Terms and conditions is one of the important issues for website owners. A website owner cannot control who access to his site and information and how the users use the information. So, it is essential for all website owners to have terms and conditions to protect themselves from foreseeable and unforeseeable issues and that are claimed by the user of the website as a result of their confidence on the information of the website.

Terms and conditions are mostly needed when a website provides a product, service or advice for customers or visitors. In most of the websites when users want to use it is necessary to accept and being aware of all conditions before using the website and any pre-purchase. For instance, by reading the terms and conditions, customers will be informed that who is responsible if their purchased product is lost while shipping as well as any warrantees or guarantees on the product.

As a result of such issues, it is important for websites to have very clear terms and conditions. For example a website that sells alcohol in Australia, the users before entering the site should first verify their age that must be more than 18 and the second one is that all users should have membership to do any purchase. This condition is in order to have more security while trading online.

I think having terms and condition is very important for website owners irrespective of the type of online business or service and they can even protect a website ideas and content from being copied.

Source: www.legalis.net

Jurisdiction

This post of mine is about jurisdiction. A word you may not heard about it because it is a word that used most by courts. If I want to give a simple definition, I can say that jurisdiction is the legal right or better the power of courts and judges to do their authority and decide about happened cases.

When a case happens in the unbound internet area, it is very important to investigate which country or state has authority to track the case. For example, when someone in US defrauds someone else in UK, which country has authority to go through the case? So many examples exist in the internet about jurisdiction but, to find the answer we should know about the cause and effect of the act.

In this situation, the cause of fraud is located in US but the effect of the criminal act is in UK. So, both countries have the right of follow the case in their courts.

Now suppose when someone create and release a virus to destroy or hack others’ accounts around the world, all countries’ court which are affected by this criminal act have jurisdiction.

Like many other legal issues, the more important aspect is implementation and being committed to the protocols which signed between countries.

Source:www.legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com

Cyber marketing

This term is used more by businesses and refers to use of internet to attract potential customers. They do this marketing activity by for example by using advertising for their products and services that they offer. These advertisings are shown to customers through websites, emails and so on. The businesses find profitable customers through their cyber marketing and then interact with them to improve their business activities. These activities may be such as online marketing.

It is obvious that there are some advantages and disadvantages with this activity. For example customers have enough time to search for their needed information without stress. And also companies can increase the number of their customers and also increase their profitability and growth opportunities.

But there are some frauds that happen in these situations. Crimes often happen in this field are credit card fraud and usage. Customers sometimes have fear to give their credit card information to buy a product. The other crime is that every person who runs the website is doing it with a unique IP address. If you receive many sales leads, each of them should have its own IP address, so if not, then there is a fraud.  There should be always coincidence between the information of the credit card and the contact information.

source:www.cyberlaw.org

Telemedicine

This subject that I will give a summary about it may be unfamiliar to you called Telemedicine. Simply the definition is the practice and activity of medicine when the doctor and patient are widely separated through the use of telecommunication technologies like computer For example when there is a distance between a rural hospital with a patient and city hospital with more and better equipments to make diagnostics, so the health personnel who works in rural hospital can share everything to other information about the patient and the doctor who is in distance can even talk to the patient and make decision. Even surgeries can take place through this kind of technology.

But there is a risk here that who has the right to access to those patient information and who is responsible to ensure the patient the information will be kept safe. Any disclosure of the patient information is a risk related to telemedicine and this can result to defamation claims by patient.

Besides, I believe there are also some advantages to telemedicine in addition to its obvious risks. For example the number of doctors or personnel in rural areas is not enough so the existence of this technology extend the access and reach of the doctors. And also I think it may lead health personnel remain in rural areas because it provides the field to online and ongoing retaining and collaboration with other health professionals.

In Malaysia this act is cited under the ACT 1997.

source:cybertelemedicine.blogspot.com

Defamation

In this part Defamation is the topic which I am going through it.

Defamation is false statements or actions of another that injures the reputation or character of someone. It can be an attack on the good name of a person. This kind of attack could happen through two types; libel and slender. Libel is a statement through the written or print forms. This kind of defamation can simply cause the victim to be avoided by the others. The other form of defamation, slender, is through spoken statements or gesture. It means you hear the injuring statements not see them such as rumors and spreading lies that somebody tells about you as a victim. In this kind, you may be injured regarding to your profession or business. Important thing about defamation is that the victim has the right to sue against the defamer for punishment and damages and for the victim having the witness is not needed necessarily. The victim can prove defamation on his own words, however sometimes having confirming evidence is better like an email.

Before taking the course of cyber law, I thought, and many people still think, that you can be anonymous through internet and you may not be responsible about your actions. But, it is considerable that everybody is responsible about his or her actions such as their weblog content, emails, status in social networks and even their comments in other’s weblog.

source:injury-law.freeadvice.com

  

If I go more through cyber terrorism subject, I can say that there is another level of attack in cyber terrorism that has political motivations and better saying it is the combination of political activities and hacking. This is hacktivism. There are some types of attacks against computer systems like physical, syntactic and semantic that you might not have any idea and even heard about it.

In physical attacks, attackers use weapons such as bombs or fire. In syntactic attack the attacker use a kind of software to damage the computers or networks. This software is sometimes referred to malicious software. The attackers may do it through sending emails.

In the third one that is caused by producing errors and unpredictable marks or results in computers by publishing incorrect information to users computers in order to attack users confidence. One example of computer based attack was related to Israel and Palestine conflict in 2000. Some Israeli teenagers did syntactic attacks against computers which were maintained by Palestinian organization Hezbollah and Hamas. So to respond to this attack Palestinians immediately crashed a number of Israeli websites which among those websites some were belonged to Israel Defense Force, the Bank of Israel and the Foreign Ministry.

I believe cyber terrorism phenomenon can be a critical matter and issue for the computer industry and society in general and it seems the countries must legislate strong law against cyber terrorism and more important is being committed to the law.

source:www.symantec.com

In my previous post, I wrote an introduction about cyber terrorism in this and next parts I will continue the discussion.

Generally cyber terrorism is created to describe the computer-based attacks against the target’s assets. These attacks happen in cyberspace and all will show some common elements to all acts of terrorism. One is that cyber terrorist will attack on purpose and the attack should be planned since they involve the acquisition of software to do the attack. The second one is that the attacks are designed to impact political structure and cyber terrorists are hackers with political motivation.

The other one is that cyber terrorists often attack civilian interests that result in violence against person or property and generate fear. The last one is that cyber terrorism is sometimes separated from cyber warfare or information warfare which these are computer-based attacks designed by nation and states.

Cyber warfare is another form of cyber attacks that is used to describe aspects of defending and attacking information in cyberspace as well as denying the target’s ability to do the same. In cyber warfare or information warfare the information technology is used as an instrument to attack the target or better adversary’s computer system. Personal information warfare is a kind of attack such as corrupting the personal information such as medical or credit files information. And the other one can be global in information warfare which aims at a country’s critical computer system to disrupt the country by disabling its systems, such as communication, transportation and so on.