I got one of those emails saying that the sender had infiltrated my devices and had complete access to all my data.
They further said that they’d looked at my browser history and seen that I’d been going to porn sites. Then they go for the blackmail pitch.
The sender said, “I’ve recorded your masturbatory habits and unless you send me 2K in bitcoin I’m going to send videos to everyone in your contact list.”
WHATEVER!
Go ahead! Do It! I put on a fine show, just ask my friends…
If there was actually a way to track this moron down, and they actually had video of me, I’d bill THEM. Obviously they’ve gotten their jollies from watching my sex shows!
Jackass!
I did love the comment near the end where the sender claims they’re honorable. Uh Huh, RIGHT!
I don’t go to porn sites, and haven’t for over 4 years. They’re too spammy and with very few exceptions boring. My own porn library is way better, and the image quality is excellent, especially on the big screen!
The only thing that is of interest, is that this email appears to have originated from my Outlook address. I thought Microsoft was supposed to prevent email spoofing.
Well, I’ve been thinking about deleting the Outlook email address anyway. Maybe today is the day. It shouldn’t take too long to change the email address of the businesses that I still use, to something else.
That would allow me to abandon the purveyors of some of the ridiculous SPAM I get, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about LinkedIn exposing all my contacts to data breaches either.
LinkedIn (A Microsoft Company) absolutely will not let me delete the connection to my Outlook contact list from their service. The Microsoft Outlook email account, (not the application,) continues to remind me of birthdays for contacts that have been deleted for literally years, and repeating calendar events that have been deleted for longer.
Several years ago, I very briefly experimented with switching to all Microsoft applications instead of Mac native apps. It was not a happy experience and within a month, I’d gone back to Mac native applications.
Yet, after manually deleting the contacts list, and the calendar data, somehow stuff keeps popping up even though according to the Microsoft web based portal there’s nothing stored. Hmm. Maybe my data isn’t actually mine???
Perhaps the only way to deal with it is to delete the account(s) entirely.
I’ve even been considering not renewing my yearly subscription to Microsoft Office.
More often than not, I use other word processing or spreadsheet software. I’ve saved 2 GB of disk storage by deleting the Outlook and PowerPoint applications from my system. I could save another 2 GB by dumping Word and Excel. Why on Earth does Microsoft Office need to suck up 4 GB of disk space?
I’ve already deleted Office completely from my iPad and guess what? I don’t miss it at all. I never missed a beat after it was gone.
Don’t fall for these kinds of scams. The only thing real in the email is the bitcoin wallet address.
Besides, even if someone recorded you rubbing one out in front of your computer. After Jeffery Toobin… It doesn’t matter in the least.
Who knows? Your antics might get you some interactive action not just the one handed kind.
The prevalence of these threatening emails might just breathe life back into the dirty magazine industry. After all if you’re getting your freak on with a magazine, you’ll never have to worry about being recorded.
Years ago, I was speaking with a Professor friend of mine, extolling the virtues of digital books.
In my idealism I was bubbling over about the elimination of the high cost associated with college text books. I saw this as a new age where everyone would have better access to higher education and as new discoveries were made, the new data could effortlessly be inserted in the text books so people wouldn’t have to buy the revised editions of a hard copy.
My Professor friend nodded and conceded that if things worked that way, it would improve education and could make higer education somewhat less costly.
He said simply, “Sometimes the best ideas, built on the best of intentions, don’t work out like we think they will. I’ll stick with my dusty paper books for the time being.”
At the time I envisioned a world where everyone had access to the sum total of human knowledge and that we would then all be playing on a level field. Naively I thought that the best angels of humanity would rise to the top and we would enter a new age of cooperation and creativity. I thought equality and harmony were just around the corner, built on free exchange of information and thought.
I WAS A MORON!
Yep, at that time in my life I was leaning pretty left. I thought the vast majority of people would choose light and temper their natural selfishness because the promise of everyone being happy, healthy, and productive would be so alluring.
Looking back from 2021, I have a bitter laugh. There’s also a sadness, humanity could be so much more, but the opportunity may have passed. Now I think we’re heading for another “Dark Age”.
Five years, or so later, my friend and I were having a similar discussion. This time the discussion started because He was having to incorporate EBooks into his curriculum. He was dealing with variations in some of the books. It turned out that many of the Ebooks, even though they had the same ISBN number contained different text and there was no notation of when revisions had been made. To make things more confusing the Ebooks didn’t match the hardcopy text books that could be purchased from the campus book store.
That was when I realized that an Orwellian component had come into play. In my innocence I’d never considered that anyone would prefer censorship or alteration of the facts in a book, to fit a narrative. I actually believed that we as a species had grown beyond that.
Truth rings like a bell. You might not like it, but Truth stands on it’s own merit.
Knowledge, and understanding may start out flawed, but there is a logical step by step refinement that is driven by the truth of new undeniable facts. We should be able to see that process, to chart it, and books provide the evidence of our journey towards understanding.
If we can look at the old books and theories contained within, we have a view into how knowledge evolves and how new data can, and should trigger re-evaluation of a theory or belief.
I always believed that books, and the written word were somehow sacred. That is why the Nazi book burnings were so abhorrent to me.
During our conversation, discovering that books were no longer being treated with any kind of reverence, it dawned on me perhaps digital media was too ephemeral to be trusted with the knowledge of our species.
Maybe a better method would be to have books start out as digital, collect the data and facts then publish a hard copy (a snapshot if you will,) that would be placed in every library all over the world. Then you’d publish addenda in hard copy as warranted.
But even as I had that thought, I knew the genie was out of the bottle. People will always choose convenience over having to do the actual work of locating a book in a library stack and opening it. The books would simply rot to dust on library shelves.
That was the beginning of my journey toward a more conservative view of the world. That journey continued the more I became aware of subtle changes to books. Specifically Ebooks.
I bought into the convenience of having a book on my phone or computer to read at lunch. I purchased a lot of Ebooks but as I read them there were changes. At first it was small corrections, reasonable edits that corrected a typo or made a sentence read better.
These changes were within what I considered, the realm of reasonable. I could see an author making those changes in the Ebook because it was simple and didn’t require an entirely new press run. The changes would be folded into the printed copies of the book as needed.
But the edits became more plentiful, and far reaching. Soon some of my favorite books diverged in their Ebook form from the hard copy I’d had for years. Then I started seeing it in movies.
The weirdest example was in “Alien”. A friend had a laserdisc version of Alien. When we’d seen the movie in the theater we’d noted that the Nostromo’s shuttle had a name. When we’d purchased the movies on videotape there wasn’t a name on the shuttle.
At the time, we thought it was probably something to do with the resolution of the videotape. When my friend purchased the laserdisc version of Alien, the name once again appeared on the shuttle. But DVD and Bluray versions, the name was gone again.
This suggested that there were multiple versions of the movie and there was no way of telling which cut you actually were purchasing. Shortly after our “discovery” multiple cuts of movies were being repackaged as “New” xyz cuts, thereby maximizing profit to the studios. I think at one time, this friend and I had 6 different cuts of Alien and who knows how many other movies between us.
I lost my DVD / Bluray collection and all of my books in a house fire. At the time, I chose to invest heavily in streaming movies and Ebooks so that I’d never have to face the heartbreak of losing collections again.
Except that’s not how it works.
Movies and books available online can disappear suddenly and with no explanation.
Gone with the Wind,for example now has a whole Social Justice disclaimer before you get to watch the movie.
Looney Toons collections have Whoopie Goldberg reminding viewers that some of the depictions in the cartoon are representative of an era when racial relations were horrific. She even has to comment on Bugs Bunny having a go at German and Japanese soldiers.
All she needed to say was that those cartoons were propaganda from World War II and in context, they were supposed to give theater goers of the time, a laugh and bit of hope. But instead we’re subjected to the whole Social Justice Warrior education about a 6 minute cartoon.
If you’re sitting down to watch Looney Tunes, you’re not looking for any deep political lessons, you’re looking for some mindless goofy antics to put a smile on your face.
The point here is that if everything in malleable, if everthing can be edited and altered then we risk corrupting and losing our global knowledge.
If we eliminate dissenting opinions, we eliminate healthy discourse that could lead in new directions. If we censor comedy, or free speech, in my opinion we accelerate the decline of civilization.
If all that you believe is given to you in little spoonfuls of “Approved” narrative then you shouldn’t be surprised to discover that almost nothing you know is true.
We all know that a large percentage of the population will be surprised, then angry, then possibly violent. When that happens… Well, you have book burnings, and stuff akin to the fall of Rome.
This time, it will be worse than the dark ages. Because libraries have fewer and fewer books, some libraries are even destroying books rather than curating them.
A large percentage of late 20th and early 21st century information is digital only. After everything is burned, the power goes down, the internet doesn’t work, and the cell towers go offline what resources will be available to rebuild from?
We’ve written our knowledge and history in the sand on a beach. When the tide comes in, it will be lost.
Just as a lot of old knowledge had to be rediscovered when the Dark Ages waned, humanity will have to claw their way back from the abyss and start over.
For just a minute, imagine what this world would be like if the industrial revolution had started 300 years earlier. What might we know now? The people of Greece, Rome, China, MesoAmerica, and Egypt were all equal in intelligence to us. What they lacked was knowledge, science, and resources.
All of these civilizations were working on those problems when they fell. We’ll never know how much was lost or suppressed. But we do know they contemplated the stars, and studied mathematics. We know they could build massive structures and grasped art, literature, and rudimentary physics.
An argument could be made that had these civilizations conquered their greed, need to control each other, and war, choosing instead to work together we’d be a lot further along in our development than we are today.
Then again, I’m reminded of the line from The Fifth Element, “Everything you create you use to destroy.”
Perhaps that kind of cooperation would have just reduced the population.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in my life and my local environment that have created a bunch of noise in my head.
I’m worried about a lot of things, and even ignoring the larger issues of the world at large the static is making it very hard for me to put thoughts together in any coherent order.
There have been a lot of false starts in blog posts and other projects, they’re not progressing because lately I have the attention span of a gadfly.
The more I try to set aside time for me. Just me to sit quietly, collect my thoughts and plan a day, the more interruptions, or disasters, rain down on my life.
I’d love to actually plan a day and not have every single plan blown to hell almost instantly. Perhaps I’m asking too much!
The more distracted I am of course the less gets done that I need to do and the greater the frustration I have, because my stuff is piling up.
It’s a vicious cycle and really starting to harsh my buzz.
The latest annoyance is that the most recent MacOS update is killing my laptop’s battery in just a couple of hours. I discovered this when I decided to take my laptop and myself outside to enjoy the nice weather we’re having.
I thought perhaps being outside would assist me in clearing my head. The plan was to remove myself from all the distractions inside the house and just sit looking for a job, and perhaps writing a bit, in the sun and fresh air. HA!
On balance I got about an hour of what I wanted to get done, done before the unusual power drain became apparent. Then I was sucked down the rabbit hole of identifying what was causing the power drain.
Still unsure about that. After turning off all the communication channels. BlueTooth, WiFi, etc. The drain was still happening. That led me to all the crap running in the background, (most of which is Apple’s ill defined subsystems,) according to Apple’s monitoring software there was nothing wrong. Uh Huh sure! Looking at the UNIX monitoring software there were 600 processes running most of those were sleeping but several of their “New” modules were consuming a lot of CPU time. It’s unclear how to actually turn off any of these modules which I’d do in a heartbeat because I don’t use them.
This kind of thing annoys the crap out of me because clearly Apple dropped the ball again! They’re apparently not doing real world testing and that annoys the hell out of me because I’m a software tester that has applied to Apple at least 20 times for testing positions, only to be completely and rigorously ignored.
I’ve said it before. Automated testing has its place, but an actual human working with the machine is still necessary because automation can only spot those items it’s programmed to spot.
In other words, automation will confirm that the software completed the expected task. A human on the other hand will spot things about the requested task completing, with other collateral issues, (like excessive power drains,) and get curious about what’s causing them.
But God Forbid, the great and wondrous Apple actually considered that!
As I said, I’m annoyed. Here’s an axiom for you:
Shitty software is still shitty software regardless of the logo. No-one is immune to creating shitty software. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, are all guilty of unapologetically foisting shit on the public. Apple never apologizes for anything, no matter how bad it is! (Unless they’re forced to do so by a class action lawsuit.) Just once, I’d love to see Tim Cook apologize for a crappy Mac OS or IOS release in his opening remarks at a convention or online event. I’d probably have a heart attack but it would be worth it.
The MacBook Pro isn’t the only device having battery problems. Apparently, some iPhones are sucking their batteries dry after the latest release of IOS 15. Apples response, in typically Apple fashion is, “**smug** You’ll just have to wait until we get around to fixing it. **smug**”
So for the time being, I’m chained to my power adapter, instead of enjoying the spring weather and being able to write. What happened to my MacBook outlasting the competition?
Oh yeah… poor testing & verification on one of their products core advantages!
To make matters worse, this has been an ongoing issue for at least the last four releases so you’d think someone in their software development and testing team would have a big assed sign that said, “TEST BATTERY LIFE IN REAL WORLD SITUATIONS!”
I’d be happy to design a sign for them if they’d be willing to pay me a year’s salary for it.
There’s a report from Apple Insider where a former employee alleges that Apple changes their job title to “Associate” once the employee leaves.
While that probably didn’t hurt Jonny Ive when he left, for the hundreds of other employees that simple change in their job title after they leave, can be devastating.
Just imagine yourself working for Apple for 10 years, working your way up the corporate ladder. You started out as an associate, and through hard work, education, and perseverance you make it to manager of your department. Then your spouse has to take another job in a different city.
You’re faced with divorce or moving to be with your family.
You choose family, thinking that your years at Apple will be worth something as you attempt to find a new job in your new city.
Your resume says you were a department manager but when new prospective employers contact Apple, they say you were an associate for those years. So now you’ve “lied” on your resume and job applications.
Not to mention being an “Associate” for 10 years doesn’t look like you’ve got much ambition.
It also means that your career is being torpedoed by a company you gave your all to. Most HR people wouldn’t question a major corporation like Apple. They’re the “Good Guys” after all.
It’s almost as if Apple is being the hurt lover. “If you leave me, I’ll make sure no-one will want you!”
This is abusive and wrong!
Apple looks a little less fresh and a lot more rotten.
There have been rumors for years that Apple wasn’t particularly fair or nice when it came to their treatment of employees. Up to now, I’ve wondered if the rumors were true, or just ex-employees being upset. I’d chosen to believe it was sour grapes on the part of the employees.
After all a shitty executive can make the entire company seem bad to those suffering under their direction. I’d chalked these rumors up to that sort of thing. Now, I’m not so sure.
When I was dealing with hiring directly, all I could ask a former employer was if the person had worked for the employer, their last job title, and the dates of employment. Way back in the day, I could ask about last salary, and if the employee was eligible for rehire. A discrepancy between the last job title reported by an employer and the job title listed on a resume was a red flag.
It honestly never occurred to me that any company would change a former employee’s last job title after they’d left the company. That’s just superunfair and pointless.
Perhaps I’m just sensitive from my own eternal job search. But I’m glad Apple has never responded to any of my applications. The last thing I need or want is another job that should be amazing to turn into another shithole experience. If Apple is changing job titles like this, I rather think Apple might be the latter instead of the former.
I’ll be wondering, and thinking about this, the next time I consider an Apple purchase.
Will my concern be enough to prevent me from buying something from Apple? I think it will depend on the item and if I can find something similar at a better price.
Apple may well have become evil, just like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and God only knows how many others.
This kind of thing has always concerned me. I’ve worked for several companies that I LEFT because of health insurance or corporation biases.
There was one company that noticed I had a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license during the onboarding process.
The HR person told me that I’d have to provide them with a bill of sale for my bike within 30 days. She then went on to tell me that riding my motorcycle onto company property was a fireable offense.
After saying this, she went on as if she expected me to just comply without any pushback. When I asked her what the hell? She was quite shocked that I didn’t understand. After a bit of prodding she explained that the group insurance policy forbade anyone being covered from riding a motorcycle.
She was even more shocked when I told her we were done and asked for the hiring paperwork that I’d already filled out so that I could shred it. Then she got mad. I remember her screeching, “We’re only trying to protect you!”
My retort was, “Yep, at the price of becoming an indentured servant whose rights are granted by my employer, instead of The United States Constitution. What’s next? Approval of my sexual practices? Will I have to bring in the bedsheets weekly to prove that I’m not having sex if I’m unmarried? Will I have to prove that I’m not masturbating as well?”
Hey, I was younger and more prone to hyperbole.
I remember walking out of that place so pissed off I literally had to sit in my car in a mall parking lot to calm down for the drive home. Then I realized, “I’m at a mall, screw it! I’m going shopping!”
Then there was another company where smoking was suddenly forbidden, dictated again by a change in their insurance policy. This was not just on company property but in your home. I’d quit smoking a couple of years before, but that day when I stopped for gas I bought a pack of smokes. Then I found a nice bar and ordered a double. I sat there drinking and smoking much too late. I quit the job the following Monday, I quit smoking again about a month later. I made sure that when I went in to quit I reeked of cigarette smoke.
Then there was a company who sent out a survey to each employee asking if they were SCUBA divers, or skydivers, pilots, mountain climbers, motorcyclists, dirt bike riders, or enjoyed hang gliding. Most employees thought they were doing one of those HR team building things where the company would build clubs of likeminded people to tout their work life balance. My antenna went up immediately after reading the list of activities. I didn’t send my survey back.
Two weeks later an HR representative was standing at my desk with a stack of surveys demanding that the employee named on the survey fill it out while they waited. The representative testily pointed out that lying on a company form was grounds for dismissal.
She had maybe 30 other surveys in her hand. I asked, “Why is it so important for you to know if an employee participates in this specific group of activities?”
She told me, “the reason was none of my business.”
I told her, “Then write that I do all of them, then you’ll have whatever reason you’re fishing for to do whatever you’re going to do.”
Ahh… The fun of open office plans with 4′ cubicle walls. Several of my colleagues had incomplete surveys to fill out too. They heard the exchange and marked all of the above as well.
I’d already interviewed for another position with a competitor, and been offered the job.
The little lady stomped off, and I finished my resignation letter effective immediately. My boss pointed out that 2 weeks was customary and I said, “I’m not going to allow a company to dictate my personal life.”
My boss sat back and said, “Oh, you’ve heard.” I said, “Nope, but I’ve been to this rodeo before and know how it ends. Out of courtesy, I’ll give you two weeks because you’ve been decent to me.”
The next week, HR announced that the company decided the activities listed on the survey were too dangerous and employees were not to participate in them because medical insurance would not cover “Dangerous Activities”. In the HR announcement, they said they’d be reaching out to employees with acceptable methods that employees could prove to the company they’d given up these “dangerous” hobbies.
Over the next two weeks, the company received the resignations of about 20 engineering employees. In the end, they were begging for people to stay. HR remained intractable and started trying to hire replacements. But the word was out in the engineering community. It turned out that American engineers like to have fun in their off time.
These are examples of employer overreach from my own life and personal experience.
I’ll grant you that COVID vaccination was a bit different when the vaccines were being touted as providing immunity. But now?
We’ve been told by the CDC, and Dr Fauci that the vaccines against COVID-19 are therapeutic not preventative. We’ve seen articles in the mainstream press saying that the vaccine will prevent hospitalization with COVID but that even vaccinated persons can still get COVID and spread it.
So NOW with this knowledge, is it reasonable for corporations or governments to demand their employees be vaccinated? Is it right for those corporations to insinuate themselves into the personal lives of their employees? Will the future hold that an employee with HIV or cancer, or heart disease be threatened with their job if they don’t take HIV meds, or choose not to have chemo, or refuse a pacemaker?
This comes to mind because T-Mobile can be added to the list of employers demanding that their corporate employees get vaccinated. The article is here.
Since I’m adamantly against a corporation dictating any aspect of my life except when I must be at work to do my job, I’m in a bit of a conundrum.
I don’t want to support companies that do this sort of thing. But after doing some research it turns out that T-Mobile provides the best plans and pricing for me given my family’s needs.
Generally speaking, I’ve been terminating my connections/subscriptions to companies whose policies I disagree with. Apple being a notable exception although I have been reducing the new dollars that I give them.
There’s a problem being entrenched in any corporate ecosystem. You try to get out and they keep pulling you back in… To paraphrase the movie line about the Mafia.
I miss the good ol’ days when companies were just about making profit and were publicly apolitical. I know we’ll never get back to simple transactional relationships with Corporate America.
