Today’s Rant by Joe Farace
Update: Colorado is the fourth most hacked state in the USA. According to Gizmodo, :In 2020, Colorado reported 12,325 cyber incidents to the FBI but a fairly high rate of losses, at $100,663,897. In 2021, the numbers dipped: 10,537 Coloradans reported being victimized, but, as with other states, the financial losses rose, in this case to $130,631,286.”
Can we talk….
On December 27 at 6:10 AM MST, I reached peak e-mail. All of the email that I received that morning via Microsoft Outlook were phishing attempts. And in the days that followed more and more of my email was the same. Since that day, I have experienced repeated days of 100% phishing email. Is this why e-mail was invented?
When Alexander Graham Bell invented telephony in 1876 he could have never imagined this scenario: Mary and I are sitting down to dinner and the phone rings; it’s a telemarketer. This happened over and over again until we finally said “enough” and disconnected our landline. I don’t know how long it took when we got our first cell phone before we started been bombarded with similar calls. A little wile ago, my cell phone or provider popped up a question on the screen that said “silence junk calls?” I clicked yes and guess what? My cell phone seldom rings anymore. Instead I see a message that says “silenced call” and shows the calling (probably spoofed) phone number. And this same scenario is happening with text messages now and I now have a command in the latest iOS that says “block caller and report junk?” and I’ve said yes to that!
More than ninety-five percent of the email I receive are phishing. Occasionally, some are from companies who want me to review their products or books by reading the “enclosed press release.” It may be hard for you to believe that some blog posts and reviews—not mine—are written using that method. Every now and then there will a real email, including the recent message I received from a former model who is now a respected Phd in biology reminiscing about our film era shoots together. That was a pleasant email.
According to The Byte, University of Amsterdam professor and media theorist Geert Lovink thinks that at a certain point, everyone’s going to get tired of being online because “eventually, the bad is going to outweigh the good and we’ll all finally get to log off.” In a paper titled “Extinction Internet” he poses a question for our age: “Can today’s internet culture withstand entropy and overcome infinite capture while facing its never-ending ending?”
In the paper, which was published by the school’s Institute of Network Cultures, his generation “found out early that the internet… is both toxic and curative and…cannot be fixed.
“There may come a point when that’s no longer possible, after which time the adverse consequences can no longer be controlled,” Lovink said in the school’s press release. “The internet is headed for a point of no return, and Big Tech is probably already aware of this, too.”
“Mark Zuckerberg has moved away from his social media platforms and launched Meta,” he added, “as if nothing’s wrong and we can just start over again, but it’s clearly already broken.” And so is my email.