Saturday, April 19, 2014

Would You Like To Play A Game?

Computer viruses scare me. Not like the end of the world scares me, but they still scare me. This is probably because I can imagine how a computer virus could bring about the end of the world. Like that Matthew Broderick kid who thought he was just going into his school's computer to change a grade or two for his girlfriend Ally Sheedy and he almost ended up bringing down a fiery rain of nuclear Armageddon, or was that just a movie?
As a subscriber to the well-established theory of entropy, I don't actually believe that our demise will be quite as abrupt or drastic as the one suggested by Professor Falken's evil machine. It's not a game, but rather a series of games. Candy Crush. Angry Birds. Tetris. All of those little time sinks that we keep in the corner of our home computers, smartphones and tablets, the ones that take us away from the important business of the day, like answering that email from the Nigerian prince who will gladly pay you half his fortune for your First World ability to generate a money order. It's not the Trojans and worms and hacks at this and that which will bring about our cyber doom. It's our continually diminishing sense of priorities.
Oh, sure, I'm frightened by Heartbleed, but not because I'm worried about hackers stealing all my money and turning my computer into a slave workstation for the eventual overthrow of our system of governance by robot overlords. I am concerned that all the time it will take me to change all my passwords will come directly out of that chunk of time that I have set aside for playing Fruit Ninja. Besides, I'm pretty sure that the NSA already has my profile pretty much in hand and will probably be selling it to the highest bidder in order to ensure my continued enslavement to the machine dominated society in which we all live.
It's probably best that we all maintain a certain amount of paranoia. A healthy amount. It is what distinguishes us from the androids. Except Marvin, that is.

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