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Tips and precautions for a cyber cafe/public computer
A cyber cafe is a concept which is very popular in India. It is a business in which internet connected computers are offered for use to the public at the rate of Rs.10/- to Rs.20/- per hour(The rate varies from place to place.) Some cyber cafes also offer computer games.
Many people( young and old) use cyber cafes for browsing the internet, sending email, and chatting.
Some old people who have never used computers before and having children abroad come to the cafes to send/check email to/from their children. They tell the cyber cafe personnel their email id, password etc and ask him/her to send/check the email. This is very dangerous and can be misused. An alternative is to use the guidance of the people in the cybercafe to get upto the login window and then enter the personal details like password by themselves.(Most cybercafe personnel are helpful)
Some young people come to the cyber cafe with their resume on floppies or cds in order to send via email. Usually the individual computers do not have floppy or cd drives. So they give the floppy or cd to the cafe personnel who will copy it to the individual's computer from the server. The files are usually copied to My Documents folder or the desktop. Sometimes the user will attach the resume documents to the email and will go home without deleting the original documents especially if it is not on the desktop. Even if they delete the documents they sometimes forget to empty the recycle bin.{ Note that even emptying the recycle bin does not mean that the files are gone forever. Some files can be recovered using utilities like pc-inspector (site: www.pcinspector.de). If possible it is always better to use software which overwrites the files before deleting the file. An example is the open source program eraser (site: www.tolvanen.com/eraser/ ) or try sourceforge (site: sourceforge.net ). If necessary ask the cafe personnel to install such software for you as installing software in another person's computer without their permission is not legal }
People who use the cafe to send email or loginto some websites should take care that the 'remember my id on this computer ' or similar option button is not selected. They should also check whether the autocomplete option in the browser is off. This can be accessed in ' tools - internet options - content - autocomplete' tab in internet explorer and ' tools - options - privacy - password ' tab in firefox. Also go through the 'tools - options - privacy - saved forms' tab in firefox. Other interesting options to go through are the history, download history, cookies, cache, tabs all under ' tools - options - privacy - ' tab in firefox (and also clear private data tab in the new versions of firefox) If you are using internet explorer go through 'temporary internet files' , and history tab under ' tools - internet options - general -' tab in internet explorer.{ Note that some of these options require a restart of windows for the new setting to work. Most cyber cafe personnel do not like the customers restarting their computers ! )
People who use messenger software should logout properly after using the messenger software. Some people just close the messenger software without logging out, some software do not shut down, it will just minimise to the system tray without logging you out so that the next user after you can use your account if he so wishes. The same is true for properly logging out of email accounts like yahoo. As in the previous paragraph, you should go through the options in the messenger software like 'remember my id on this computer ' and also some options which offer to archive your messages for you as text files.
Users of public computers should be aware of the existence of some dangerous softwares like keyloggers, trojan horses, etc. Keyloggers are software which run in the background (usually will not show up in the running program's list) and records the computer users keystrokes which might include passwords and sensitive data and saves the keystrokes as encrypted files on the computer itself or sends the files as email to the person who installed the keylogger. A funny thing about keyloggers is that some of the keylogging softwares are commercialy sold to parents who want to keep a watch on their children's activities on their computer's or to people who want to spy on their spouses. Some of the keyloggers can be detected by antivirus softwares and also by using spyware detection software like spybot search and destroy (site: www.safer-networking.org) or ad-aware (site: www.lavasoft.de ) {If necessary ask the cafe personnel to install such software for you }. Some cybercafe system administrators use remote administration software like radmin (site: www.famatech.com) which enable the cafe personnel to administer the users computer remotely from the server. They can also watch the sites that you browse, the programs you use and your chat from the remote computer.
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