Future View!

[Peter Creasey]

The Media Revolution! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj8ZadKgdC0)

[Judy G. Russell]

The Media Revolution! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj8ZadKgdC0)That's actually rather frightening...

[Peter Creasey]

That's actually rather frightening...

Judy, I wonder if another possibility is for a trend towards more and more fragmented and individualized markets with the big media companies becoming dinosaurs and eventually vanishing. Everyone with a product or service to sell puts up their own Web site and sells directly to their customers or clients. No middle-men required. The media companies are basically middle-men between the content creators and the people who wish to see/hear/experience that content. The Internet makes them unnecessary.

[Judy G. Russell]

Judy, I wonder if another possibility is for a trend towards more and more fragmented and individualized markets with the big media companies becoming dinosaurs and eventually vanishing. Everyone with a product or service to sell puts up their own Web site and sells directly to their customers or clients. No middle-men required. The media companies are basically middle-men between the content creators and the people who wish to see/hear/experience that content. The Internet makes them unnecessary.I kind of doubt it. The fact is that it's still too easy to conglomerate, and the big media companies will be doing just that for a long time: gobbling up the smaller promising companies, I suspect. As far as selling directly? Not in our lifetimes will that replace brick-and-mortar, if ever. People are still afraid of buying online, want to see and, more importantly, feel what they're buying, and are being scared off by the IMO vastly overblown threat of online identity theft.

[jdh]

and are being scared off by the IMO vastly overblown threat of online identity theft.

Don't forget, in the old days we used to send EXECUTABLE TEXT files on hard copy that could be typed in an editor to a txt file and then renamed to COM and run to bootstrap primitive modem software onto a PC so that more elaborate modem software would be downloaded to go online for real.

Basically the same principle as in a buffer overrun exploit, i.e. executing data.

Software is inherently a chameleon.

[Judy G. Russell]

Software is inherently a chameleon.No doubt. But some basic safety measures and it's very very unlikely that anybody's going to clean out your bank account!

[Mike]

...vastly overblown threat of online identity theft.

Vastly overblown for you and me and most other people who visit here. However, there still are way too many people who get taken by all the phishing and malware and other nasties out there. They simply aren't as educated as we are, and they're pretty gullible.

[Judy G. Russell]

Vastly overblown for you and me and most other people who visit here. However, there still are way too many people who get taken by all the phishing and malware and other nasties out there. They simply aren't as educated as we are, and they're pretty gullible.There is a sucker born every minute, I know, but it really isn't possible to protect people completely from their own stupidity.

[Jeff]

Vastly overblown for you and me and most other people who visit here. However, there still are way too many people who get taken by all the phishing and malware and other nasties out there. They simply aren't as educated as we are, and they're pretty gullible.

Yesterday, MUCH to my surprise, something (I think MS's monthly malware checker) lit up in the middle of my screen and screamed about four problems. I, of course, had been idly surfing around with full hardware / software firewall and AV condom protection in place but even so apparently I stumbled into a bad site of some sort. Not knowing just what was screaming at me I backed out of IE and updated and ran AdAware, which also very got excited about four problems, and took them out. Checked and double checked and the machine is clean, but can we say "wake up call"?

- Jeff

[Judy G. Russell]

Checked and double checked and the machine is clean, but can we say "wake up call"?Just remember that some of these programs get all bent out of shape by simple ad-tracker-type cookies. Nothing I like but nothing that's going to clean out your bank account either. Still, better safe than sorry has to be everybody's first rule online.

[Mike]

...but it really isn't possible to protect people completely from their own stupidity.
Indeed, it's not. But if the message is repeated enough times, eventually most of them will take notice.

[Mike]

...can we say "wake up call"?
I think so. "Wake up call."

As Judy suggests, some of the spyware programs get overly hysterical over cookies, which cannot affect your system. Yeah, they may leave an ID number on your computer which might be able to tell that you visited sites A, B, G, and Q, but they can't actually do anything to your computer.

Still, I've had my "Oh, sh*t!" moments when something has warned me about a potential nasty that might be affecting my machine. So far, however, it's clean.