A Story From The Wild Wild Internet West
I don't think that anybody believes that internet technology is tamed, but a story I heard today reinforces that for me. My brother is a high school teacher who lives in Spanish Fork Utah. The city put in a community fiber network and is offering internet service through TeraPeta http://www.terapeta.net/ISP/utah/spanish-fork.html. My brother bought a new XP computer and got his internet access yesterday. He and his wife believed that their teen age daughter would benefit from the resources on the internet. The computer has a sign on it saying "Cassadra's College Computer".
He had done his research and knew that we wanted a content blocker and a firewall. We will install the firewall software today, but yesterday he and his wife decided to test their content blocking software before one of the six children did. The went looking and clicked on an ad. The content blocker did not allow them to see the site, but they did receive a virus. They followed the instructions from Norton to download the latest virus definitions and scan their hard drive. They then followed the instructions to remove the virus. It was something about loading an update from Microsoft, using resedit to remove Internet Explorer definitions and other stuff.
Believing that all was well they rebooted their new machine only to find shortcuts on their desktop. Their home page was an Italian Porn site. Repeating the instructions for purging the virus and rebooting left them in the same spot. I think the kids are still banned from the computer.
My brother and his wife are smart people and spent a fair amount of time trying to get the computer ready for their kids to use. I guess that some of their neighbors would not be so adventuresome. When he called me he was pretty distraught. I told him there is always a way to fix what was wrong. I doubt we will need to reformat the disk. :-)
Just another day on the Internet frontier.
10:32:25 AM 
|
