October 28, 2009
Submission
I originally intended to submit my second post, but since I cannot find the article anymore, I have decided to write a new one. From reading the article “Facebook Password Reset Confirmation Email Contains Virus [ALERT]” by Adam Ostrow at Mashable.com, I have come to the sudden realisation that New Media, although useful and very, VERY convenient, causes us to become extremely reliant on technology. It also makes me think about how gullible people have become.
The gist of this article is that Facebook supposedly sends an email to a user, requesting that the said user change his or her password, and sends an attachment with the new temporary password. The user is supposed to open the attachment to change his or her password, thus releasing a torrent of trojans and nasty viruses into the hapless victim’s computer. This, obviously causes a lot of distress to the user, and this is probably what the hacker intends.
In the past, viruses, although annoying, would not cause much inconvenience. This was because most people did not keep their important files in their computers. They didn’t store passwords in the cache, nor did they store their credit card numbers in a file in their My Documents folder called, ingeniously, “Passwords”. Basically, they had nothing to lose, really. This brings me to my main point, which is that people have become to reliant on technology, and New Media. If they had written down their passwords in a good old fashioned notebook, not the digital kind, the real “Book & Binder” type, it would have been impossible to receive a trojan. New Media has made it that much easier for someone to steal your information, quite literally, from under your nose.
In my opinion, humanity has become much more gullible. From what I see in my family and friends, people are more likely to click and open something they have never seen before, even if it looks suspicious. Obviously, they have not heard of the phrase, “Curiosity kills the cat”. Either that, or they do not understand the meaning of a metaphor and assume that because they are not cats, the phrase does not apply to them. They seem to believe that whatever it is, it will not hurt them, or cause them any sort of inconvenience, because they “have AVG”.
Like many things, however, the internet is not to be blamed. The internet is neither good nor bad. It is just a medium with which we work. We can do good things or bad things, and the internet will not care. Thus, my above argument is not really against New Media. Basically, I’m trying to say that humanity is not mature enough to use New Media responsibly. People HAVE done good things with New Media, that is a fact. However, the fact that there are still viruses and trojans around undermines their efforts. The recent jump in sales of anti-viruses are enough to prove that fact. Viruses, like the internet, are man made. We wouldn’t need anti-viruses if there weren’t any people irresponsibly using their skills to create these things just for the sake of annoying others, or stealing information. I have heard that the amount of New Media will increase exponentially within the next ten years. As interesting as this may sound, I feel the pace of New Media far outstrips the pace of man’s ability to use these technologies responsibly and carefully.
