In the first activity, I learned about safety on the internet. One of the things that I learned was about phishing and how they can lead you to fake sites or trick you into putting in information for your bank account. I also learned about how to turn off images in spam email so they don’t load. I learned that those images can be used as tracking and that they can let the scammer know that the email is valid and works, so you might receive more spam. I didn’t know that you could track emails through images to know if they’ve been opened, which I found quite interesting. I also learned about ways to identify ways of figuring out if the email is spoofed or fake. A couple things might be bad spelling or grammar and threats. I learned you should also be wary of links in the email as well. This will help in the future to know because then I will be able to keep my future emails from spam or scamming better as well as not getting viruses or malware on my computer.
In the second activity, I learned about ways to check the privacy of your settings for browsers and how to make sure that things are safe. Some of the settings you can control can block bad sites or protect you from viruses and malware. You can also configure cookies in your browser to see any malicious or sketchy kind of things that were being saved. In settings, I learned that you’re also able to control if the browser can send data or not about your searches and/or history. I also found that you can tell your browser (at least in Chrome) that you don’t want to be tracked when on sites. This way the site doesn’t know other things such as history or what kinds of ads it should give to you on the site. I found this information to be helpful to know because nowadays everyone is concerned with privacy and that ad companies can track your interests through patterns or history of searches and sites. It’ll be good to know in the future so I know how to control what gets tracked or not (for the most part; as much as it allows me to).
In the fifth activity, I learned about ShieldsUp and how it detects if your router responds to the UPnP that they send. I learned that a UPnP stands for “Universal Plug n’Play” as well. From trying the ShieldsUp, the results were good for me. It said that my router did not respond to what they sent (the UPnP) and that that was a good thing. It recommended running the test every time something changes for the network to make sure it’s still protected/safe. This is useful to know in the future because then I know a good place to test if my router may be hacked or have some kind of virus in it.