Memories of the 28th Century

Paranoia:*a mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions and the projection of personal conflicts, which are ascribed to the supposed hostility of others, sometimes progressing to disturbances of consciousness and aggressive acts believed to be performed in self-defense or as a mission.
1. baseless or excessive suspicion of the motives of others.
The more general definition is Irrational fear.
(from dictionary.com)

I just logged into my email on a public computer, and it was not easy. No one has ever broken into my accounts; although someone has used my email address as spoof, but any fool could look at the headers and determine whence the email came. Alas, it appears that people who try to manage the security of websites are more ignorant than ordinary users, and they think that random evil people will try to hack any and every email or website account. That just doesn’t happen. Sometimes people will hack the account of a friend or enemy or of some notable person, but except in the cases of people who have their personal or financial information in such accounts there is simply nothing to be gained by anyone by hacking someone’s account. We shouldn’t think much of such people, because they clearly don’t have the brains of a roach.

On the other hand, there are people who actually put all of their financial information on their internet enabled cell phones. That is one of the many problems with so-called “smart phones”. Intelligent people do not use web enabled phones for several reasons and the lack of good security is one of those.

For people whose intelligent is within the normal range password protection is quite enough, so there is never any reason for captcha things or additional passcodes. But it seems that since Donald Trump lowered the level of intelligence required for someone to be considered normal such excessive levels of security have been added to save those people from their foolishness. If someone is educable, then it should be possible to eliminate excess levels of security by teaching those people to keep any sensitive information from being available on computers that are vulnerable to hacking. It is quite easy to keep information separate from the internet, even though some professionally managed systems are not handled that way, which makes me wonder about the quality of the security experts.

There is another possibility that comes to mind regularly. That is that the computer security professionals allow hacks to create the illusion that they, the experts, are necessary and should be paid more. They do get good pay, but I question whether they deserve that extra pay. It seems that as pay has increased, the understanding of the situation has decreased. We learned decades ago that if one wanted to avoid having certain information secure, one could simply keep that data on a system that was not connected to the internet. Apparently, some security experts have forgotten that strategy, and that seems to be true of some government and military computer systems.

But computer paranoia is only one matter. The recent horror of some people about aircraft is another irrational fear. All my life, there have been things flying in the sky that were not butterflies, moths, bees, or other living things. I have become so inured to things flying around that I don't even look up when I hear something in the sky. Whether they are airplanes or drones is irrelevant. A number of years ago, I was riding in an automobile being driven by my mother, and in front of the car, there was something flying that was unusual. It fly directly toward us until it was about a mile away. and then it took an abrupt left turn. It looked like a sharp right angle, and airplanes can't do that. Later we saw on the news that thousands of people saw the same thing, and it was listed among the unexplained UFO's. If people were seeing things like that, then I would understand them being scared, but they have been seeing airplanes and drones. Come on now. We do not have to be afraid of those, unless they are being flown by North Koreans.

It makes me wonder if humans are becoming stupider. Is this the new direction of evolution?