Temptation

The word temptation has a negative connotation. To be tempted is to be attracted or to be persuaded to do something that is seemingly pleasant but may be harmful, unwise or immoral. The appeal of ‘forbidden a fruit has always been strong and somehow it can be difficult not to yield to moments of temptation.

Temptation shows no discrimination for everyone can and will be tempted in one way or another throughout our lives. It is during such moments that our principles and values in life are challenged and through our respective responses, our characters revealed. Temptations come in different forms and in different degrees of seriousness.

As a student, the most popular temptation is that of being distracted in my studies. I have often wanted to concentrate on my studies for a specific period of time but somehow distractions of various kinds tempted me to neglect my studies. It can be a real struggle to overcome the temptation of not watching a popular film show with my friends on the eve of a test, not to watch a favorite television program when there is lots of school work to be done or even stop talking endlessly over the phone for hours at the expense of neglecting my studies. During exams, temptations to cheat or feign illness do arise among certain students.

For a working adult, one may yield to the temptation of purchasing food, clothes or even shoes when there is no necessity to do so. Somehow, such people fall prey to the gimmicks of sales and become guilty over self-indulgence. The more subtle form of temptation may deal with ethical issues arising from their work where one’s integrity could be tested. Temptations to lie, to blame others, to be lazy and shoddy in work are definitely present in the working world.

As mentioned earlier, certain temptations are morally linked and upon yielding to them, the turn of events in one’s life can be tragic. People are sometimes tempted to drink, smoke, and engage in empty talk and gossip during their leisure times. Other more serious temptations such as getting involved in extra-marital affairs, in illicit trade in drugs so as to earn some fortune overnight, rob and kill innocent victims are examples of temptations that lead to dire consequences. Yielding to other temptations including watching blue films, reading and admiring pornographic materials only encourage the development of a corrupted, polluted and perverted mind.

Victims of such serious temptations sometimes defend themselves by claiming to have weak will power and that they are pressurized to yield to such temptations. Personally, I see them as lame excuses for each of us is accountable for our own actions. Such people should deliberately break away from such evil influences before they are drawn into committing greater evils in life later on. Therefore, we should exercise our choice carefully in confronting with temptations.

Here is a funny video on temptation of kids “ The Marshallow Test ” :

Dancing

Dancing is a popular past-time to many people all over the world. It is not exclusively for the young nor does it take place only in developed countries. Way back in past centuries and even today, tribal people engage in dancing as a form of worship or part of a ceremony in a celebration. For such occasions, dancing can be ritualistic and solemn.

In modern times, dancing appeals to different people for different reasons. To the young, it serves as a form of exercising such as in aerobic dancing. Through this, the body’s stamina can be built up and muscles of various parts of the body become well-toned.

For some people, dancing is also a way o release pent-up feelings and frustrations. With the music in the background and the privacy secured in a room, one can simply dance to the music, allowing for self expression along the way.

Young people often include dancing in parties or at other social gatherings in discotheques. It seems to be an incentive for people to gather. They look forward to dance away into the nights during parties and not so much of wanting a good tuck in.

To the elderly, the steps in dancing are reduced with a slower tempo in the music. They gather in community centers to learn folk dancing and at the same time to know one another in such informal interactions. However, dancing can be abused by certain people in certain ways. With the playing of music with or without suggestive lyric, some people use dancing to enter into a more intimate physical contact with their dancing partners. Whether they are dancing with strangers or friends, this can usher in moral and relationship problems in some cases.

Personally I doubt the effectiveness of dancing as a major role in keeping one’s body healthy and in good shape. Activities such as jogging, swimming and playing racket games are more effective towards attaining good health. They are effective in burning off calories in our body and developing one’s muscles. To me, there are more meaningful and effective ways of keeping fit.

Fire – friend or enemy?

Fire has been around since creation; in fact it appears that fire had a hand in creation itself. Therefore, man did not discover fire but apparently he discovered its use. Before he discovered its use, he was probably at its mercy. Fires started by nature, by lightning or by the sun, must have terrified early man for centuries when he eked out an existence by gathering fruits and nuts to keep body and soul together. Probably he also ate meat raw. Then one day he discovered that this terrible thing, which burnt and hurt, could be tamed. Then one by one he must have discovered its marvelous uses. Then fire ceased to be an enemy and became a bosom friend of man.

From then on it was a close friendship. Today we can hardly conceive of life without fire. It cooks out food, it provides warmth and it burns rubbish. Fire plays a major part in our lives from birth till we are cremated. The main blessing that this mysterious friend bestows on us is that it cooks our food. Throughout the world, from highly organized societies to primitive tribes, humans need food. Since it has been discovered that food tastes better when it has been cooked, cooking has evolved over the years so that there are now countless dishes to pamper our palates. All this is possible only because of fire.

Yet this great friend can be a dangerous enemy. In its natural state, fire can break out at any moment – usually through careless handling- and cause devastating harm. Destruction of lives and property by fire is one of the, almost, daily disasters in the world. Not even the most developed countries are exempt from this. All anyone can do is take as many precautions as possible but still prepare to fight it when it occurs. Frequently when fires break out, humans are helpless and great losses occur before the fires are brought under control.

On another note, man too uses fire for destructive purposes. Most weapons are based on the principle of fire. This applies to simple devices like handguns, to artillery pieces and nuclear bombs. The main destructive element in weapons or at least the trigger is fire based. In this case, it is not fire, which is danger in itself, but rather because it is used for destructive purposes by us.

Hence it is clear that fire is both a bosom friend and a deadly enemy. When kept under control it is one of the greater boons known to humanity; but when out of control or used for destruction it is a devastating force before which man is helpless.

Emailing for Business Success

No discussion of business communication today would be complete without dealing with the newest, most popular method of trading arguments today – email. Email has replaced casual conversation as he most common means of exchanging business information, telling jokes, and spreading gossip. Whether the email you author travels the cyber-path if the Internet, or remains confined to your company Intranet (internal network), there are five key things you should know about cyber-letter-writing so you can become truly productive on the job.

1.       Know Your ABCs: Remember that an email message is intruding upon your reader’s time, space, and bandwidth. You’ve got to ensure that your messages follow the ABCs of all effective business writing which must have accuracy, brevity, and clarity.

Accuracy: If you’re stating facts, research them to make sure they’re genuine. If you’re stating opinion, say so. Pinpoint what you want to say and make sure it’s accurate.

Brevity: It is the soul of wit, and is critical to effective email messages. Get to the purpose of your email message in the first sentence; whether you seek information, want to inform the reader, or move that person to action, don’t keep him in suspense. Make your points and provide your support as quickly as possible.

Clarity: Avoid using big words trying to impress the reader – they won’t. “Speak“ through your message in the same way you would speak to your neighbor, using simple language and clear phrases. It’s easy to misinterpret meaning when reading an email, so make sure messages are absent of ambiguity.

2.       Know the Rules: Guess what? Email is written correspondence. Doesn’t it follow, then, that you should follow the rules of basic business writing when you compose email message? Make sure you have a clear objective that you have a clear picture in your mind’s eye of what you want to say and what you want to happen – before you start writing.

How is your mail message going to flow?

For emails, putting the bottom line first is a strategy that has little downside. State the most important items at the top of the message, flowing through to supporting evidence later. Make it easy to read, using headings or numbers to call attention to specific areas of your message. Emphasize key ideas with bold or italic text.

Unless you’re talking to a good buddy, never write an email and hit “send” appropriate. You would be surprised what gets blown away from your first email draft. Heed the words of Samuel Johnson who said,”What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure?”Take your time when composing your message so it is a pleasure to read.

3.       Know You Audience: The ease of sending email is also the reason that many people hold these invasive messages in the same disdain as a telemarketing call received during the dinner hour. In the days when your copy list was limited to about five people because the carbon copies were only readable for that many layers, you were very careful about whom to add to the coveted roster. Use the same discretion with email distribution lists. Before sending any email message, ask yourself, “Dose this person really needs to know what I’m saying?” If the answer is no, don’t include her in your distribution.

4.       Know Your Netiquette: You know what’s great about email? It’s so easy to create a permanent message and send it to tens, even thousands, of people. What leverage! Guess what’s bad? It’s so easy to take your permanent message and send it to tens, even thousands, of people. Let that little fact serve as a reminder that you need to be extremely careful about what you say in your message and how you say it. Email has no volume control. The reader can’t determine your facial expressions and body language. Consequently, human nature causes many people to interpret your message in the worst possible light. You can offend hundreds of people in one fell swoop, and those careless words can come back to bite you. Ouch!

Virginia Shea, in her bestselling book Netiquette, explains the following dilemma. Computer communication allows us to speak to people we might otherwise never meet, bringing the world closer. The funny thing is, the technology is strangely impersonal, and so since the listener is at arm’s length, people will often say things in a much terser manner than if the reader was there in person. As Macintosh evangelist Guy Kawasaki suggests, ask yourself, “Would I say this to someone’s face?“ Your answer will provide some perspective on your email style.

5.       Know Yourself: Like anything you do, your email messages paint a self-portrait. If you send messages replete with misspellings, grammatical errors, and fowl language, you’re telling everyone who reads the message that you don’t really care about your work; you might even be a jerk. This is an easy trap to fall into because email is so simple to compose and send that we use the arms- length nature of the medium as an excuse for professional laziness.

Use a signature file that shows up at the bottom of every message that identifies you and makes contacting you easy, including phone numbers. As unbelievable as it sounds, some people won’t want to respond via email. Autograph your emails with excellence. That alone gives your message a much better chance at being heard and influencing others.

There are many technical things that you can do to enhance your email messages that leverage your ability to communicate. Always remember that you’re talking to a living, breathing person, not an inanimate computer. If you want some easy and practical guidelines, follow the five steps listed above, and you will become a cyber-mailing sensation. More importantly, your message will have the impact that you want and help your business succeed.

Etiquettes in Business Communication by E-mail

Much of our communication now takes place over e-mail. While e-mail is a great tool for fast, easy communication, it has its own challenges that face to face and telephone conversations don’t have. With that in mind, here are some e-mail dos and don’ts to help your employees respond by e-mail in a caring way:

• Do be exceptionally polite and more effusive than you would in ordinary speech. This may make up for the tone of voice that is missing in e-mail but present when we speak. Begin with phrases like “Thank you for writing.” “We are grateful for the opportunity, etc 

• Don’t be short and to-the-point in a clipped business style. With the missing speech elements in e-mail, you will come off sounding rude and uncaring.

• Do present in a very positive and affirming words what you will do to address the customer’s problem.

• Don’t emphasize what you cannot do. This will put a negative spin on the conversation, letting the customer know right off the bat his options are limited.

• Do use the word “and” when responding to a customer who has had a bad experience with your company. Using “and” keeps your customer’s brain opens to both sides of the sentence. For instance, you would want to say, “I’m sorry about the difficulties you’ve had and I’m sure I can help fix them,”” rather than, “I’m sure we can fix this, but it will take some time.”

• Don’t use “but” anywhere in your response. By now, your customer’s bad experience lets him skip over the first part of the response when he sees a “but” and begin reading the communication immediately after the “but”.

• Do use the ideal of partnership to solve problems. You can accomplish this with phrases like “Here’s what I need you to do.” ”Advanced thank you for calling back.” etc. Always use the inclusive “we” one of the key words of partnership that signifies to the customer that “we” are working together.

• Don’t dictate to the customer.

• Do set the e-mail message aside for an hour or before sending it. This hour will give you time to review it and ask yourself, “Have I walked in my customer’s shoes and do I understand what she really needs?” You do not get a second chance to make the first impression. Do it thoughtfully the first time.

• Don’t just dash it off and let it rip through the network to get it off your desk. Invariably, as the message is being swept off your screen, you will notice something that will negate all the positive words you just wrote with one negative comment or questionable lone.  

Email Messages That Demand Attention

Tired of all the junk mail you get in your mailbox? What about email box? I bet the situation there is getting worse and worse. Well guess what? It is for the people you communicate with as well. The biggest challenge in sending an email today is getting it read! Here are few reasons why:

• There is so much junk mail that people are deleting stuff right from their in box without opening it based upon the subject line or if the sender is known. You can get lost in a sea of sameness, even among friends.

• Email programs allow users to put selective filters that trash incoming emails based upon the sender the subject, etc. An example will be emails with ‘XXX’ or ‘$$$’ in the subject line … anywhere.  You can pretty much assume it is online spam.

Here are some ideas to proceed in the email universe with sanity.

• Never assume your important emails are read unless you get a confirmation, not by a, confirmation robot but by a person replying. Always follow important messages with a phone call.

• Never send unsolicited junk mail yourself. You will anger people and some will be motivated enough to get your name on a watch list that allows many services to simply trash your emails, all of them, based on who you are. Only send email to those who have granted permission for you to do so, such as e zine subscribers, friends, business contacts, etc.

• Unless you are a spammer, you just want your email read by those business and personal contacts you have actually made. You use the email medium to follow-up on existing relationships. If that is the case, make your subject line as specific as possible, referencing the earlier contact with the recipient. Things like “Our conversation at Sam’s party” will put you immediately in context. (Yes, readers of my voice mail tips, this step are the same on voice mail). Spammers know this and will try to fake people out with “A friend referred me” or “You requested this information” right in the subject line. Of course, after you open it and realize it is online BS, you are highly irritated and set a filter on that user (see above).

• Get your point quickly in your message, respecting the reader’s time.

• Don’t send large attachments (greater than 200KB) without first warning the recipient it is coming. If not, shrewd email users will set filters to trash mail based on exceeding a predetermined size of the message, which include attachments.

• Don’t bother responding to spam you receive to tell someone to take you off of their list unless they provide an electronic, automatic means to do so (like I do with Getting Connected). All you are doing is confirming that there is a live body at the end of the communication and subject yourself to electronic mail.

 

The basic truth is that we are so overwhelmed with email contacts these days, 85% unsolicited nonsense, that we are not in the best frame of mind when viewing email and are looking to quickly trim the size of the incoming messages. Make yours stand out in your subject line and provide a relevant, user-friendly message that respects the time of the recipient and more will get read, allowing you to effectively leverage your communication across cyberspace.

 

Two-Factor Authentication

Technical controls are built into systems by the system developers during the system development life cycle. Including an internal auditor on the project team is an excellent way to ensure that such controls are included as a part of system design. Most of the security controls are based on the hardware and software technology. The basis for security like Two-Factor Authentication against threats by unauthorized persons is denied access to the information resources, and then harm cannot be done.

Two-Factor Authentication are basically the dual process that technical controls or access control to a website or software or to a secured valuable thing. First process is user identification and secondly user authentication which are describe below:

Example of Two-factor Authentication

·         User Identification: Users first identify themselves by providing something that they know, such as a password. The identification can also include the user’s location, such as a telephone number or network entry point.

·       User Authentication: Once initial identification has been accomplished, users verify their right to access by providing something that they have, such as a smart card or token, or an identification chip. User authentication can also be accomplished by providing something that they are, such as a signature or a voice or speech pattern or eye contact or finger print and so on.

Both user identification and authentication should be completed to make the Two-Factor Authentication. This Two-Factor Authentication is very helpful for security purpose and work better than only using user identification. However, Two-Factor Authentication may be not enough to be secured the site or access. User authorization also matters and required.

User authorization means with the identification and authentication checks passed, a person can then be authorized to access certain levels or degrees of use. For example, one user might be authorized only to read from a file, whereas another might be authorized to make changes in the file.

Identification and authentication (Two-Factor Authentication) make use of user profiles, or descriptions of authorized users. Authorization makes use of access control files that specify the levels of access available to each user. Once users have satisfied the three access control functions, they can use the information resource within the constraints of the access control files.

Identity Theft

Identity Theft

In accessing an email account or online resource sharing, each user has a unique identity to do it. When this unique identity or ID misuse by others it’s known as identity theft or identity disguise.   Identification security risks as a potential undesirable outcome of a breach of information security by an information security threat. All risks represent unauthorized acts, and there are four types: disclosure and theft, use, destruction and denial of service, and modification. These are the four activities is mainly done by an identity theft in online which are discussed below:

1. Unauthorized Disclosure and Theft: When the database and software library are made available to persons not entitled to have access, the result can be the loss of information or money.  For instance, industrial spies can give valuable competitive information, and computer criminals can embezzle the firm’s fund.   
2.  Unauthorized Use: Unauthorized use occurs when persons who are not ordinarily entitled to use the firm’s resource are able to do so. Typical of this type of computer criminal is the hacker who views a firm’s information security as a challenge to be overcome. A hacker, for example, can break into a firm’s computer network, gain access to the telephone system, and make unauthorized long-distance call.
3. Unauthorized Destruction and Denial of Service: Individuals can damage or destroy the hardware or software, causing a shutdown in the firm’s computer operations. It is not even necessary for computer criminals be on the premises. They can log onto the firm’s computer network from a remote terminal and cause such physical destruction as damaged monitors, crashed disks, jammed printers, and disabled keyboards.
4. Unauthorized Modification: Changes can be made to the firm’s data, information, and software. Some changes go unnoticed and cause the users of the system output to make the wrong decisions. An especially worrisome type of modification is that caused by malicious software, often grouped under the heading of viruses.

Reasons of Website Privacy

We all use website for many purpose like emailing, sharing files, uploading pictures, keeping address index or phone numbers of our friends or colleagues and so on. While doing such activities online, have we ever thought of that website privacy? Most of us not aware of it and give little importance to it. Well, we (users of website) might forget this important issue but while designing a website its privacy matters, guided and implemented always.

Reasons for Website Privacy:

1.       Logically Malleability: The computer performs exactly as it is instructed by the programmer and this can be frightening. However, when the computer is used for an unethical activity it is not the computer that is the culprit. Rather, it is the person or persons behind the computer who are at fault. So, rather than fear that the computer is sometimes used in an unethical way, society should fear the persons who are directing the computer.

2.       The Transformation Factor: This reason for concern over computer ethics or website privacy is based on the fact that computers can drastically change the way we do things. We can see this transformation of duties in firms of all types. A good example is electronic mail. E-mail did not simply replace regular mail or telephone calls. It provided an entirely new means of communication. Similar transformations can be seen in how managers conduct meetings. Whereas managers once had to physically assemble in the same location, they can now meet in the form of a video conference.

3.       The Invisibility Factor:  The third reason for society’s interest in website privacy is that society views the computer as a black box. All of the computer’s internal operations are hidden from view. Invisibility of internal operations provides the opportunity for invisible programming values, invisible complex calculations, and invisible abuse.

·         Invisible programming values are those routines that the programmer codes into the program that may or may not produce the processing that the user desires. During the course of writing a program, the programmer must make a series of value judgments as to how the program should accomplish its purpose. This is not a malicious act on the part of the programmer but, rather, a lack of understanding. A good example of the impact that invisible programming values can have is the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. The plant operators had been trained in handling emergencies by using a mathematical model. The model was designed to simulate single malfunctions occurred simultaneously. The inability of the computer to give the users what they needed was due to this invisibility factor.

·         Invisible complex calculations take the form of programs that are so complex that users do not understand them. A manager uses such a program with no idea of how it is performing its calculations.

·         Invisible abuse includes intentional acts that cross legal as well as ethical boundaries. All acts of computer crime fall into this category, as do such unethical acts as invasion of individuals’ right to privacy and surveillance.

We therefore, expect business to be guided by website privacy in order to put these concerns to rest. However, many websites hardly follow these privacy guides and misuse website members or visitors in many ways.