The Web don’t work ’cause the vandals got a handle
Why are we constantly beset with malware and other horrible digital excrescences? Too much tolerance for things that go wrong, maybe:
We’ve become an eight-cylinder SUV society. For all the nonsense we babble about global warming and how worried we are about it, we’ve become a culture in which we just press the gas down when we want to go somewhere, and we really don’t care about the imperfections in the system that makes it all go until the bill for gassing it up again is ten dollars higher than what we’re used to paying. And then, we don’t fix anything until the power steering makes a godawful squealing sound or the transmission conks out. Then we bitch and cuss about how it cost three thousand dollars and the mechanic must be out to screw us over.
I’ve had one transmission rebuilt. Then again, it was a two-speed Powerglide, which is about as complicated as a Waring Blendor.
Still, I’m not sure this is the answer:
I will expand the government to start a Bureau of Malware Damage Compensation. It will be responsible for filing civil suits against these guilty parties and placing liens on their property and income. It will accept and validate claims for anti-virus software licensing, computer services, and time lost by the victims, and as the proceeds of these liens are collected, it will compensate them.
Which is admittedly easier than, oh, say, creating a digital buzzbomb which will trace these evil little scripts to their evil little masters and setting off an explosion in their evil little shorts, but it’s a hell of a lot less gratifying. And if I have to scrape things off a hard drive, I want the culprit to suffer before I want him to pay; I want his attitude adjusted in such a manner as to make his testicles flee halfway up his abdomen at the very thought of trying that crap again. (If there are in fact any women writing malware, make the appropriate alterations.)
