The Internet, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly One of the problems with the internet is one of its good points is also one of its bad ones. I am talking about being able to deal with so many people we never would have had a chance to deal with pre-internet. The good part is we are able to exchange ideas with many others and gain a much larger understanding about the world and people who come from different places. The bad news is this has subjected us to being susceptible to all sorts of criminal acts. Age is a big determination on how much you understand what is going on in some places on the net. The shortened phrases while used with confidence by the younger generations is like a foreign code to some of us older people. When I first came across these shortcuts I had to look up what they meant, but as newer ones came out I just gave up. That was probably because I was not that interested and the people I conversed with on the internet were older people and none of us seemed to use these shortcuts. New terms started to come into common use on the internet and some older terms found new uses. One term which has become very popular is influencer. The word has been around forever, but has never been as popular before as it has become now. This is tied directly to the internet and to places like TikTok It seems to refer to those who get enormous amounts of hits on everything they say. Some have far more influence in important areas than they should have. I am not mentioning any names, but an example might be a game influencer who tells people how to vote. It is usually very hard to tell if someone is a skeptic or just either covering up something, or wants to start an argument. There have been plenty of times when people have run into others who not only didn’t agree with them, which by the way is okay, but then began to curse them out, which is not okay. People should be able to state what they feel about a certain subject without being cursed out, harassed, or being attacked because some so called influencer directed his or her followers to attack them online. I personally have met a lot of interesting people online. These are people I would not have met otherwise. I see some of them have made it to television and am very happy for them. Others are very busy writing books and have become successful authors in their field. I remember one particular man who was living in a village in South America somewhere and we had to make arrangements so I could contact him online because he had no computer service. I was able to do this by other means and then I interviewed him by phone when he went to an area with phone service. I have his interview on Truth Facts. He was working on a car which ran on air. There is a company in India that now builds cars powered by air. The internet has changed quite a bit from its start. Sites have come and gone. Some sites which were active at the start of internet service are gone but one site which used to be one of the biggest is still around and it is AOL. It used to be the equivalent to a gateway to many other places and services. This has changed now, but it is incredible it has lasted that long. From what I understand they have managed to retain about 1.5 million subscriptions. Another famous company at the time was Netscape, which no longer exists. It was the company which created the first widely used internet browser. Most of us have much faster internet service today, in the old days it was painfully slow because all we had was phone technology for a connection. One of the things the internet has allowed to be done to us is the loss of privacy. It along with improvements in computer technology has allowed companies to collect all our data and hackers to break into it. The truth is there is probably no one in this country who has data which is entirely safe anymore, and if they think it is, they are just unaware of what is happening. We didn’t have that worry when the internet first started and never even thought this would ever be a problem. There are just some things which should never be online in my opinion. One of those things is your medical data, another is your financial information, and yet another has to do with important records which could be tampered with. Sure, it makes things easier for us but the danger has to be balanced with the advantages. One has to wonder how many times defense information has been stolen from computers online. Some people are even asking if we can ever protect any of our data anymore. We are always being told to protect our data but this is a fallacy, it really can not be done as long as outside agencies have it all over the place. There is no doubt the social advantages of the internet are great. So is the convenience of shopping online. Food can be ordered online and delivered right to your door. This is really great for those who can not get around too easily. Even some doctor visits can be conducted online for the simpler things. If we could be sure of protecting all our info, the internet would be one of the most wonderful places, it is still great, but as I said it is also a threat. Email and text messaging has changed our lives. I would also like to include free phone calls anywhere on earth using apps like Messenger. When I was young, phone calls were very expensive. It was so expensive many families couldn’t afford a phone. Long distance calls ranged from 25 cents to one dollar per minute at a time when the minimum wage was 75 cents an hour. Email and text messaging has made writing to someone instantaneous. When you think about it, it is just incredible how easy it is for us to reach someone today and it doesn’t matter what country they are in. Experts tell us some day they will be able to protect all our data with the coming of the quantum computers. They may believe this, but I certainly do not. They brag about the millions and billions of combinations of code that will protect us, and yet they explain how incredibly fast the quantum computers will be. It seems to me whatever man encodes, no matter how complex, eventually another man using the same equipment will be able to decode it. I remember when years ago we wanted to see how safe our nuclear codes were. A professional white hat hacker was put into a hotel room with nothing more than an Apple computer and in three days broke the code to the horror of the government at the time.
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