"Deloptes"  wrote

| I don't know how old are you, but my observation is that things went worse
| in the past 10-15y, especially after the smart phones went out.
| But it also could be that before the things were not that obvious.
|

   I'm a babyboomer, but only discovered computers
with Win98. Then I got hooked and taught myself
Windows programming. So I don't have the long view
that you old men have. :)

  I guess what I saw was great fun with the PC fad
of the late 90s. Then some malware written by geeks
or teenagers for fun. Exploitation of ActiveX in IE.
Melissa. Remember that one? some office worker decided
to play a practical joke with script in a Word DOC and
it became a disaster.
   That kind of thing. I though MS were brilliant with
ActiveX. They just didn't see the security problems
coming.

  Security then became an excuse to start locking down
and turning computers into service devices. I guess
that would be about the last 10-15 years. From there
it became big business, with sophisticated hackers.
But neither governments nor businesses want people
to have privacy or control their devices. So how do
we establish security protocols?

  I'm kind of surprised that no one's written a sci-fi horror
story where hackers erase all of the data around the world,
after it's all gone digital, and ownership of all kinds
is erased. What a mess that would be. History erased.
Records erased. Communication. Deeds. Bank accounts.
All gone in a flash. Yet people
continue to digitize data that doesn't need to be digitized
and add computers to machines that don't need them.

  Even one super solar flare, which supposedly happens
every few hundred years could possibly fry all integrated
circuits. 30 years ago that would have been a minor
issue. Today it would stop cars, computers, utilities...
everything. Yet people keep spending hundreds of dollars
for watches to tell them their heart is beating. So I
try to avoid unnecessary computerization.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05