The single greatest threat facing computer users is loss of control.
Unaccountability is a two-edged sword. It’s bad enough people in power refuse to account for their actions to those affected, but we also have a full range of areas in life where control is taken from us indirectly. That is, we who want a measure of control have been herded along with all the folks who don’t want to be bothered. That latter group is by far the dominant species in the herd.
You can look up various search terms that include “computer” and “apocalypse” and get quite a few articles. Add the concept of “false flag” and you still gets tons of articles. We’ve already seen truly major computer security threats sponsored by the US government as a tool of espionage that can’t be targeted too cleanly. In the nature of standard human negligence, a tool of espionage designed to attack one kind of vulnerability on the enemy’s computers can easily spread to every computer with similar vulnerabilities. We could easily see a form of spyware infecting a the majority of common household users all over the world.
Don’t be too sure that wasn’t the plan in the first place. It’s not a simple matter of Windows having a backdoor wide open for the likes of NSA. Windows has always been vulnerable to control from Microsoft engineers. Whatever they wish to do with that operating system will happen at their behest; if your system is connected to the Net, their controls will find you. That same path is easily shared with any agency of the US government having the gall to demand it. That means you could find your system erasing itself entirely, installing and running all kinds of software, or simply downloading and displaying by force images you simply don’t want to see. There are multiple openings of those sorts written into the system on purpose. While MS has seldom availed themselves of such controls, the possibility has always been there. People running Windows have never really had control of their system without completely disconnecting it from the Internet forever.
This remains the single biggest threat in terms of getting what you want from the computer hardware and software that you buy: It’s never really yours. Right now there is a sudden rise of threats to families from spyware secretly planting evidence of things like child porn on private computers and then alerting the authorities that you have it. More than once it would seem the authorities themselves are planting this garbage on computers. You won’t have a clue when the SWAT team bursts through your door at 3AM. This has happened already to more than just a few. Yet disconnecting is not really a viable option for most.
The system has slowly created a social dependency on computers. If you don’t have some means of connecting to the Internet, you are today isolated from a major portion of minimum social expectations. Kids in school? The school administration wants an email address. Churches, too. Just about every government agency you encounter these days does the same thing; those who don’t will be required to do so soon. Want a job? You are almost required to have a Facebook account just to be taken seriously. Because we can all connect cheaply and easily, we almost have to just to stay out of trouble.
And God help you if you aren’t part of the mainstream near-monopoly Windows OS users. You’ll get by with a Mac — just barely — but with anything else, you had better be awfully savvy. The system wants to you dumber than a rock or you might start making unique individual demands, and uniformity is a vital necessity of bureaucracy. Working to govern through computers makes that enforced uniformity even easier. At the same time, the economy is collapsing enough to make buying a new computer highly unlikely for many. So we’ve got millions of WinXP grade machines running just fine, but with insufficient horsepower to run even Win7, much less Win8. That is, run it so as to have any use of it as a general purpose PC.
Right now I’m advising a lot of people to switch to Linux (primarily Xubuntu) before WinXP drops dead in April 2014. Not because I’m pushing a new religion as with most Linux zealots; I do this because it’s a valid answer. However, along with this comes the vital necessity of them learning a bit more about computers in the first place. They’ll have to learn the different interface (XFCE) and different operation and maintenance habits. With poverty comes more work just to survive, and that means more work in every measure of life. Even if you keep XP, you still have to work harder to keep it secure and operational. Either way, you’re going to need a bigger investment of yourself into the system to use it over the near term.
[Side note: The 12.04 release of Xubuntu runs quite well on most XP-grade systems and will be supported officially until late 2017.]
If you don’t take a greater interest and assert more control, your life itself will tend to spin out of control when things get harder; computers are just another facet of this.
