The more observant among you will of course have spotted the title of this article is a not correct. It should of course have read ‘The Problems with Computers’.
Anybody who has lost hours of work, or sat staring at printer waiting for it to commence printing will know that there are many, many problems with owning and using a computer.For me, THE problem with computers is that I do not think that I could live without one. Indeed, I am typing this on my trusty (well the screen has four lines down it and the left mouse button only works 50% of the time) laptop.
For me my PC is my window to the world. I read the rather excellent BBC web site for my news and sport, stay in contact with friends and family via email and have nearly finished copying my music CD collection onto it. I stare at my piles of CD’s gathering dust and soon I will pluck up the courage to sell them. My wife’s theory is however, that nobody will buy them, as I have poor taste in music. She could be right; when my car was broken into a few years ago whilst back in England, my CD’s were left untouched and just the 11p in the ashtray was stolen. And were the Police interested? No.
So, back to PC problems in general. Without doubt, there is a lot of technology built into PC’s today so with all the processing going on, you can accept that once in a while it will stop working, or “hang” or “crash” to use the vernacular. However, I remember using an IBM PC in the early 1980’s and that used to “crash” just as many times as my current PC “hangs”. So 23 years of hardware development just so my PC can “crash” more quickly. Apparently, the IBM PC’s of the early 80’s had up to 256 K of RAM (memory) and my PC has 1.25 Gigabytes of memory. Who cares about bits and bytes? Does it work, that’s all I am interested in? I have long said that despite the constant launch of new versions of Windows – Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP (asleep yet?) – well OK, not that constant; there still is not a truly useable PC interface. For want of a better term a PC for dummies. I come from a technical background and still there are times when a PC problem leaves me stumped. They can put a man on the moon but cannot create a PC that can tell you what is wrong and what needs to be done. The famous Microsoft Windows ‘Blue Screen of Death’ tells you things such as:
0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED Mmmm, I’m no expert, but I would say it is stuffed. I.E. your PC has stopped working and needs to be turned of and on again; or rebooted as certain types like to call it.
When was the last time your television stopped working in the middle of Coronation Street? Or rebooted itself because “a critical update has just been downloaded onto it”. Might I suggest that this is a sign of how indispensable computers are to us now? So indispensable, that we put up with all of the problems. At times I swear at my computer and call it useless. Yet the next day I will return to it like a besotted lover.
One concern I have with computers, and the future of the Internet, is security. I regularly transact payments and use Internet banking. But only recently I read: “A major security loophole has left the accounts of 3.1m HSBC customers vulnerable to attack by criminals, who can access their details with ease, it is claimed.” Little comfort for the HSBC customers then, when the bank admitted that the loophole was deliberately built-in to their Web site.
If HSBC struggle to get it right, what about lesser organisations we deal with? A few years ago, my wife and I booked a holiday to Borneo with an Australian travel company. After we had received the details of the itinerary, we transferred the money to them and THEN said “I hope they are a legitimate company”. Thankfully they were, but it could have easily been a con and we would have lost thousands of pounds.
There was a very interesting article on the BBC web site that discussed the complexity behind some of the “spam” emails sent out. The term spam refers to unsolicited emails that more often that not, appear to try and sell you something. More often than not than not, the emails are about pharmaceutical products. The article explained that the links on these emails can take you to bogus web sites that look legitimate, but once you try to buy the items listed using your credit card; you are defrauded of money for goods that do not exist. The act of trying to get people to hand over details for credit cards etc using an email is known as “phishing”. The article also explained how the spammers managed to send out 100 Million emails over a 14 day period. Basically, 100,000 home computers in 119 different countries (predominately in Europe) had been hijacked and were sending out the emails. To stay one step ahead of software to stop spam email, a new variant of the mail was being despatched every 12 minutes.
Now this is scary stuff and to me, I must confess this is a grey area. Does my Norton Anti-virus software stop criminals from hijacking my PC? Why aren’t we told about things like this occurring and how do we stop them? It also staggers me that despite governments and anti-criminal organisations having huge amounts of resource and money to invest into online fraud detection and prevention, they always seem to be a few steps behind the criminals. I guess this is just a case of ‘where there is a will there is a way’ and the criminals are spurred on by the thought of the ill-gotten gains.
A friend of mine in the UK works for a security company that protect the web sites of many large on-line gambling web sites. For these companies a non-functioning web site means loss of revenue running into tens of millions of pounds. Knowing this, criminal organisations blackmail the betting companies by threatening them with what is known as a Denial of Services Attack. Simply put, they criminal organisations have once again hijacked thousands of home computers and then instruct them to try to access the targeted web site all at once, hundreds of times a second. Unable to cope, the web site servers just give up and the web site is down. Without mentioning names, he said some companies have paid the blackmailers the amount requested, as it is easier (and cheaper) than preventing the Denial of Service attack. Even more frighteningly, another friend told me that Denial of Service attacks have been seen for sale on the auction site eBay, giving anybody the chance to maliciously bring a web site of their choice to its knees.
A report released in September 2006 by security firm Symantec said that the favourite target for hi-tech criminals are home computer users because they are “an easy target” compared to large enterprises who invest in on-line security. So the next time you receive an email from someone offering you money from Nigeria, tablets that increase the size of certain parts of your anatomy, or anything that seems too good to be true, it is, so just delete it without opening it. It strikes me that as the criminals’ methods become more complex, it still takes a large amount of stupidity at the user end to assist them!
