eSanctity
For the second time now, someone has stolen my AOL password and left me without access to my email. I have a second ISP, but that doesn’t give me access to the mailbox where I get ten to twenty pieces of personal and business mail every day. It is more than irritating; it affects my income.
And this isn’t a case of loose lips; I don’t give my password to anyone, and I can’t remember anyone asking for it.
A friend at AOL shrugs her shoulders, albeit empathetically. It seems to be a fairly common problem. She says it’s mostly people who just like to take a free ride on the Internet, and it’s not more malicious than that. Oh, how nice, pint-sized, pimply-faced cretins having fun. Well wrap me in a flag, I think everyone should have free access. But until it is free, what these little nasties are doing is theft.
I’m not sure why AOL isn’t able to catch the people who steal passwords. Maybe the system is too porous. My concern is that it’s easier for AOL to issue new passwords than to track these people down and prosecute them. Kinda like how the credit card companies dump their bankruptcy costs on the customers who are honest and pay their exorbitant interest charges.
I propose immediate federal legislation that would institute regulations against tampering with email and would impose as serious penalties on those who steal passwords as people who interfere with the postal system. There should also be the funds and personnel to go after these miscreants and bring them to justice.
Aw, but they’re just kids. Well aw, how ‘bout then taking away their computers, and their parents computers, and letting their parents pay a substantial fine.
And for those who those send viruses, the same regulations should apply as to those who send letter bombs. Sound unfair ? Ask anyone who has had to try to replace the contents of a hard drive that has been ravaged by a virus. Someone has to teach them hard and fast what it means to have days, months, or years of work destroyed and unrecoverable.
Not only is there the sense of violation, but there is the brutal senselessness of the act, since usually the victim isn’t even a personal target. Just some hapless soul who opened the wrong download. And consider the psychopathy of the individuals who trash the email universe at random. They want newspaper headlines saying their virus is worse than the last?
It’s like the protesters who blocked traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. They wantonly interrupted -- and altered -- the lives of others. People missed important flights and critical business meetings.
Such intrusion warrants the harshest deterrent.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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