- Memberlist Disabled
- Whois Online Disabled
- Birthday Disabled
| Sculpt Your Life Or Others Will Sculpt It For You | ||
 |
In this ever increasing competitive environment, many people will offer you things that look and feel good to you in the short term at your expense in the long term. If you don't consciously decide, i can guarantee someone else has designed it for you and they don't always have your best interest at heart. They want you to unknowingly advance their interest. |
 |
Preventing Unethical People From Using The List To Spam Your Mailboxes
Unethical people may:
- Sell your name and address to other companies without your permission
- Use your health or medical information for marketing
- Put you on mailing lists that you can't get off of And more ....
Email is a double-edged sword. When i first got my internet account back in 1996 on a 28.8 modem i was very exciting to try out email. I don't know of any friends who have an account so i went searching for someone to email. Back then i was very keen in multiplayer gaming and the hottest game during that era was WarcraftII. I searched and found a fellow countryman and sent my first email to set up a modem game with him. Back then receiving 2-3 emails per week is wonderful when i was an amateur of the internet.
However the novelty wears off after a while. Junk emails started coming in and is the scourge of internet users. Just as it is easy for you to reach someone at the other part of the world it is just as easy for some mean guy to unload junk, advertisements etc onto our mailboxes. I see the disadvantages far-outweight the benefits and thus the memberlist is disabled from the very first day. Drowning in emails is becoming more or a problem these days and it will be a bigger issue in the future.
No Surveillence On Your Presence
A cool feature to see if your favorite buddy is also at the message board. This can be a major boost to the palace if i provide you with this feature. The pitfall i see is that more and more of our transactions are handled over the internet now and in the future whether is banking, purchases or some other confidential info. Hence online security and privacy is a serious issue. Through the message board, any Tom, Dick or Harry could know your presence and may have devious motives (eg. hacking) towards you. We don't want that to happen.
It is better to stick to AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ etc to stay in touch with your trusted pals. Is much better for you that way than to rely on the message board which offers you little to no protection since your presence is simply broadcast to everyone who happens to be at the board. Although the user can switch to 'invisible' status on the message board, a lot of people simply don't consiously choose to do that mainly out of laziness or ignorance.
Birthdays Disabled
Our very own holiday! As you hang around the message board and get to know more people, this question eventually pops out. Is fascinating as i started the message board back in 2000 to see people's birthday being celebrated by others in other parts of the world even though this feature is unavailable. You are entitled to your privacy and don't need to reveal your birthday when you register as a member in the palace. As time goes by and you get to befriend others, you will know a few others' birthday and they will know yours.
Advertisers are more concerned with the year of birth to collect consumer demographics. Nevertheless the board's birthday feature is disabled for your privacy against unethical people.
Eliminate Spyware with Ad Aware
I recommend that you download Ad Aware to rid your computer of whatever spyware being implanted without your permission as suggested by Shu-Han Zhao Lie Di. Sure competition is stiff and some companies don't care about us and secretly insert spyware into our pc to monitor our activity to advance their self interests.
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to warn everyone of the threat to our privacy because of spyware, which are little programs which are installed without our knowing. They collect information about our computer, where we go on the Internet, etc. and send this information secretly to the companies to be used as a marketing study. I believe this is a serious breach of our privacy on the Internet.For those who are concerned about the spyware that is installed on their computer, consider downloading the program Ad-aware from the following link: Ad Aware 5 Main Page
The refupdate program, which is listed below ad-aware, updates ad-aware with the latest information about spyware so its good to periodically run it and download the latest 'ad definitions' from the authors so you know that your computer is clean. Of course, there are many programs which rely on advertising and banners (eg. morpheus, opera, etc.) and they usually install the spyware called 'cydoor' which ad-aware will remove if instructed. Hence some programs which rely on ad banners may stop functioning. Consequently you can always backup the spyware in ad-aware and restore them if something breaks.
I ran this program and found about 4 spyware programs on my computer. I removed all of them and only one program which used ad banners (Limewire) complained about it but it still worked fine.
Cheers,
Stephen So