I was accused of
going a little overboard in another thread [webmasterworld.com] and perhaps some background behind it, something I've never shared in a public forum, will help you understand why these things really get under my skin.
My mother, in her 70s, used to get so worried about her software firewall's pop-up messages of attempted infiltration alerts, thanks to hackers, worms and botnets hitting her firewall all day, that on a couple of occasions it got to a point of near hysterics when an escalated attack was causing so many alert messages to pop up her PC was more annoying that useful.
I tried to tell her just to turn off the alerts, she wouldn't have anything to do with that, yet my phone would continue to ring all the time with panic sounded calls about "they're trying to get into my computer again!".
I would tell her they're just knocking but they can't get in, the firewall and anti-virus are doing their job, but that didn't make her feel any safer.
She wouldn't even leave her computer on between uses like most people do because she was afraid it would get hacked when she wasn't there to stop it, like she could so anything about it if it actually happened!
Likewise, both my mom and father-in-law call us all the time about phishing and scam emails that slip past the spam filters and show up in their mailbox.
They literally think people on the internet are out to get them and they aren't wrong.
My solution to my mom's problem was I had to pay for and install a hardware firewall just so she wouldn't see the attempted attacks on her computer all day long, out of sight, problem solved.
However, that doesn't stop the fact that mom, and many others like her, are literally being terrorized by hackers, spammers, phishers and botnets on the internet constantly trying to infiltrate other peoples computers.
Had they actually infected her computer I'm not sure what would have happened, she might have just thrown it out and never used one again.
That's why I have such a dim view of these activities, and strong views about what should be done to stop them, because it hits close home and really diminished what should have been online computer fun for an old lady instead of terrorizing her in her own home.
I'm sure others have encountered similar experiences but we rarely hear about them.
