False Advertising

A person should be absolutely satisfied that a web site or an email or any social media posting is completely legitimate before responding to it in any way. This is because the purveyors of spam have become sophisticated enough to fool even an intelligent casual observer.

For example, I recently got an email describing an interesting job opportunity. It was from a person I didn't know—but there are many in my network I don't know yet and if they have work for me, I want to hear from them. The language of the email was only slightly off-beat—call it a yellow flag, not a red one.

When I went out on the internet I couldn't find the company. Okay, that's almost certainly a red flag—except it meant I didn't find any bad reviews. Could the company simply be new or obscure? Does every business have a web site? Well, probably, yeah, so it was a red flag. Still, I wanted to believe it was a legitimate opportunity and wasn't yet ready to hit "delete."

But the indisputable red flag was that the email appeared not to have been sent to anything resembling my email address, nor was it from any business. These days, all of the email header information can be faked, so if it isn't from a legitimate enterprise—and certainly if it appears it wasn't sent to you—it’s garbage.

I saved myself further trouble, but wasted my time in the bargain.

Win98 Was Stable

Windows 98 was a stable and secure operating system.

It was stable because you could simply reinstall everything if it failed, or restore it from a tape backup. You’d have a tape backup because you assumed Win98 would crash.

Win98 was secure, at least during its heyday, because this was prior to the exponential growth of internet viruses.

A case for the robustness of Win98 (second edition) is hard to make from a technical standpoint. But in practice, I never had problems with it. Subsequent Windows operating systems increased in complexity and, in my opinion, were rushed to production (release “updates” have multiplied almost as quickly as viruses). I feel we now live in a very uncertain computing environment.

Disagree, please. I’m surely not accounting for the increased sophistication of today’s software. But how much of that sophistication do we need, and at what price? And not a dollar cost so much as a demand for more of our time.

If hardware and software are ends in themselves, then we live in the best of all possible worlds, and it only gets better. But to the extent computers are tools intended to accomplish real-world tasks, we need better mousetraps.