A report from the Internet front line …
Today, as part of our ongoing campaign to keep Rust readers in tune with the modern world, I am reviewing some of the latest developments upon the internet.
PASSWORDS
For anyone over a certain age the fundamental problem with passwords is of course that we cannot remember them.
In my innocence – when I was first exposed to the internet at all – I was under the ridiculous impression that ‘the world out there’ was entirely benign, positive and a force for good.
The concept that it might be used by fraudsters from Nigeria and/or the Far East to try and relieve me of my hard-earned cash – in similar fashion to the way my early conviction that it was only a matter of time before the National Lottery delivered me the £100 million in cash I needed to live the remainder of my life just ahead of the poverty line caused me to religiously buy Lottery tickets every week for the first three months of its existence – was completely beyond my imagination.
And anyway, can anyone out there in Rust-dom tell me what the hell ‘cookies’ are?
When I first came across them I assumed they were sweets biscuits being offered to the world by our American cousins. I still don’t have a clue what they do – well, part perhaps from allowing Mark Zuckerberg to collect every intimate detail of my life and store them somewhere, all the better to make even more money by selling them on to other internet giants.
Only yesterday I was rung up by a gentleman operating from an unknown number beginning 01223 claiming to be a representative of my supplier of electricity – this a few days after I’d received through the post an announcement about their latest hike in prices – to ask whether I was happy that British Gas had just announced its second hike in the past six months.
At the time I had no idea at all that this is what British Gas had done, so I told him as much, adding “Well, obviously, if they have done, I cannot say that I’m delighted about it – but so what?”
He then asked me what I would say if he told me that his (electricity) company could also supply my gas and at a fraction of the extortionate price that British Gas was now charging me.
I gave him my stock answer to this sort of contact, viz. that, being over fifty years of age, I was not going to be of much assistance to him in his daily grind.
The fact was that I liked to buy my electricity from an organisation with ‘electricity’ in its title … and similarly, my gas from an organisation with ‘gas’ in its title … simply so that I know which is which.
Plus, he might like to know that I also responded as I was doing to him every time British Gas rang me up – which was about as frequently as someone from his organisation did – and told me that they could supply me my electricity at a cheaper rate that his (electrical) company were currently doing.
He soon wound down our conversation and wished me a great day. As I did him.
Anyway, back to passwords.
Because of my naïve assumption that the internet was ‘safe’, from the moment I first went online I began using my AOL email address password for absolutely everything. As any sensible person of my age would.
The catastrophic development was the news that the internet was not inherently safe and that all sorts of miscreants – both criminal and high-tech internet monsters that were supposedly forces for good – could ‘hack’ my password (and indeed personal bank details etc.) and use them for ‘bad’ purposes, so now we all had to either change our passwords regularly and/or devise a series of different ones.
That’s where I metaphorically ‘fell off the wagon’. Every time I signed up to some new internet service, I religiously invented a new password … and then, within a fortnight or so, I became unable to recall which password I had used for what. And as a result was unable to access any of the websites I had joined – that is, until I ‘changed passwords’ … and went back to having one password for everything.
I figured that at least being able to access the websites I had intended to ‘join’ was worth the risk of some two-bit little criminal operating from a bed-sit in the back streets of Isleworth nicking the contents of my building society account.
In which context I present you with a link to this article by Joe Pinkstone that appears today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL
FACEBOOK OFFER – (AND A POTENTIALLY CHEAPER ONE)
For good or ill, I have never quite mastered the art of talking a selfie on my smartphone, or indeed attaching an image to either a text or an email, so I can state unequivocally that I have never managed to send nude photographs of myself over the internet, even accidentally.
That is, should I have ever wished to – which I haven’t.
However, I was somewhat intrigued by this piece penned by Alex Fern as appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
As a result of reading this article overnight, I have this morning written an email to our esteemed editor attaching a two-page business proposal suggesting the establishment of a Rust spin-off service which I have given the working title of ‘RUSTPORN HOLDINGS’.
Via this exciting new development – for the modest signing-on fee of just £150 sent to the usual Rust bank account and sort code – we here at Rust Corps Global will safely store all our readers’ sent-in nude self-images in a special ‘area’ of our website. And indeed also any images that our readers would care to send us of them in sexual congress either in positions unknown to the Kama Sutra and/or in unusual geographical locations.
Subject only, of course, to Board approval, I am confidently expecting that we will be able to offer our readership access to RUSTPORN HOLDINGS on or before 1st July 2018.
As you would expect it comes with the guarantee that nobody will ever be able to access the hard drive in which your images will be stored – that is, except the Rust editorial staff, of course, and then only for purposes of providing entertainment at our annual office Christmas parties.
