Chat Room

Understanding Electronic mail and Internet Crimes

Littlejohn Shinder , Michael Cross , in Scene of the Cybercrime (2d Edition), 2008

Conversation Rooms and Instant Messaging

Chat rooms are Web sites or programs that allow people to send text messages to one another in real time. The chat room works as a virtual room, where groups of people send messages that others can read instantaneously. Often, people in conversation rooms volition use aliases or nicknames to provide some anonymity, and will employ the chat room to meet others. If private visitors to the conversation room wish to talk privately, they tin can enter a private chat room, which allows two or more people to send messages privately to ane another. Some examples of chat rooms are Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Web sites such every bit Talk City (www.talkcity.com).

Amidst other groups, chat rooms appeal to adolescents and teenagers, who communicate with others and use features to send files to one another online. Because of this, online predators will employ conversation rooms to meet young people and try to engage in sex chat, where individuals in a private chat room volition tell one another what they similar to do sexually to one another. Basically, sex chat is the textual equivalent of a dirty telephone call. In addition to this, features in chat programs allow people to transport pictures to ane another, enabling pedophiles to substitution kid pornography, or groom potential victims with pictures.

Instant messaging is similar to the function of a private chat room. It is a service that allows two or more than clients to transport messages to ane another in real time using IM software. By and large, each IM client ties into a service that transfers messages betwixt other users with the aforementioned client software. However, there are programs such as Trillian that permit users to consolidate their accounts on unlike IM networks and connect to AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Alive Messenger, ICQ (I Seek You), and IRC all within a single interface. In recent years, such features have too been folded into other IM software, such as Windows Alive Messenger supporting messages exchanged with Yahoo! Messenger clients.

Considering so many young people enjoy conversation rooms and instant messaging, these features are too being incorporated into other tools. For example, a game used on an Xbox or PlayStation may provide features so that you tin chat with people y'all're playing against online. Although this can be fun for those with a real interest in the game, it can besides be used past pedophiles to connect with children and adolescents who are trying to connect with immature people in new means.

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Beyond technology—dealing with people

John Sammons , Michael Cross , in The Basics of Cyber Safety, 2017

Chat Rooms

Chat rooms are areas in which people tin gather to appoint in real-time conversations, generally using text-based communication. There are a number of sites on the Internet where y'all can notice chat rooms focusing on various topics, interests, ways of life, or providing forums for full general discussion, although other sites may only provide a single chat surface area. You may see forums for moms to chat, issues with sexuality, and so on, although these often go into more general discussion that don't reflect the room'due south name. In the main chat room at that place volition exist groups of people who are all chatting with 1 some other, although two or more people can open a private conversation room to communicate privately. Some of the chat sites on the Internet include:

●

Delphi Forums (www.delphiforums.com), which provides multiple rooms. After setting up an account and contour, you'll be able to join the room(s) you lot wish and engage others in conversation. Some rooms require a 48-hour await before you can enter, which prevents those who have been banned from a room just creating a new account and going back in.

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Conversation Rooms Online (www.chat-rooms-online.com), which provides multiple rooms, but doesn't require creation of a profile if you continue as a guest.

Conversation rooms generally have moderators, who are responsible for ensuring the rules of the room are followed. A variation of netiquette is used in chat rooms called chatiquette, which govern the acceptable behavior in virtually rooms. While some rules like not typing in caps are the same equally those used in netiquette, there are others that are unique. For example, prior to going into private chat with someone, it's commonly expected that y'all should ask offset in the main room. You may run into someone ask y'all "tin I PM you?" meaning they want to individual message or go into a private room with you. Those who are bothering people in the room and ignoring the rules are often "kicked" from the room, and moderators may ban them so they can't reenter.

Different rooms may take dissimilar rules, so yous should hesitate before jumping into conversation. Some rooms may strictly forbid offensive remarks and rude behavior, while others may have a more laissez faire attitude and permit anything happen. Lurking is the human activity of not participating in the main chat room'south discussion, but simply reading what'south beingness said. By taking this stride, y'all can come across if the room meets your approval, and if the group that'due south on there seem like the kind of people yous want to interact with.

While the people who get into conversation rooms are predominantly dainty, they as well concenter trolls and people who want to engage in cybersex, which we'll discuss later. It'south of import to recollect that you don't really know who you lot're talking to, and that everyone'south a stranger. It can be difficult to retain this mindset as you get comfy. However, if you accept a problem, feel costless to utilize the button to ignore a pest and block any communication from them.

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How the Web helps people turn ideas into code

Joel Brandt , ... Scott R. Klemmer , in No Lawmaking Required, 2010

Method

The participants' task was to prototype a Spider web conversation room application using HTML, PHP, and JavaScript. They were given a working execution environment (Apache, MySQL, and a PHP interpreter), and were asked to implement 5 specific features (see sidebar). Four of the features were fairly typical, but the fifth (retaining a express conversation history) was more than unusual. We introduced this characteristic then that participants would have to do some programming, even if they implemented other features by downloading an existing chat room application (iii participants did this). We instructed participants to think of the task as a hobby projection, not as a school or work assignment. Participants were not given whatsoever boosted guidance or constraints. An experimenter asked open up-ended questions to encourage think-aloud reflection, and all participants were recorded with audio and video screen capture.

Chat room features that lab study participants were asked to implement:

i.

Users should be able to prepare their username on the chat room page (application does non need to support account management).

2.

Users should be able to mail service letters.

iii.

The message listing should update automatically without a consummate page reload.

4.

Each message should exist shown with the username of the affiche and a timestamp.

5.

When users first open up a page, they should see the terminal 10 messages sent in the chat room, and when the chat room updates, only the last 10 messages should be seen.

Xx Stanford University students participated in a two.5-hr session. The participants had an boilerplate of 8.3 years of programming experience, but little professional person feel (simply one spent more than than 1 year as a professional developer). Thirteen participants rated themselves as novices in at least one of the technologies involved. For a more than thorough description of the method, see (Brandt et al., 2009b).

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Digital Identity

Brett Shavers , John Bair , in Hiding Backside the Keyboard, 2016

Third-Party Providers

Identifying online service providers, such as a chat room, blog, listserv, or other site where Internet users interact can be an important consideration in an investigation. When suspects use a 3rd-political party provider to communicate, they are trusting the tertiary party to provide the communication aqueduct. This tin can be a forum or social networking site. 3rd-political party services give investigators one level of security to prevent compromising investigations when search warrants or subpoenas are issued to the tertiary party. A search warrant to Facebook for a user'southward account and activity is an instance where the doubtable should not be alerted past Facebook if required in the search warrant.

Conversely, if a suspect controls the service, such every bit hosting a forum, the suspect holds all information and access to the forum. Serving a search warrant for the doubtable to turn over show on his own service would be counter-productive before the investigation is complete. I method of bypassing both a third-party service and a suspect-controlled service is to create a honeypot website or forum to describe the suspect(south) into. If a suspect has been identified by a username and seems to be interested in classic sports cars, a website for sports cars can be created with the intention of the suspect accessing or creating an account on the site to leave comments.

To draw the suspect into the honeypot website, secret conversations may have to exist conducted on his electric current third-party sites to entice him to visit the honeypot site. Lots of work goes into setting upward this kind of legitimate-appearing website, and its success may depend on luck. But if successful, IP addresses can be captured without warrants and a direct line of communication is possible with the suspect.

Whatever third-party website may contain a link to a suspect. Fifty-fifty a product review on Amazon.com by a suspect can identify a purchase and IP address of the postal service, delivery address of buy, method of purchase, e-mail accost, and telephone number. If a suspect is using a unique username that may fifty-fifty be personal to the suspect, the same username could exist used in legitimate areas of the Internet, such as Amazon, just also in criminal areas. Although the same username can have dissimilar e-mail addresses, if a suspect likes the username plenty, he may use it with several due east-mail providers and keep some for open up use, others for covert use.

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Email safety and security

John Sammons , Michael Cross , in The Nuts of Cyber Safety, 2017

Limiting What Your Email Reveals

More often than not, when you sign up with an Internet access provider, you're issued an email accost that includes your proper name in it or your first initial and last name. For example, my email address might be [email protected] or [e-mail protected]. In looking at it, you can see that all or function of my proper name is included in the accost. As nosotros'll encounter throughout this volume, these little tidbits of information can be used with other information gathered about yous, and reveal more than you want to know.

Before setting up any accounts on social media sites, chat rooms, and and so on, you lot should seriously consider setting up one or more than electronic mail accounts with less revealing information. In doing so, the proper noun used for the electronic mail account should include nonidentifying information. For case, using an email accost like [e-mail protected] may indicate you're a happy person, only it doesn't reveal who yous really are.

Note

Understanding the Importance of Nonidentifying Email

Keep in mind that your family and friends already know your total proper name, but many of the online "friends" or connections you make are actually strangers. You never desire to reveal more to a complete stranger than necessary, and one of the biggest identifiers of a person is their proper noun. To illustrate a problem with revealing email addresses, allow's say you used a chat site, word board, or instant messaging (which we hash out in affiliate: Beyond technology—dealing with people) to see new people and take online discussions. When you set upwardly an account to use any of these, y'all're probably given the option of creating a username or alias, so that when you're chatting other people would run across you every bit "Big Bob" or another name yous came up with. Now, consider that 1 of these people decided to bank check your account profile, and saw your e-mail address. If information technology included your real name, the stranger at present knows who you are, and the anonymity and protection provided past an alias or username is lost.

Depending on your needs for the account, you should too limit whatsoever data included in a signature in messages. For piece of work e-mail, yous might include your work number, extension, company website, business organisation address, so on. However, you do not desire to include this in other emails beingness sent, unless there is a specific and infrequent reason to exercise and then. Fifty-fifty if yous send personal information in an email to someone y'all trust, there is no guarantee that they won't forwards it, or include others in the reply that would show the original information you sent.

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Cyberbullying

Carl Timm , Richard Perez , in Seven Deadliest Social Network Attacks, 2010

Summary

Communication over the Internet has created new ways to bully. Chat rooms, social networks, due east-mail, instant messages, and online gaming rooms have all contributed to cyberbullying. The outlook on cyberbullying is one that requires a conscientious understanding to address. We've examined a worst-instance scenario where cyberbullying that involved collaboration between kids and adults contributed to the suicide of an influential teenage girl. Nosotros've examined that children and schools are non the only locations where people are bullied, equally workplace bullying is every bit convenient as schools to commit threatening or harassing acts. Online gaming forums and worlds are areas where cyberbullies or griefers experience safe and secure to perform their malicious deeds with little concern for repercussions.

Educational awareness and open advice between adults, teens, and children are essential to influence and guide appropriate behavior while online. While government intervention is e'er viewed with cautionary skepticism, laws need to be reexamined and rewritten to ensure that online harassment is taken into account while preserving our liberties of free speech.

We have observed that culturally nosotros are encouraged to divulge equally much data most ourselves, our activities, and our feelings. Given the level of exposure that nosotros provide in these mediums, cyberbullies are well armed to carefully examine and exploit those matters that are dear to us or are of a sensitive nature. Until in that location is a method using which we can command our own demeanor to these tactics and gauge a more thorough understanding to the sensitivity and distinguishable aspects of the information which we divulge on ourselves, the greatest threat in the aspect of cyberbullying will continue to be ourselves.

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Condition (update) anxiety: social networking, Facebook and community

Amanda Evans , in Digital Dialogues and Community two.0, 2012

It'southward all almost me

The perceptible anonymity of MUDs, 3 chat rooms and bulletin boards has been replaced past the overt nonymity of the Facebook network. The choice of profile pictures and 'nigh me' descriptions offer a projection of a virtually desirable self and are littered throughout the cyberspace. Social networks similar Facebook provide a sense of belonging and identity performed within a community imagining. This customs is neither static nor stable, as is witnessed by the relative ease of one 'friend' exiting while some other crosses the social threshold with an intense want to belong. The apparent innocuousness of communication requires further agreement to ensure that members of these communities are not vulnerable to institutions and agencies that tin information mine this information for their own purposes. It was recently revealed, via Freedom of Information, that in 2008 Us Homeland Security encouraged overt cyber snooping of potential US citizens, declaring that officers from the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS) might 'friend' suspected fraudsters on sites similar Facebook, by taking advantage of 'narcissistic tendencies' to acquire nearly their daily activities. Weinberger reports that 'this provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities'. 4 The trust displayed by those creating Facebook profiles may be described every bit overly romantic, but perhaps this indifference has more to do with belonging and the need for social connectedness in a chop-chop changing virtual world.

Community beliefs are strengthened by those who reside within the consensual normalities. The social networks that people detect themselves fatigued to tin can also effectively stabilise the community in which they imagine themselves. The most obvious customs frameworks are often the almost dominant and ideologically incontrovertible: religious beliefs, sovereign rights, national pride and youth culture. The unquestionable nature of customs beliefs is both clear and disturbing. As Benedict Anderson reveals about nationalism, 'information technology is imagined, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship'. 5 Anderson's analysis is pertinent when exploring the explosive construct of social networking, especially through his accent on the ideological construction of comradeship. Imagined communities are non facile groupings that appear and disappear. Information technology is important that the relationship betwixt social networking and community be stressed as they are difficult to separate.

Communities are dependent upon the instability and dynamic nature of identity. Identities are inverse and moulded in relation to the emptiness that is preoccupied with the performance of a self(due south). The performance of visibility is an act of customs belonging, the consensual agreement to live under the sign of that customs. Equally Poole states, '[t]he nation is not merely a course of consciousness; information technology is a grade of self-consciousness. A community is a nation only if its members identify themselves and each other through their membership of information technology'. 6

The signs of a community are constructed as visible identities and attach themselves to cultural texts. The fashion in which this zipper is performed relies upon higher and lower degrees of visibility. Signs are ordered and presented to accommodate the purpose of the present self. For example, feminists are able to recognise other feminists through the mobilisation of particular cultural resource, but the overt fact remains that there is not one, atypical feminist customs. Identity and customs focus upon the importance of belonging. As Elspeth Probyn argues,

It is of the utmost importance that nosotros take into account this desire to belong, a desire that cannot be categorized as skillful or bad, left or correct – in curt, a desire without a fixed political footing but with immense political possibilities. 7

This desire to belong, to immerse the self in significance, is relevant to the dynamic and gratis-floating nature of community. This creates a space where the signs presented to the cocky from the community create a continuation of belonging, a site of homologous imaginings. There must be an agreement to the signs that environs and are dispersed past a network in which they imagine their signification in relation to others. It is at this point that the self, customs and social network are at their near visible.

Imagined communities should exist historic and applauded, but in a virtual world where identity is multi-faceted and ever-changing, should nosotros be concerned about the iceberg that lies beneath? For every 'friend researcher' in the Facebook customs there is a bored viral antagonist trolling the fringes looking for profiles, pages and groups to exploit. How much should people keep explicit? In a world tinged by identity theft and cyber crime, how rubber are our virtual identities and how trustworthy are people's profiles? Would you trust Ronald Grand. Noble, Head of Interpol?

Just recently Interpol's Data Security Incident Response Team discovered two Facebook profiles attempting to assume my identity every bit Interpol's secretary full general. One of the impersonators was using this profile to obtain information on fugitives targeted during our contempo Operation Infra Red. 8

This example highlights the currency of the new millennium: information. Whoever controls the social network controls the menstruation of information. What makes this new currency so powerful is the command that information technology bestows on those who possess information technology. While cyber criminals tin can encompass their tracks, the majority of SNS users are leaving dirty, great, big, muddied footprints all over the virtual landscape. In essence, those who playfully flit through net are asymmetric to those who tin can understand and manipulate the engineering and and so finer hide the evidence. Fifty-fifty privacy settings cannot withstand the ability of a skilled techno-criminal who wants to access a profile. Facebook, the system, has firmly placed the responsibleness for identity protection firmly in the hands of its users. Therefore, Facebook is an identity gamble and 1 where the community itself must scrutinise one some other and advise a directive of proficient taste and acceptable behaviour.

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The Dark Side

Michael Cross , in Social Media Security, 2014

Romance scams

A common scam involves the promise of love and companionship. A cybercriminal will use chat rooms or sites to find and romance a victim. According to the 2012 Net Crime Report, with the exception of men who are aged 20–29, women in every historic period demographic are more than often victimized past this scam. Gathering information on your profile page, a person might see what books, music, movies, and other pastimes you like and claim a shared interest. Using this, posts on your wall or tweets you've fabricated, they tin can make up one's mind your likes and dislikes. The scammer may post flattering comments, entice you with promises, and gain your involvement with fake pictures that are supposed to be of them. In one case you trust the person, the scammer will enquire for favors. Y'all may be asked for money, requested to help by receiving and reshipping a package, or do something else on their behalf. The scam generated 4467 complaints to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), with victims collectively losing more than than $55 one thousand thousand.

Romance scams work considering they play on your emotions. The person will often say how yous were meant to be together and claim to love you or accept feelings within 24–48 hours of kickoff coming together online. They may ask you for your address to ship you a gift, and in some cases, y'all might really receive something, such as flowers or some other token of affection bought with a stolen credit card. In time, they may even inquire for some coin and so they tin visit you or ask another favor that will cost y'all.

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Network Maintenance, Monitoring, and Control

Jan 50. Harrington , in Ethernet Networking for the Small Office and Professional Dwelling Office, 2007

Messaging

Timbuktu Pro provides two ways to exchange real-fourth dimension messages. The first is through a relatively standard chat room interface, such equally that in Figure ix-27. A user can add himself or herself to a conversation session, or a user can add a remote estimator to a conversation session (assuming that the remote user has the access rights to do so).

Figure 9-27. Timbuktu Pro conversation

If networked computers are equipped with microphones and speakers, Timbuktu Pro provides an intercom service that allows users to speak with each other (see Figure 9-28). This can exist an culling to a long-distance phone call when the remote user has dialed in to the network from some other location, perhaps using a dedicated line. (If the remote user is paying long-altitude charges to connect to the network, of course there would be no savings.)

Figure 9-28. Establishing a Timbuktu Pro intercom session

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Web conferencing and peer feedback

Kevin Garrison , in The Plugged-In Professor, 2013

Observations and advice

Students who are typically silent in a face-to-face grade seem to "come alive" in a chat room. Oftentimes, they learn more than from an online session than they do from a contiguous session because they feel more engaged with the students and the instructor – largely because the presence of the screen mediates the conversation in different ways than a traditional classroom does. Likewise, students, collectively, are oftentimes meliorate at helping each other begin ideas and review each other'southward drafts than the instructor is, and the students in my courses ofttimes request more workshops than I have scheduled for the semester.

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