Grumpy Old Chook

OK, OK – I know that scum actually floats on the top of the water, therefore can’t technically be described as “bottom-dwelling” – I was just looking for an expression strong enough to describe these individuals without offending the sensitive ears of any of the younger generation who might possibly be reading this. (Who am I kidding – most of the younger generation could teach me words I don’t know! That, however, is a totally different issue.)

I turned on my computer first thing this morning to find an e-mail from my web hosting provider informing me that my account (the account on which ALL my domains are hosted) had been suspended due to a virus on one of my sites.

Now, I pride myself on being pretty tech-savvy, but I have to confess that I wouldn’t know how to produce a virus if I wanted to … I wouldn’t have a clue where to even start. This was definitely not my doing!

I was flustered, shaken and furious all at the same time. This was definitely NOT the way I wanted to start my day! After hunting frantically for the provider’s international phone number – they gave only the US free-call number in the e-mail, and I am in Australia – I made the international call to the USA, grumbling all the while about the whole mess. Praise God, I got straight on to a tech fellow – I had been concerned that I might get on one of those interminable wait lines, which would have cost a fortune.

Turns out a hacker had attacked the theme of one of my blogs. Deleting the problem file was easy, and my account was restored in minutes. However, I had used that theme (somewhat modified) on several of my blogs before I started creating my own themes, and as a safety precaution I had to disable it from all of them, temporarily revert to the generic theme, and create new themes to replace the one I had removed. I’m still in that process, it will probably take the rest of today and most of tomorrow.

What is it with vandals? Whether it is the kind that spray paint stupid messages on any blank wall they can find, those who tear up other people’s gardens, or those who hack web sites, they are all the same. Stupid, mindless twerps! I simply can’t imagine living inside the head of someone whose greatest pleasure in life is destroying someone else’s property.

Of course, the very worst kind of vandal is the fire bug. We had a never-to-be-forgotten taste of their work last year, when deliberately lit fires swept through our little town the week before the major Black Saturday fires that devastated much of Victoria. We were blessed that, unlike so many places a week later, we were not doing a body count. Nonetheless, homes were destroyed – nine in our street alone – and lives shattered.

To my way of thinking, there is only one punishment fit for a fire bug: make him make a great big bonfire of all his own possessions, and force him to put a match to it! I’m not quite sure what an equivalent punishment would be for cyber vandals, but I would love to be the person enforcing it!

This blog is © Lynn Fowler

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