by Dave Moore, 3-24-19
Some people think it’s weird when I tell them I don’t do Internet shopping or banking on my phone. I also don’t check email on my phone. I won’t even sign into Facebook on my phone.
“Why not?” they ask. “You’re the computer guy, Dave. We thought you would do it all.”
The reason is simple: I don’t trust my phone. It is the least secure device I own. In fact, I don’t trust technology, in general, but I especially don’t trust my phone to protect my wellbeing. At this immature point in Internet and technology development, it’s simply too risky.
This attitude bothers some people, especially the millennial and younger crowd who have given themselves wholly to a technology-dominated lifestyle and can’t conceive of any other existence. They figure I’m merely some out of touch cranky old geek who just doesn’t “get it.”
Don’t get me wrong, though. I love technology. I love computers. I love figuring it all out, working with it, fixing it when it breaks, and turning it into something that can be enjoyed, instead of it being a source of frustration. However, seeing that the World Wide Web just turned 30 years old, I understand that, compared to other technologies like telephones (143 years old), radio (124 years old) and automobiles (134 years old), the Internet we know today is barely a teenager, and should be treated and trusted accordingly.
The Internet’s relative immaturity and fallibility become painfully evident when you’ve put all of your eggs in the same Internet basket, and the basket explodes. Suddenly, poof, in the blink of an eye, you lose access to your files. Impossible, you say? It happens. It happens a lot.
Did you know that Google’s GMail, Google Drive, Google Maps and YouTube services crashed last week? On March 12 (coincidentally, the official birthday of the World Wide Web), these Google services went down, affecting users in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Malaysia and Australia. The outage was reportedly fixed after about three hours. Three hours may not seem like much to you, but to individuals and businesses solely dependent on Google services, not being able to access files or send and receive email was a very big deal, indeed.
What if the outage was more widespread, including Yahoo, eBay, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, Facebook and (one shudders to think), Amazon? What if all Internet service went down, not for three hours, but three days, or three weeks? Wars, natural calamities, terrorist activity, criminal hacking, technical failures and government dictators all have the potential to shut down the Internet.
Impossible, you say? Tell that to the people of Mauritania, when the entire country had no Internet service for two days after an under-sea communications cable was cut last year, also causing serious outages in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Gambia. Impossible? Tell that to the folks in Idaho, New York, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, California, Washington and Massachusetts, who lost emergency 911 service, as well as ATM machine and phone service for two days last December due to failed service from Internet provider CenturyLink.
You think it’s impossible for the Internet to fail? Tell that to people in Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and China, whose governments regularly turn the Internet off and on based on political whims. Tell it to people in India, whose government turned off the Internet 154 times between January 2016 and May 2018 (once, just to prevent school kids from cheating on exams). Tell it to the folks at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, whose Internet access was shut down in 2018 by U.S. military hackers authorized by President Trump to thwart Russian interference in the midterm elections.
Are you starting to see the big picture, here? I am often amazed at how we have based our entire society on horribly flawed technologies like computers and the Internet, but, that’s the situation, and there’s no turning back. The wise will ask, then, “When the Internet fails, what will I have?”
Until then, surf on and have fun while you can!
Dave Moore has been fixing computers in Oklahoma since 1984. As founder of the non-profit Internet Safety Group Ltd, he also teaches Internet safety workshops for public and private organizations. He can be reached at 405-919-9901 or www.internetsafetygroup.com