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Consumer Reports on 'State of the Net'
netbuzz writes "A " State of the Net" survey to be released today by Consumer Reports contends that Americans lost $7 billion over the past two years to malware and myriad online scams. Not surprisingly, a significant portion of this financial pain appears to have been avoidable, as the survey reveals a widespread continuing negligence toward the use of home firewalls and virus protection. As for underage children using MySpace and the like? There, too, the risks in many case look to be self-inflicted, as 13 percent of children fail to meet the 14-year-old age minimum on MySpace, and, as the organization notes: "Those were just the ones the parents knew about."
When I was in school I was punished for doing anything with a computer that wasn't within the teacher's scope of instruction; making spreadsheets and word processing. Most parents know next to nothing about how to operate a PC outside of simple browsing and email. Anything else is intimidating techno-wizardry. Teaching more advanced computer classes in grade school could easily reduce that "cost." I've found parents are more than willing to take little Bobby's advice on computer related topics, because at least he can program the damned VCR.
If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
I guess I'm lazy.
I just tried logging into my Hotmail account and I got this page saying "Hotmail is now Windows Live Hotmail" with a completely new domain name and everything. I don't know if this is legit or a phishing expedition and I didn't get any email in the last couple of days saying this will happen. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to wait a couple of days and if I don't see any news of phishing of Hotmail accounts, maybe I'll go through the hassle of logging in, or maybe not.
You see, I really don't feel like spending time surfing the web trying to find out if it's legit or trying to find the MS contact email and waiting a day or so for MS to tell me if it's OK or not.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Oddly enough i once threw a redhat 9 box on the internet and within several hours someone had managed to become 'root' via a portmapper flaw. I know, your arguement is i didnt apply security fixes, etc right? Isnt this the same arguement to be made about the windows boxes? Portmapper was turned ON by default, allowing them to hack it.
If linux had marketshare, there would be more pople looking to exploit it.