

If you meet either of these people, please kick them in the gonads from me.

If you want to see a troll in action, I would advise Yahoo Answers. This is a simultaneously sickening and addictive service, in that it collects the overall stupidity of the world into easy-to-handle portions.

A cursory glance yielded the question "How can I get lesbians to stop doing number 2 on my lawn? [...] Humane answers only, please." Suggestions included providing a photo for the lesbians to attack instead. Answers can be equally unhelpful, as this website will testify.

I get riled about citizen journalism. I even get riled about the weakness of online compared to print, but if we do insist on never paying for anything, what can we expect? There is one problem, however- I'm one of them.

I'm a blogger. I spout unverified opinions constantly. My information is generally backed up by nothing more than my personal experiences. It hurts me to be on the same level. It doesn't really happen in other professions. Trainee brain surgeons do not start out practising on their friends. They do not have to contend with guerilla brain surgeons making them look bad. Real brain surgeons will not get criticised on the quality of their work by the general public.

For some reason, brain surgery commands an awful lot more respect than journalism. If you walked up to someone and told them your cousin/friend/mentor needed a decompressive craniectomy, and asked them for their help, they'd probably turn you down. However, if you told them you had hours to finish a newspaper and would they write a column, they'd most likely give it a bash. Why? Prehistoric man got the hang of making a hole in the skull long before writing. Yet people think they can do it.

As a result, the quality of journalism has become cheapened. In tandem, the price of newspapers has gone up. We can't keep trying to get our information from the internet. I know I'm shooting myself in the foot here, but... it's all rubbish.

Hidden Menaces

As many of you who are on my email contacts list are more than aware, my email was hacked this week. I apologise profusely to you all.

The thing is, how could I have prevented this from happening?

According to the lowlifes down at Hacker9 (don't look them up, I wouldn't want to give them the publicity), it is because I am "noob or [have] very poor knowledge of internet". At least I know that nouns need articles.

One other nugget of grammatically infantile information I managed to unearth from the little toads at Hacker9 is that email hacking can be done in three different ways. The first two I almost certainly did not fall victim to. The third, however, is rather more sinister, and could affect anybody. I'm going to run over all three and how you can prevent them from happening to you.

The first is password guessing. This is something that nobody should fall victim to. If a hacker is a close friend (unlikely), or just a manipulative internet acquaintance, they can have up to a 20 per cent chance of working out your password- by simply guessing. A lot of people use memorable names, dates and places as passwords. What's more, the majority of us use the same password for pretty much everything.

So then, give up on nostalgic passwords for high-importance accounts such as emails. Use a combination of random letters and numbers, preferably more than 8 characters in length. If the website allows it, also use punctuation. The official line for multiple accounts is to use different passwords for each, but this is not always reasonable. My advice, which is in no way endorsed by anyone, is to vary your passwords on a theme. For example, if you have numbers in your passwords (you ought to), increase them by 1 for each new account you open. Or, write the same password backwards. Or half backwards and the rest forwards. The combinations are only as limited as your imagination.

Now, I'm pretty over-the-top when it comes to keeping my password private. I most certainly practice what I preach. If an email comes to me from Paypal, Yahoo or anybody else, saying for security reasons I need to reply to the email with my password, I don't suddenly decide I'm a moron and offer them my bank account details and the keys to my house as well. So I can say with 99.9 per cent certainty that it wasn't this that caught me out.

The second method used by weed-smoking maleducates and opportunist sociopaths alike is Phishing. This is a common beast, and typically wanders round shouting, "I'm really obviously trying to steal from you." Phishing works by asking you politely for your bank account details, email password or similar by promising a lovely juicy worm in return. This worm is usually in the form of a free iPod.

You can avoid the Phishermen (or women) by thinking twice before entering your details online. Do you trust the site? Remember, it is very easy to lie on the internet, because nobody can see your face.

Though I must admit to being a little too trusting sometimes, I almost certainly haven't entered my password into any kind of popup, or badly constructed website offering freebies. So that leaves just one more option, one I hadn't fully realised even existed.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the murky world of keystroke capturing. If you want to avoid this one completely, seal yourself in a box and have your nearest and dearest feed you through a straw for the rest of your life.

It works in one of two sinister ways. The first is by using an actual hardware keylogger, which plugs into the back of the victim's computer and records every single keystroke they make. With an experienced eye, the important passwords are identified and the email accounts accessed. Though this approach seems to target just one person, and be of more interest to private investigators than spammers and scammers, how's this for a thought: what if it was stuck into a public computer? Say, in a library. Or a university.

Here it seems we may have stumbled across our culprit. There is of course, the second, even darker form of keylogging- using a software keylogger. This takes the innocent form of a video of a kitten falling off a chair sent to you by one of your closest friends. Only it's not actually from them, and it's not actually a video of a kitten falling off a chair. No, once you stop watching that kitten, he gets to work.

He makes a note of every keystroke you make, and beams that straight to the internet. On the internet, another kitten (kitten here being a metaphor for piece of software) calculates which of those keystrokes is likely to represent an email password. A third kitten then tries each of these possible combinations until bingo! She cracks it, and suddenly all your friends, family, old work colleagues and former schoolteachers are being offered Viagra.

Or worse. Another little scam running around the interweb presently is the idea that person A is being held hostage, and person B needs to send lots and lots of money to person C to free them. Of course, because the email was sent from Person A's account, Person B thinks it actually is Person A, and sends the dosh. That is, providing Person A typically writes in lowercase Courier New.

Luckily, none of my contacts got this message. They could have done though, and that makes me feel quite apologetic. I must do better. Though I am not noob, and have actually relatively snappy knowledge of internet, the second I let my guard down was the second a criminal tried his luck.

I will no longer write or check emails from public computers. It is terrible to have been reduced to this, but the internet is swarming with armies of kittens working for a plethora of the most diabolical faces you'll never see.

Be careful out there.