Is the Internet Good or Evil? When I look at the internet, I see a lot of wonderful things, but I also see a lot of bad things. One of the greatest accomplishments of human kind is the internet. For the first time in human history everyone on earth can communicate with each other. When future history books come out, I am sure this will be listed as the thing which will eventually unite the human race, that is unless we decide to destroy ourselves. Communication means we will be able to understand each other much better. Before the internet, what did we know about someone living in Africa or India for example? Most of us knew nothing, but with the internet we can talk to each other about everyday things, increasing our knowledge and understanding of each other. The internet has allowed us to be able to repair things even if we don’t have any talent in that area. One can find a video on YouTube telling us how to do most anything. Recently I had a hard time using some settings on a complicated watch. I found a video telling me how to do exactly what I wanted to. The video contained the exact make and model of the watch and a person in India kindly put up video instructions for all the settings. That was an example of bringing people together even in a small way. For those who like to do their own car repairs there are plenty of videos available telling anyone how to do most anything to a car from installing brakes yourself to doing an engine overhaul. One of the great things you can do on the internet is find a medical site such as WebMD. These types of sites should be used with caution because looking up certain diseases and injuries and their treatment certainly does not mean we are getting a medical degree which in turn means we may think we understand something and what is recommended for it, but we could be wrong and there could be far more to what we should do than we know. There is also the strong possibility we are looking up something we believe we have and we could either have a different disease or no disease at all, which might mean we are taking something which could hurt us. I have heard from a couple of people who looked up diseases and came to believe they had them when they were perfectly fine. Some sites might even be giving you the wrong advice. One handy thing on the internet is reviews of products. I say this but I am issuing a caution, because some companies flood a site with good reviews which make you think they are customer reviews. If one is careful however, they can learn a lot from reading product reviews. I always say before you buy, look up the specs on the products you intend to buy, especially if they are electronic and the specs can affect performance. An example of this is one person I know thought they were getting a real good buy on a laptop computer, but when they got it, they weren’t happy because it was too slow for what they wanted to do. They had purchased a machine with a low end processor which is known as a CPU. They got the machine cheap but for a little more money they would have gotten something they could use without getting agita. There are people who hold the opposite opinion about the internet that I have. They believe the internet is evil and some believe it is just a way for criminals and companies to take advantage of us. I think by now most of us know the internet has a bad side. Let’s talk about companies first. A lot of companies are getting websites to put up adverts which just aggravate us. I have talked about this before. The advertisements block what we are trying to see or read and sometimes more just keep popping up. Most of us have been forced to use ad blockers, but some sites won’t let you see their content if the blockers are on. Other companies get sites to run stories divided into little one paragraph segments and you have to continuously click the next button and this can go one for fifty to sixty pages, each one containing new ads. No this is not evil; it is just plain annoying. Evil sites are those which sell your information that criminals have stolen. They sell your credit card numbers, Medicare info, Social Security info, bank account numbers, passport info and so forth. I have to wonder how many people have gotten into this country using this stolen info by making believe they were US citizens? These sites have absolutely no redeeming value to society and they should be shut down and the owners sent to prison. Sites run by terrorist organizations are also evil. Some pretend to be doing God’s work, but how can killing innocent people be part of any organization or religion? There are some sites which are said to be on the internet which are secret and may be giving out some sort of instructions, but there is no way to presently tell what the messages are. We don’t know if they are run by the government or other organizations good or bad. It is said when quantum computers become standard, these types of sites will easily be broken and not able to hide what they are doing. One of the connections with the internet is email. Email can be very useful, but unfortunately it provides a way for criminals to reach almost anyone on the planet who has either a computer or cell phone and tablet. There are so many email scams, but there is no way we can call email evil. What we can say about it is, it is a great way to communicate but can also be used by criminals to try and extort money from people as can snail mail. Snail mail is mail from the post office. Internet phones have made calling incredibly cheap as have cell phones. I have talked about this before too. When I was a kid transatlantic calls would cost an entire week’s salary for a couple of minutes. Today you can call for a few cents per call. This has allowed criminals to take advantage of the fact to threaten a lot of people by getting them to believe they were agents from government agencies and money was owed. No, I cannot say the internet is evil, but it is being taken advantage of by criminals not only here, but from all over the world.
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