The challenges of being on social media and the internet

I was checking on the biography of the person who had written about and translated Saint Epiphanius of Salamis.  That’s not important since he’d posted for many ancient writers and Christians.  What was interesting was the warning he’d given about anything about himself:

“This page was written in 1999, when this website was new.  It contained my photograph, my email address, and various personal, educational and professional details and so forth.

Little by little, it has grown shorter.  The internet is not so small a place as it was in those days.  A troll was merely a nuisance, not a brutal thug determined to use the compulsive element in social media to drive a vulnerable teenager to suicide, and to jeer at them afterwards on their memorial Facebook page.  A spammer was merely an advertiser, not an internet criminal determined to steal your every shekel, and your identity with it.  Privacy was taken for granted.  None of this is true today.

My email address was the first to go.  That change was forced upon me by the torrent of spam.  I created a form -- which the spammers soon learned to attack -- but this stemmed much of the trouble.

Next to go was my photograph, once I found that the nastier people online sought out personal information in order to use it to inflict pain on their victims.  Professional details went next, for the same reason.

Today I have decided to remove the rest.   It is a wrench, it is true.  But I see no alternative.  If I were to join the internet today, I suspect that I would not use my own name at all, but a pen-name.  Anything else puts you at risk from the criminal element online. 

I myself feel uncomfortable writing online under any name but my own.  Occasionally some forum software prevents me from using my own name; but it is a weird feeling.  But I think it would be absurd for me to attempt to use a pseudonym at this time of day.

All the same, I cannot sensibly allow personal details to remain on the web when I can prevent this. Nor should you.

You can still email me, if you like.  The following link will take you to a form, and this will email me.”

A sad story of our times.  Vicious trolls, angry Christian haters, and just plain nasty people.

The Facebook flap

Everyone is upset about Facebook sharing our data. Our carelessness in exchange for convenience has been going on a long, long time. Read the DSNB disclaimer that comes with your credit or debit card. To have the convenience of a piece of plastic in your wallet, you agreed years ago to share your personal information in any transaction the bank needs to maintain your account, including legal investigations and credit bureaus; you agreed they could use your personal information for marketing purposes; for uses with other financial companies; for their affiliates (whoever that is) to perform their "everyday" business purposes; for those affiliates to use your personal data for their business purposes, and for those affiliates to market to you using your own information you supplied when you applied for credit.

In 1967 when we moved to Columbus we had to request service from the utility companies. On ONE form there was a small error where a number took the place of a letter in my husband's name. That error continued to appear in all sorts of advertising we received for years because all that is sold. And resold.  Same with the BMV. So although the FB theft and misuse of our data is much bigger, we've been carefully eased into this lobster bath of warm water heating up for over 50 years.

https://www.itsecurityguru.org/2018/04/09/facebooks-data-scandal-impact/

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/12/19/facebook-used-data-from-chinese-security-threat-huawei-for-site-feature/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html

The religion of Julian Assange--one view

"Like other anti-American cranks on the planet, Assange holds firm in his warped faith that the U.S. is the leading source of global evil. The roots of this religion run deep, beginning with 18th century European aristocrats who despised the American Revolution. The anti-Americanism of Nazis, communists, tribalists, anarchists and now militant Islamists all rehash the same tropes, with their semi-schizoid baseline being the U.S. is simultaneously a vast authoritarian conspiracy and a heterogeneous menagerie of infidel-cowboy-capitalist idiots who dogmatically resist enlightened social policies.

Assange argues his revelations will force this conglomerate American monster to become more secretive and authoritarian. Limiting access to information, in order to stop future leaks, will reduce the monster's secretive and authoritarian effectiveness. The monster's "security state" will dumb down, and --here's the moment of religious rapture in Assange's prophecy -- this will increase global justice.

Assange also links this shackling of America to creating peace. Don't snicker too long. There are a lot of tenured gray-haired profs with ponytails who teach this dreck at notable universities and get paid for it.

Assange understands media grandstanding, but he doesn't understand people and certainly doesn't understand how American diplomats contribute to maintaining peace."

Read the whole piece. WikiLeaks' Bottom-Line Revelation

"Wikileaks obtained hundreds of thousands of secret American military and diplomatic documents from a U.S. soldier (PFC Bradley Manning) who worked in intelligence. As such, Manning had a security clearance and access to SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network). This was a private Department of Defense network established in 1991, using Internet technology and able to handle classified (secret) documents. But Manning got access to a computer with a writable CD drive, and was able to copy all those classified documents to a CD (marked as containing Lady Gaga tracks) and walk out of his workplace with it."

Read the rest. Information Warfare: Why Wikileaks Backfired

Another important job for librarians

Librarians, the most left of all professions, exceeding even the Hollywood stars who periodically appear before congress to opine (223:1 Democrat to Republican) spent a lot of time during the Bush years flapping their gums and becoming aroused at meetings over the USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001) that might snag a terrorist sitting innocently planning mayhem at a terminal in their library. I'm sure now that we're going to have an internet czar, that they will be equally as concerned that Obama not appoint another ethically challenged Timothy Geithner to an important post. So far, he has no details, which means it is wide open for abuse, but I know we can trust the librarians, because after all, "Knowledge is power," and librarians are certainly at the top of the ladder in pay grade, prestige and political clout.

This lovely mosaic, "Knowledge is Power," is at the Fisher College of Business which is closing its library.