An illness had struck me down for more than a week. What would have been described as "hitting a moderately rough patch" by my grandma kept me up at night. With my eardrums flapping like a dying sparrow, I tossed and turned sleeplessly in bed until I finally tumbled into the living room. Instead of letting the TV drown out everything I made a grave mistake: I entered my symptoms into Google and started looking. One hour later, I thought myself on the verge of death.
Spending your vacation at home always involves some degree of coziness. Same with me, after a day on the road we decided to ease it out on the sofa with a "fine" movie. We didn't narrow it down further and that's when the problems began. In the past, you were at the mercy of TV schedules (with a whopping 3 different channels in my youth!) but now we had over 40 channels, multiple online media libraries, Amazon Prime and Netflix at our disposal. What was supposed to be a relaxing evening turned into a real challenge.
"Where are our vacation shots? Are they gone?" The women seemed on the verge of a stress-related demise while holding her crushed cellphone in her hands. With a smile, her husband (obviously a model for tooth bleaching) turned around and replied in a calm voice: "They can't be gone, they're in the cloud!" Domestic bliss had returned, it was joy all over again, the coffee is ready.
That about sums up the essence of most ads run by cloud service providers. It doesn't matter if a piano drops on you, you're data will still be safe. Whether that's the case is another story since ads are known to exaggerate.
Recently an older friend told me he'd like to know if his old friends were on Facebook. He had moved many times in his long life and eventually lost touch with his old contacts, you know how it is. Since I knew he owned a PC plus Internet I was about to ask him why he wouldn't simply take a look online. After all, he was perfectly capable of inputting names like Krzysztof Szyszkowitz himself! I got his answer before I could ask and it drove me mad inside. Facebook was new to him, certainly very complicated and generally, at his age… Frankly, that's a shame. He didn't lack the motivation or doubt their controversial privacy policies, he simply thought himself incapable. But why? Any moderately sane person familiar with mouse and keyboard can do so much more with their computer! "If I can show you ten guys with the IQ of a fire hydrant that made it onto Facebook, will you promise me that you'll give it a try?"
Mails with serious content in an official tone, final notices or seemingly technical issues are enough to unsettle most readers. Often, this is an attempt at cheating you out of your money as I described last week. How can you catch on to the scammers, where do they give themselves away? The first step is to realize that your personal information is already in the wrong hands.
