{"id":3334,"date":"2014-06-16T13:51:05","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T19:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ramblindan.org\/?p=3334"},"modified":"2014-06-17T14:03:23","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T20:03:23","slug":"wow-i-just-want-to-break-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/?p=3334","title":{"rendered":"WOW! I just want to break free\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"borg\"<\/a>\u2026from the Borg.<\/p>\n

Starting from the early days of the then<\/em> truly horrendous America On Line (AOL) who were one of the earliest and perhaps first Internet Services that attempted to totally control my Internet experience. They went as far as secretly modifying my computers’ MS browser and operating system to suit their purposes and billing me with a non cancelable monthly \u201cservice\u201d fee. I had to cancel my credit card to stop the charges. I also had to totally wipe and reload my operating system to remove all traces of the AOL intrusion. I still avoid AOL at all costs.<\/p>\n

Google (and others) are now working very hard at trying to be the Total Service Supplier as AOL had attempted decades earlier. Yahoo and Bing and several other lesser players are also in the fray. These players seemed to have stopped hacking the basic OS but they try their damndest to load my system with \u201caccess bars\u201d and devious monitoring plug-ins, all for my good and their marketing needs of course.<\/p>\n

Why do you think the first thing police crime investigators do at a crime scene is confiscate all the computers? It\u2019s because everything that the computer has done for the last umpteen months is still recorded on the hard drive, cookies and trash files galore.<\/p>\n

I just look at something once on Amazon.com and for many months later the same item still pops up in web ad banners on totally unrelated web sites. My privacy has been invaded and categorized and sold out.<\/p>\n

What a potential data mine all the cloud services have become. My daughter\u2019s major corporation has totally converted to Google Apps for all their office software. Goodbye MS Office, hello cloud. I hope they made a good move. I\u2019m sounding like a curmudgeon who thinks good of nothing, Ha!<\/p>\n

Moving Away from Personal Privacy Issues<\/p>\n

We are slowly becoming assimilated and a part of the hive. Yes, the Borg to you Treckies. I know assimilated Borg life is totally not a good thing as a human, but the Borg also assimilated all useful technology (like control systems).<\/p>\n

Equipment control by remote digital systems is the mission of the company I work for and how I earn my living. Not personal privacy invasion, but total connectivity and control of energy consuming and producing systems. This is accomplished by networking distributed digital computer systems. It\u2019s a theme of many movie and TV plots where super hackers working for either the good or the bad team can take control of almost any system in the world with a basic laptop computer. It\u2019s done by\u00a0my company and many others every day with appropriate software and access security.<\/p>\n

I have managed large building automation systems myself from home via the Internet. It\u2019s a very limited and controlled access but it does exist, but not to the extent and ease of hacking into private systems as shown in the movies. I hope we never get there (to the Borg connectivity level), but it is in the thinkable realm of a possible outcome of where we are heading, but of course, most extremely unlikely.<\/p>\n

My company is also an industry leader in the digital based security and video monitoring business. We have the ability to combine it all.<\/p>\n

I am not talking out of my hat about this technology, it exists. I am not alarmed about industrial control. Control systems are necessary and strict access to control even more necessary. I hope the two will keep pace with each other. Let the movies have their fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026from the Borg. Starting from the early days of the then truly horrendous America On Line (AOL) who were one of the earliest and perhaps first Internet Services that attempted to totally control my Internet experience. They went as far as secretly modifying my computers’ MS browser and operating system to suit their purposes and billing me with a non cancelable monthly \u201cservice\u201d fee. I had to cancel my credit card to stop the charges....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[92],"class_list":["post-3334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing","tag-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}