Last week Ben asked me to get an anti-virus program for the computer, because he needed to finish a C++ program for school, and the computer he uses at school is infected with the Bleah virus, so his diskette had Bleah virus.
So Thursday I bought McAffee VirusScan at Costco, $24.99, and when we got home, asked Ben to help me unload the groceries, and bring in the program, and install it, and get to work on his homework.
Friday, Chris called me from work, and told me that someone had stolen some tapes from his car - he had become very lax about keeping it locked, because the neighborhood seems so uneventful. Then when Ben came home, he told me that when he left for school Friday morning, someone had put the garden hose in my car and turned the faucet on, but it didn't wet my car because the nozzle was turned off. (I had become lax about locking my car, too.) So I checked, and some things were stolen from my car, too, some empty CD cases from my glove box - the CDs were in the changer, but the thief didn't know where to look (under the seat) - and the battery and charger to a cell phone - the phone was in the house. Probably a kid. I wish Ben had told me before he moved anything, I would have called the police, but I decided not to, because Ben had restored my car to order, and Chris had done the same to his.
Turns out Ben hadn't installed the anti-virus program because he got distracted, but after hunting for it all day Saturday I decided it had never been brought in from the car, and had been stolen Friday morning. So I downloaded another copy from the McAffee website, $29.99.
After I installed the program, and it scanned my computer, it said the computer was infected by a worm, which probably came in on an attachment to an email. So I deactivated the worm, and the computer was supposed to list everyone that MY computer had infected, and there were no names on the list.
I had been thinking about installing a firewall, and that made me go ahead and do it. I downloaded BlackIce, it's either $40 or $50, it's supposed to be very good for people who use cable modems. It will tell you when someone is trying to hack the computer, even if it fails. Yesterday there were six attacks on this computer, none successful. According to their website, computers connected to the internet via cablemodem experience an average of 20 attempted hacks a day, mostly unsuccessful because they are looking for weaknesses like trojan horses that were already hacked. This computer doesn't have the ports configured in a way that makes them easy to hack, e.g., file sharing isn't turned on, and neither is printer sharing. There are other things, I don't really understand them, but we haven't done them so I don't worry much. Of course, I am sure BlackIce could be hacked but someone would have to have the number of this computer to really go for it.
Since the water hose nozzle was turned off, and since I don't use the cell phone, and since the CDs weren't stolen, and since the computer wasn't infected with a destructive virus, all of this is just irritants.
But during this irritation, I was also experiencing attempts at causing me mental/emotional/psychic harm on Feelies - and it strikes me how very similar the mentality is, of people who think it's fun to put a water hose in a car and turn it on, and people who think it's fun to put viruses on computers, and people who think it's fun to constantly barrage others with nasty comments, in the hope of causing them harm. It's just petty cruelty. Of course, I was not harmed, so this, too, was merely an irritant.
There really is no good explanation for the mentality, IMO. I like the line from the beer commercial, "Why ask why?"
I hope we won't waste anymore time with recriminations - I hope we have learned that the only thing to do with these types of people is simply pretend that they don't exist. Society has developed ways of putting up social firewalls. Let's use them. |
