Monday, January 20, 2020

J is for Jacked as in Hijacked






AND NEAR-FUTURE APOCALYPTIC FIRE @ lindalzern.com


“Sherwood?” I asked. I thought I detected an eyeroll from my husband of forty plus years, but it was hard to tell. The weirdo lights from his fifteen computer screens have a strobing effect.
“Yes?” He answered a question with a question.
“You know how I’m going to the Space Coast Book Lovers extravaganza this coming summer, and they wanted to publish my website link, and I sent the link to them, but then when I checked the link to see if the link actually linked to stuff and it went to a strange website with wild Chinese writing and girls in boxes?”
“Don’t click on anything.” He had not looked up from the strobing effect of his wall of computer screens.
“Sherwood?”
“Yes?”
“I may have clicked on something.”
His next question sounded like a groan. “Whhhhy?”
“Because the girls were hard to see in their little boxes, and I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, what with the absence of anything I could recognize, understand, or read. So . . . could you?” I flashed my best smile and batted my longest eyelashes.
He tapped and tapped and tapped; computer lights flickered and snapped, but in the end he took on the hijackers. My husband is a computer analyst of the engineering variety, called on by nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples to wrangle their wiliest computer ills. He agreed to track down the bad guys and try to sort out my website trouble. He’s an expert, and the one and only member of my IT staff. It took him three weeks, seventy-five phone calls, one hundred and eleven billable hours, and a bottle of extra strength Excedrin.
In the end, Hong Kong hijackers? One website.
Us? Two new websites: lindalzern.net  &  16Toadstonelane.com
What I’ve learned from the whole stolen website ordeal. Be Disney. Disney defends its intellectual properties and copyrights like a tigress protecting her cubs. Their legal team will go into a children’s daycare and make them paint over their Mickey Mouse mural.
I get it. If you don’t, you turn your back and the next thing you know your clever little website name, which is partly your name, is a porn site in Hong Kong.
Sigh. Important to note that I couldn’t have figured it out alone, not without going mad and running down Kissimmee Park Road tearing at my hair and wearing a ragged evening gown. Thanks, IT staff, our neighbors are grateful.
But I do worry about the high cost of beating back the robbers and thieves and social media bots. The time, the energy, the grief that is involved with trying to track down and straighten out the tangled web woven by the unethical and the dishonest is exhausting. Double sigh.
I guess I liked the world better when more people were worried about going to hell for breaking one of those handy ten commandments. Thou shalt not make life miserable for everyone else. Just saying.
Linda (Catch Them if You Can) Zern


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