Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Saturday, September 21, 2002
15:10 - Lawyers and Computers: A Dangerous Combination http://www.freep.com/news/locoak/checks21_20020921.htm	(top)
You know that "Nigerian Scam Letter" thing? The one that's apparently been in circulation since the 80s, through various media, and only now becoming so much more common knowledge because of e-mail? Well, a 59-year-old woman at a law firm in Michigan seems to have fallen for it-- big-time. Bigger-time than usual. See, she had access to her entire law firm's assets. And she drained them in order to dutifully fulfill the scam's requests (for fees, taxes, bribes, etc. that must be paid in order to secure the victim's "fee"). To the tune of $2.1 million. If a person falls for this scam and uses his or her own money to bankrupt oneself over it, that's one thing. But if the person embezzles money from business accounts to which he or she has access, well, now they're both stupid and malicious. And all you can hope is that they haven't bred. Now we see why it's so futile to try to educate people to not open e-mail attachments, not install every damn piece of spyware/malware that they find, to pay attention to security warnings, and so on. We'd like to think of ourselves as a society that can handle the responsibility that comes with an unfettered, unregulated, unguaranteed medium like the Internet. But the sad fact is that our society-- and that of the whole world-- is in fact full of morons, and more of them are coming online every day. Half the population, after all, has an IQ of less than 100, by definition. Up till now it's mostly been the other half, the ones with a clue, who were using computers. But you know... that was once true of the telephone and the TV. Sooner or later someone like this-- someone intensely rich and intensely stupid-- will have something like this happen to them, and then will pull coffee-in-the-lap emotional tricks and play on the PC conscience of the public and convince everybody that it's the Internet's fault, not theirs. And you know what that means. The free ride can't last forever. Let's enjoy it while we have it.