My first reaction to this Non Sequitur (AMS) was that it’s impossible. We all know that the way you learn to check before sending is by sending before checking, a lesson gained through experience.
It was a lot more fun back in the days of listservs, which, O Best Beloved, set up a little closed universe in which members could send and receive emails to the group. It’s still around, but there are so many alternatives that I think it goes unremarked.
But it did a lovely job of amplifying the “reply all” disasters we’re familiar with, because it was easy to intend to send a filthy joke or snide remark to one member and have it pop up in everyone’s email.
Embarrassing in a social group, potentially a job-killer on a professional listserv, and far easier to do on listservs than on social media, because Facebook and such make private messaging significantly different than overall posting.
My favorite was when two pugnacious members of a Family Law listserv, who often lashed out, knowledgeably, against the fathers’ rights fascisti on the list, began quietly dating. On a visit of one to the other, she accidentally forgot to log in as herself on his computer, with the result that a message with her signature came from his address.
The fathers’ rights crew lost their collective minds, assuming that they had proof that it had been one person plus a sock puppet all along.
Anyhow, the most important thing to check before you hit the send button is who it’s gonna send your message to.
But if anyone ever learned that without screwing up personally, well, yes, they deserve a statue.
Anne Morse Hambrock asks God another unanswerable question in this Anne and God piece. To begin with, who really expects good results from a Google image search? I use it fairly frequently, but to find what you want nearly always requires reframing the question until Google finally figures out what you meant, and then still sorting through a lot of hay until you find the needle. Or until you give up.
I’ll give her this: Those Captcha pictures apparently foil bots. Unfortunately, they foil just about everyone. I’m never sure if a slight corner of the post holding the traffic light counts or not, and I greatly suspect I’m not the only person whose reaction is to say to hell with it and bounce to another web site.
Though Poncho had no problem with it over at Pooch Cafe (AMS) this morning.
Speaking again of things you learn through personal experience, this Carpe Diem (KFS) got more of a groan than a laugh from me. Our adventures in switching to a new server at the end of the year triggered a series of glitches as the new settings were cursed and adjusted and refined.
We were lucky to be able to resolve each mini-disaster within a few hours and we’ve rebounded nicely, but even going down a few hours at a time discourages visitors.
I’d agree with the bear that hibernating for four months would pretty well take you off of everybody’s radar.
Amy Kurzweil‘s cartoon also came along at a relevant moment, because in the past month, I switched insurance companies and my bank completely redid their website. Both required new registration; neither went particularly well.
My bank is local, so when their computers refused to recognize my name, account number and password, I could call a for-real person who had the power to give the web site a slap upside the head and get me on.
But I still need to call the insurance company and get that ironed out, and I’m not looking forward to it.
There are a lot of cartoons floating around about people using their pets’ names for a password. I don’t know that anybody in Nigeria knows my current dog’s name, but I’m willing to bet they don’t know all the names of the dozen I’ve had over the years.
Though none of my dogs’ names included 14 letters and numbers plus a special symbol, which is what my bank’s new, improved website requires.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Ah, we don’t none of us care about likes and traffic and suchlike. We’re just here to tell the truth and express ourselves and all that.
Just like we didn’t want a date for prom, either.
The Congressional Hearings did get a lot of attention, which is partly due to the number of bereaved parents brought in to pack the peanut gallery. A smart move, not only to get media attention but to back the social media execs into a corner.
Though some of the attention focused on whether Sen. Tom Cotton (Nitwit – AR) knows that Singapore and China are two different countries.
The overall topic of kids and social media certainly matters, and Zuckerberg in particular took a beating at the hearings, for the impact of Facebook on young people and for his lack of candor in addressing the matter.
Incidentally, last week the grandmother in Grand Avenue described the kids as being eight years old. I hope she’s keeping that computer in an area of the house where she can see what they’re up to, and seriously limiting the amount of time they spend on it.
Particularly on social media sites where you’re supposed to be at least 13 years old to have an account.
Even if Congress stopped making speeches and started passing laws to protect kids on line, it’s hard to enforce rules if parents, and grandparents, decline to pay attention.
Speaking of Anti-Social Media
Ol’ Musky didn’t make it to the Congressional Hearings, though he sent his faithful sidekick, who testified that kids make up only 1% of American Xitter users, which seemed to satisfy the Senators, if not Katie Notopoulos at Business Insider:
Anyway, the boss couldn’t be there because he was busy bragging about having implanted a chip in a human brain (and he didn’t even have to disguise it as a covid vaccine!).
As you see, some good cartoonists were inspired by his announcement.
Perhaps not in the way ol’ Musky had been hoping for, but in ways that made me laff.
The most knowledgeable security experts know that requiring ’14 letters and numbers plus a special symbol’ is really not any guarantee of significantly greater security.
And those congress critters are clueless when it comes to the internet. While, Suckerberg’s NON-apology was a shovelful in the faces of those who lost loved ones.
Also, the elongated muskrat’s claims about his new neural implant were a shovelful, too.
As we posit: technology is just a tool, not a panacea. When carefully thought-out and tested it can really help.
“As we posit: technology is just a tool, not a panacea. When carefully thought-out and tested it can really help.”
The way I see it far too many techbros and ‘experts’ are looking for solutions to problems that don’t actually exist.
Or worse, they’ll create the problem then sell you the solution.
Since they all agreed that the Social Media fish in a barrel they were blasting were doing a completely inadequate job, why doesn’t that guffawing, feckless, pseudo-empathic garbage-pailful of lawmakers write a damn law that makes doing everything they’re asking those sad billionaires to do on their own honor a requirement to remain in business? They’ve certainly had the time to recognize the problem, and, apparently, EXACTLY what needs to be done. Doesn’t that make them just as derelict in THEIR jobs?
{random dog you had}{year dog entered your life}_{another random dog}.
Done.
As ShermanJ notes, this is all a joke. The strongest password on earth isn’t going to protect you when the hackers intercept your bank’s EDI feed to unencrypt at their leisure.
Likewise the law to “protect children on the internet” underestimates the ingenuity of both children and creeps, but leaves the rest of us compelled to cough up information we might not prefer to share.
It’s my understanding that the captchas where you select specific pictures in a grid aren’t so much about getting it right as they are about analyzing cursor movement during the process, and sometimes additional metadata your browser is handing over.