Remember the good old days when junk mail came in envelopes and a mass mailer had to spend 19 cents to get it into your mailbox? What a marvelous filter that was. Sales people even qualified potential buyers. I mean, with printing costs, envelopes, postage and the cost of mailing lists, one couldn’t afford to dump on everyone. Oh, for the days when anybody who wanted to sell you something could not fill up your mailbox for free. I long for the days when the fire wall was a burning basket, when everything appended to my body was long enough, thank you, and when Viagra wasn’t a word and, if it had been, the spelling V!a’g.r)a would have been unacceptable.

For a while I really thought that a virus was a sort of proto-organism that caused people to sneeze and strawberry plant leaves to turn red. I remember reading the articles in Scientific American and simulating living organisms on my computer. What fun. Computer viruses were a joke. Boo! Then some son-of-a-female-dog from Pakistan yet caused his joke to erase all the files on some slob’s hard drive. Welcome to the dungeon. Big joke.

You had to become or hire an IT weenie. Things were bumping merrily along with various sorts of anti-virus software from Iceland, or Ralph Cramden or Ed Norton or somebody standing between you and annihilation. Oh, you had to update the stuff every whipstitch to keep ahead in the game of cat and mouse, but if you didn’t download any freeware and you kept a decent anti-virus program resident and updated, you were okay. At my emporium we only ever caught one virus during that period and that was when my grandson (gasp, choke) downloaded a game from the Internet. A little self-discipline on the net, a few operating rules, good virus software and you were safe. But then the truly evil minions of Beelzebub took over.

You can construct a crawler or spider or whatever that sifts through all the web pages looking for Internet addresses. Find an @ and you’ve got one. You save all those things, then send each an email about how they can grow their fingernails to nine inches long or longer with this stuff they can buy from you, and just sit back and rake in the money. Do you really suppose anyone buys any of this stuff or even reads the emails? My phone number is (814) 466-6559 and my address is P.O. Box 650, Boalsburg, PA 16827. If you want to sell me something, use one of them because I no longer waste my time even clicking on my inbox. If you email me, nobody is home.

Now comes the penultimate blow. Billy of Redmond (may his tribe increase) has decided in his definitely finite wisdom to fix it up so that it is a pain in the left knee not to use his software and the hardware wherein it resides. Now that he has 90% of us by the short and curly he has hit upon a great way to augment his income like various magazines, clubs and commercial enterprises do that sell your name and address so that others can annoy you. Uncle Billy has built into his software (your software) resident programs which keep track of how you use your computer and where you go on the Internet. For example, if you visit a lot of toy choo-choo sites, then he sells your name to hobby shops. He finds out about what you’re doing because your Internet browser tells him all about you.

The rest of the bad guys have co-opted his browser facility to get into your skivvies. You don’t have to do anything like downloading a file. Just click on to the wrong website with the wrong browser and everybody knows your net activity, address book, finances, taxes, etc.

I’m going to unplug my computer from the Internet and the email. I call it an air wall. I’ll carry on the way I did back in 1980 and, all things considered, spend more time selling my product and building my business without my ever-so-expensive computer gear. I’ll lay off my expensive IT dude. Consequently, the business will make more profit and I’ll have more time to smell roses.