Re: This is the seed that will spawn Big Brother
Posted by Pasti on Jan 30, 2004 at 04:02
(216.209.73.5)Re: This is the seed that will spawn Big Brother (Kelly)
You say one cannot live your life based on future disasters. I say you still have to learn, at the very least about human nature and psychology. Every morning when you wake up you plan the day such that you avert disasters of smaller or larger magnitude. You don't want to be late at work because..., you want to have a reliable car because..., you work overtime because..., you want a healthy daily diet because..., and I could go on and on. But I made my point.
Let's dwell a little on that point. Have you ever heard of actuarial sciences, or actuarial mathematics? If you haven't, you should better look it up, and it's applications also. Have you heard of something called "trade with derivatives" in the stock market? Again, look it up. After you did that, you will have a different view about the importance of "future disasters" in ones life and in society, and it is my guess that you will have to slightly amend your thought that "you can't live your life based on hypothetical future disasters". In a certain very odd practical sense, it has become a way of life for many, and yet many more prefer to ignore this fact.
Let’s now return to the government cyber alert list. Why do you think that this cyber alert program initiated by the government is more efficient than say, a similar program from MS, or Symantec, or McAffee, or 0Knowledge?The government doesn't do business with you directly, while the other companies do, and therefore they are more interested in your personal cyber security than the government.
Why do you think that this program is anything more than a politically correct (and useless in major aspects) maneuver? Do you think that they will respond faster than, say, Symantec? Or that they will develop their own publicly available anti-virus patch? Sure, they might (redundancy at high costs is not something unheard of), but chances are that for economical reasons, not only will they respond slower (and history might give you a hint about that), but they will only give you links to other sites with readily available virus patches. Or in other words, they won’t provide any real service to you.
To sum up the argument, there are other companies that will respond faster regarding both alerts and AV patches, and which have mailing lists also. So why should you subscribe to another list, for a slower, and lower quality service? Personally, I see no reason.
And more important, why would the government provide such a service under these circumstances? One answer could be PR, it looks good and it is politically correct too. In which case efficiency is a secondary issue.
But then, there can be other reasons too, as for example the government trying to protect itself against cyber attacks, the list serving, say for a better mapping of the net, not to mention monitoring computer/server activities. In which case your personal security against cyber attacks becomes, again a secondary issue, even if you are a subscriber on the list. And that might be OK too, for some at least, if there were not for overzealous individuals with IQ’s in the single digits working for the aforementioned institution. The point is that by subscribing to this list you have even less control about the use of this info (you are more exposed to a Big Brother epidemic)than if you were subscribing to MSN. So why do it? For security reasons? Whose security, mind you? Because it doesn’t seem very likely to be yours.