SO THERE I AM, sitting at a table reading the newspaper.
The kids are pottering over a laptop nearby.
One of their nerdy friends is helping them download a new game. “You just click here and then you get this security screen,” says the young visitor. “Then you click this bit here which says ‘accept all’.”
Lost in a deeply intellectual article (okay, I was counting alcohol arrests on the celebrity gossip page), it took three seconds for his words to reach my brain.
“What? Hey, wait, STOP,” I say, racing over to where the kids are sitting.
It’s too late. The nerdy friend has okayed an option to “automatically accept all downloads from this organization”.
I ask: “But who is it? Do you know anything about them?”
Nerdy friend looks blank. “I know they made this cool free game,” he says.
Time for a lecture. I raise myself to my full 165 cm height and put on my Teacher Voice. “You kids need to learn: there’s NO SUCH THING as a free lunch,” I declare.
The kids respond in chorus: “It’s not a free lunch, it’s a free game.”
I patiently explain that the “no free lunch” phrase is a metaphor about hidden problems. “You have given people we know nothing about, people who are VERY LIKELY to be thieves, murderers, serial killers or worse, financial planners, full permission to download anything they like, spyware, viruses and so on, to your computer.”
I tell the nerdy friend: “Sorry, son, but you may as well just throw away your laptop now.”
He is entirely unfazed by my criticism.
“It’s not MY laptop,” he says. “It’s YOUR laptop.”
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I spent the afternoon downloading every anti-virus program developed since Charles Babbage invented the computer in 1822 and got his first virus the following week.
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People don’t read the small print these days. True story: on April 1 this year, a software retailer in the UK added a clause to its standard contract asking each online buyer for rights to his or her immortal soul. Thousands clicked to accept the deal.
The firm, GameStation, didn’t know what to do with all these souls, so eventually wrote emails transferring the rights back to their original owners. (Surely the obvious thing to do would have been to sell them to the devil? I understand he’s keen on that sort of thing.)
(Poster for Faust, the original tale of the man who sold his soul to the Devil.)
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Sometimes it LITERALLY pays to read the small print.
Last month, the boss of Beowulf Mining hid a giveaway in the small print of a company document circulated at a London conference and on the internet:
"As compensation for reading this disclosure the chairman of the company shall allot fifty pounds sterling of shares in the company to the first person who contacts him on this."
No delegate read the paperwork. Two days later, a Swedish man who had spotted it on the internet got the freebie.
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In the meantime, if your kids are using the computer, listen carefully for the following utterance.
“Trojan worm? That sounds like a cool new Pokemon. Let’s download it onto Dad’s laptop.”
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ON UNRELATED MATTERS: The pics of commentators on the side have got a generally positive response: what a good-looking gang you are! If anyone wants their pic removed, just drop me a note.
The request to lengthen the “recent comments” column prompted me to investigate the options. I found out that it cannot be lengthened, sorry about that. On the plus side, nearly all comments are added to the three most recent postings, so they are easy to find. I’ll investigate whether it’s possible to add pix of commentators to the comments themselves.
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