Doesn’t it feel like just yesterday that the nerdy guy in your office barged into your cubicle, took control of your IBM PC or Compaq or maybe even your Mac SE, and logged onto NetScape?
“This is the future of computing,” he might have said as you studied the awkwardly formatted text slowly rendering across your screen. I remember my reaction:
“Bull pucky! Where’s the sound, the music, the voice-over, the animated graphics, the color photos, the video windows?”
It must have been around 1994, and multimedia on CD-ROM, created in a popular authoring tool called MacroMind Director, was all the rage. How could the snail-paced, text-based content delivered on the NetScape browser over the World Wide Web possibly supplant the showbiz content we could deliver on CD-ROM?
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Some of us, regardless of the breadth or our attack surface and whether or not we like adjusting the temperature of our refrigerator from the golf course, are donning an extra layer of protection in the form of a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This service allows us to encrypt the data that travels from our devices to our Internet service provider. Corporations have employed them for years, which is what our corporate friends are talking about when they refer to information “behind the firewall.” VPNs aren’t a guarantee of complete safety, but they make our data more difficult to hack.
The net-net of it all: if we want to keep something private we’d better keep it offline, to the extent that we can. It may be a little more difficult to teach our kids, and especially our grandkids, about things like 35mm film, padlocks with real keys, checkbooks and other rapidly disappearing devices of the analog age.
Who ever would have thought that so much havoc could be wreaked with a bunch of zeros and ones?
See more at: huffingtonpost.com
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