Slacking Off

[Squirrel]

(07-20-2021, 07:02 PM)Photonblast Wrote: Heh I dont get why people choose to waste their resources and post garbage here

It's very rarely a real person... But just as long as there have been computers, there have been people who would like to misuse them, and make them do nonsensical and useless things.

I think that most spam began as small plans to try and waste a computer's time. And as time went on, that evolved across all different platforms and different services offered via a computer, almost irregardless of platform or package.

From there, scams and identity theft were born. And again, those spread out across all available media. Then there was hacking and software exploits, spread through e-mail and now cell phones, looking for the dumb user who'll click on just about anything!

A decade ago, if you were on a 'free' naughty pictures site, it would try to trick you into agreeing to install software that would generate pop-ups on your machine, Some of those would lead to infected sites.

Some would change some properties of your dial-up modem and get your computer to call a 1-900 number, and you'd get a bill a month later for up to $100.00 per minute that you couldn't get out of with the phone company. And some just tried like crazy to get you to sign into more places like that which made you pay for access.

As long as humans continue to draw breath, we'll always have some of this.

And that's why it's so important to be aware, to practise good password principles, and safe browsing. Know what is possible, and you will be closer to being knowledgeable enough to know when something fishy is going on, to back up, and stomp out intrusions onto your own machine.