Do you think you are safe?

What image was drawn in your mind after reading the title? What kind of safety did that question remind you of? Maybe you had a mental picture of murderers! Perhaps you recalled your worn car tires and so on and so forth of all the normal things we tend to think of when we think about our safety. Will you be surprised when I tell that I am asking about different kind of safety and security? The type which I don’t think we, in general, consider when we talk about safety or security.

 

Computer Security or online safety is as important as your other kind of safety. Sometimes, it could be even more vital to your life and the lives of the ones you love. Imagine this scenario, a PhD student loses years of effort, when a hacker compromises his computer and stole and wipe everything, including his thesis! Or terrorist’s agency gets its hand on valuable information about the FBI agents, who work on catching those terrorists, and then know all about them and their families. How about me? I am just a regular student, should I care about this? Yes you do my friend. Computer viruses and worms are all over the internet. They could steal your credit card information, Identity or even spy on you. Spy! How? Whenever I talk with someone about online threats and how dangerous viruses can be, they seem to have the same old idea: computer viruses miss with the computer, delete your data and other kind of problems that you can immediately notice. So, according to them, if your computer is running and your photos and videos are still in it, that means you are viruses-free! That is simply 

incorrect, some kind of viruses cause a different kind of unnoticed problems. Let’s say you downloaded a free music player from untrusted website, that program has a small file that copies everything you write and send it to the program’s developer, including your Facebook, Twitter and emails credentials and your bank and credit cards information! The program would work silently on your computer forever.

Now What should we do to protect ourselves?  here are some helpful tips:

1-Get a good internet security Software.

2-Update your operating system and your antivirus program regularly.

3-Be careful with emails( don't open any unknown attachments, especially those from unknown senders)

4-Scan any removable devices, flash drives, hard disks,CDs ..., before running it.

5-Do Full scan for your computer regularly (once a month for example).

Biz Redifine Success

I really appreciate how I can run or walk very fast and on the same time catch any ads or events on my way.“That is a nice ad. Oh have they started the timed writing yet? what does this ad mean? Wait a minute, do I smell coffee? Oh I need to have a cup of coffee” these were some of the random thoughts running in my mind while I was scurrying off to class on a nice Monday morning. 

Out of a sudden, all of these thoughts ran away like a bunch of rats followed by an aggressive hungry cat! I stopped in front of this weird, blue advertisement. “Does this ad say that one of the co-founder of twitter is coming to UT next week?” I excitingly said. In a matter of seconds, I posted a picture of the ad on facebook and Twitter and marked the event on my calender.

   On April 3, I was among the first to enter the Hogg Auditorium to attend Biz stone Lecture on Redefining Success. Starting by expressing his love for Austin, the audience became so loud and excited that it took Biz Stone several minutes to start his speech. Biz started his speech describing his childhood and how he grew up. Soon he emphasized the fact that life is a serious of chances. The chance you miss will not come back. As an example, he told us about how he dropped out of college when a new window of opportunity opened in front of him to work as designer in a small agency.

The Story of Biz Stone goes on to the point where he join Google in 2003 to work on Blogger project. It wasn’t long before he left Google with his friend to establish their own company. In 2006, Biz Stone , Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, and Evan Williams started working on their project that changed the world later, Twitter. A large portion of Biz’s speech was dedicated to this project; starting from how they got the idea until the challenges they are still facing today.

 

“To succeed spectacularly, be ready to fail spectacularly." was one of the sentences that Biz stone kept saying over and over again. He was trying to tell us that beginnings are always hard, and we should never ever give up. As a computer geek, it was a wonderful and inspiring meeting and I learned a lot from Biz stone.

Later that night I wrote a summary of the meeting on twitter to my Arabic friends. My tweets got a lot of attention and over a hundred retweets !

Finally I have my own blog

 

 If someone had asked me 2 months ago, what was the thing you had always wanted to do online? I would have said: "starting my own blog." Even my friends have always asked me to open a blog to write about my experience and my thoughts about living in the United States.For them, it is better than writing in twitter, where  they would disappear in a matter of minutes because of the uncountable number of tweets. Despite all that determination, I wasn't sure when I was going to start this journey! I guess I needed a little push! And here I am writing my sixth blog and in English!

Blogging is a new world that can't be understood unless one participate and become a part of it. I have a read alot amazing Arabic blogs and they helped me understood a lot of things regarding my major, computer science, or general topics that interest me. However, it never crossed my mind how difficult that can be! By difficult I mean, to keep the same pace of posting new posts and never give up! Especially, if your blog is a general blog that has audience from different cultures, interests and unique ways of thinking. This is the challenging that I'm facing in this blog! I right mostly to my classmates in an ESL class! that means writing about topics like deep computer science topics that interests me or my thoughts and ideas about some events that happen in my country these days, won't interest my classmates.Coming up with an idea that would be interesting to them is sometimes a challenge and that what makes writing in my current blog somehow difficult.

Overall, it was  a good experience that helped me a lot! not only to start free writing, but to get insight on how others write and format their blogs. Reading my classmates' blogs  have helped me to know them better and understand the way they think and how their cultures affect their lives.