The Darkness in the cyber world

The cyber world is a place to gain information, maintain relationships and also to make friends. However, the boon always has its downside. The cyber world being a global network has a huge drawback as the users can be anonymous since identifications of the users are difficult to trace. The various kinds of cyber crimes include fraud, online gambling, online harassment, spamming, and cyber bullying and copyright issues.




Users can remain anonymous in cyber world.


The Internet has created quite a lot of issues, some of which are quite serious and receive a great deal of attention from the media. Online harassment has been quite an issue in the society as children were mainly targeted in the cyber space. There were many cases of children being tricked by online predators to be sexually harassed or worse, being a victim of child pornography. In some cases, not only children were targeted but teenagers or adults as well. The FBI is placing a lot of concentration on these cases where they received more than 500 complaints and opened dozens of cases nationwide (FBI 2006).



Two forms of cyber crimes, online sexual harrasment and cyber bullying.

Fraud can happen more easily as Nielsen (Chan 2007) says there is also “little difference between Internet users in Asia and those in the United States or Europe, because "they depend on the fundamental characteristics of the human brain, which are the same all over the world".

Copyright issues are a problem to the authorities and especially to movie or music production companies as they suffer loss due to the decrease of sales caused by piracy. File sharing is eminent in the cyber world as they are free and easy to obtain. However, file sharing using applications such as Limewire are illegal as they infringe the copyrights of the files.

Crimes are unavoidable even in the cyber world. Users can only try their best to avoid from stepping into the darkness of the cyber world and commit crimes.



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Reference:

Chan, I 2007, Usability makes business sense, ZDNet Asia, viewed 18 October 2007. http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/internet/0,39044877,61983822,00.htm

FBI, 2006, “Social Networking Sites: Online Friendships Can Mean Offline Peril”, viewed 19 October 2007. http://www.fbi.gov/page2/april06/socialnetworking040306.htm