What about if, instead, you discovered someone was using
your computer for, say, making legitimate money. And I’m not talking about
someone running a home business. I’m talking about someone slipping some code
onto your machine and using it to make money without your permission.
That has happened. Probably is still happening. And probably
will continue to happen in the future. Read here of a computer-based sports
league introducing code on unsuspecting payers’ machines to mine bitcoins. And
now that they’re caught, well, there’s contrition. Of the kind you get
nowadays. Meaning no contrition at all.
Money-grubbers have taken note of the vast archipelago of
mostly untapped computer power out there, and, thanks to the internet and the
advent of the always-on internet connection, they’re using it to their
advantage. Where organizations such as SETI at home and the LDS Church urge people
to use their spare time and computing power to look for alien signals in the
radio noise constantly streaming towards the Earth, or to sort through old
hand-written records looking for dead ancestors whom you no longer want
spooking and tormenting you because you haven’t done those four generations,
folks like the E-Sports Entertainment Association are using your spare computer
capacity to make money.
But now they’re caught, and are throwing all that money –
and other money aside – to charity. So we’re good, right?
No. These folks got caught because, as Wednesday Addams
says, they were sloppy. And so were these people.
Think it’s going to get better? Well, you’ve not been around
the internet much now, have you?
This is why, on occasion, I turn my computers off. This is
why I’m thinking about making at least one of the machines in our house an
island isolated from that vast, always-on archipelago. And why I don’t download
every bit of Tom, Dick, and Harry program and code and such from the internet,
just because someone tells me I should, something looks fun, or, hells bells,
someone else is doing it.
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