Scare-Mongering Douchebag
Today at school, we had a special guest speaker today. He spoke to us on the topic of internet security and I noticed some factual errors in his speech. After he finished talking, I confronted him on these errors and he admitted that he knew these things were wrong.
He willingly, intentionally, and knowingly lied to a body of students to scare them away from the small chance of something bad happening to their computers.
This is really something I consider to be utterly prickish and if I had the world my way, no one would ever tolerate it. Scare-mongering is a means of control, a leadin to dystopia. As long as we have things to fear, we will have to trust people and these trustees will be in a position of per over the rest of us.
Even so, its an attempt to stop people from doing things that are really inoccuous and might lead to greater enjoyment of computing, like switching to a Mac for better internet security or IMing for the fun of it.
This dick made IMing sound like it was worse for your computer than installing Kazaa. (Kazaa however will fuck up your computer. So will software by RealNetworks and yet, Dell includes that PREINSTALLED on their PCs. This is why I do not like Dell.) There is almost no risk of viruses in using IM software.
He also made the Apple’s switch to intel CPUs sound like it would make it easier for people to make Mac viruses. This will in actuality make no difference in safety. The way the Mac OS is designed, the worst piece of malware you can encounter on a Mac is a Trojan.
And he was a coward about showing the benefits of using internet explorer. He mentioned and it quickly shied away. I was really hoping he could evangelize how good that was because that would have won him back some respect from me.
But no, he is just a scare-mongering douchebag.
April 2nd, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Bravo. I did notice the fact that he said IMing was bad yet theres hardly any risk unless ur a complete idiot and go to the links that the random IM spam will send you.
Adieu.