Of course I NEVER click on links that promise to speed up my computer or scan for errors. But the air mouse trackpad for my streaming computer sometimes generates random clicks at bad moments and today it managed to click on www[dot]speedupyourpconline[dot]info. Immediately a big fat Warning!!! In red popped up with lots of alarming text and a screeching female voice urging me to ring a number immediately and NOT to reboot the computer. The tab and browser could not be closed.
Fortunately this was just a simple browser hijacker and my browser has a feature that lets me start it without loading the current tabs, so all I had to do was kill the process with Task Manager and restart the browser without the link.
Normally I don’t think much about this kind of thing because I usually know how to avoid it, but this time it made me angry. Being on-line has become as necessary as having a telephone used to be, and people need their computers. This includes old people, non-technical people, ordinary people, less bright people, all kinds of people who don’t understand a thing about computer technology and shouldn’t have to. I felt angry on behalf of everyone who encounters this kind of unnecessary crap every day and has their lives made miserable by it. When did the Internet become the private playground of immoral, egotistical creeps too lazy and self-entitled to earn a living instead of pimping off the weak and vulnerable like the despicable bottom crawlers they are? I used to find the Nigerian emails amusing for the transparency of their ungrammatical scams but I don’t think it is funny any longer. The selfishness and greed of these low-life parasites are destroying the wonderful resource that the Internet should be and I don’t see why this should have to be tolerated. It is time to spray the mosquitoes and I hope some of the very clever and knowledgeable people here can offer some useful suggestions as to how to start. Ideas and further discussion are welcome and invited.