Monday, February 13, 2017

Donald Trump and cyber-security: a lax attitude.

I'm reprinting this from a posting I did on Facebook...

  Perhaps a lax attitude because he doesn't know diddly about computers.
His field of expertise is bullshit. Hot, steaming, and from an alternate reality totally unfamiliar to those of us in the real world.

And I have terrible news for him if he thinks that all he has to do is appoint a skillful mouthpiece to browbeat the media into submission and then he can control everything we know about his government. I've said this before, but please let me repeat: everyone with a computer is both a consumer of news and a broadcaster of news. The social media like Facebook may well be our savior from the likes of a wannabe dictator like Trump, because we can spread the facts just as fast as he can spread the bullshit. So his plan for world domination may not get beyond the fantasy stage. Maybe he should have done his homework. This really isn't the 1930s when things were different.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Trump and 'Managed News'

Recently, it was pointed out that Trump would like to have the major news outlets conform to his altered views of reality, very similar to what Hitler did in Germany in the 1930s. However, as Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail points out, this is not 1939.

At the risk of 'jumping to conclusions' I'm guessing Margaret means that our world and its communications are much different now. It will be virtually impossible for the Trump administration to control news outlets, because everyone with a computer is both a consumer and a broadcaster of whatever's going around, and this is not limited to only the USA. In minutes, I can communicate to my friend in Beirut, or another in northern England, or another in central Germany, and between us, we can tell the world what's happening and our opinions of it. We've already proven that this works. And on my blog, I have readers from almost anywhere on the globe, including hundreds in Russia, some in China, and others in Europe, and Australia. It would not be easy to limit the news to only one preferred story-line. If Trump thinks he can, then he isn't aware of the capabilities of computers and the Internet.

And we haven't even mentioned those hackers, who could not only interfere with all that, but could even plant programs on Trumpers' computers that could virtually wreck them. If I were Trump, I'd familiarize myself with the possibilities, before I provoked an angry response from the world's computer users. And why am I explaining how he could avoid disaster? The sooner that hit him the better. He thinks he's smart. Let's find out.