Cybersecurity
Ganked from Messy Mimi. Lens traces it to Reddit and says the picture has been circulating, with a variety of captions, for at least nine years.
But it reflects a real problem: As the Internet becomes crowded, some web sites push us to think of ever more bizarre, preferably unique, strings of characters--harder to remember, harder to type--as passwords. If we use one password for everything, hackers might discover what that password is, they fret. If we use something easy to remember, like "password" or even "password123," hackers are sure to guess--lots of people used to use "password." If we use something that's easy for us to remember and unlikely for anyone else to guess, like the name of our shelter at summer camp, we might--heavenforbidandfend!--type that into an ordinary sentence on a comment somewhere, which sets off enough bells and whistles in Chrome to tell the whole world: "Hey! Password! Over here! Password! LOOK! It's a password! What's the least common word in this paragraph? Either 'Floogle the Canary' or '#37OldHarmon' has to be a PASSWORD! Guess what it's the password to?"
Some web sites offer to solve the problem for you. They will give you a really secure password, a combination of 40 random characters no human being would ever think of typing. Yes. And then some sort of "update" upheaval will lose that password and you'll never get into that account again.
It occurs to me that these web sites may be barking up the wrong tree. They might try simpler ways to identify hackers. If, for example, you always go online in the United States, any attempt to get into your account from a location in Vietnam needs verification. Every hacking I've survived has been traced to some company I've never visited. Web sites could take a little responsibility for this kind of thing.
Some means of "securing your account" are just bad ideas. Nobody should ever give a thought to the idea of letting a computer do a biometric scan of an image of us. That image is too valuable to too many serious evildoers. Nobody should consider letting a computer verify anything by ringing a phone, even if you work in a building that still uses phones. That number is likely to be ganked and then rung daily by nuisance callers for the next year and a half. A verification e-mail is harmless, provided that your e-mail and browser will open two different e-mail accounts at the same time. Otherwise, if something happens to your main e-mail account as jbartlebydoe@yahoo, and Yahoo shuts down that account when you log into your backup account as janebdoe@yahoo, you'll have to borrow an extra computer to recover your e-mail.
There's no real substitute for the basic cybersecurity policy: Although you don't want nuisances reading your correspondence with publishers or your e-friends' Substacks, although you may still have an inner teenager who would want to die of embarrassment if a nuisance saw that poem you're not sure you want to publish, that kind of thing is survivable. Other kinds of information leaks are less survivable so, always, assume that all web sites will eventually be hacked, and never put anyone's real name, anyone's home address, any Social Security or bank account or credit or insurance or even library card numbers, any phone number, or anything that might identify any specific child, on the Internet. Don't bank or pay bills online. Don't discuss anything online that you wouldn't want to see in the newspaper. And never, never, never touch a screen with your finger.
Education
If you're going to have a child, which State should you rear it in?
Daniel J. Mitchell compares two politically biased metrics that, oddly enough, don't seem relevant to the child's experience. Children don't know or care how hard it is to get an abortion. Children do benefit when it's easy for their parents to find work or stay in business, but if anything their preference might be to live in poverty with full-time parents who spend all their time on the family farm, whether the farm ever makes a profit or not. Anyway, whichever politically biased metrics are used, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia seem to be good States for parents.
For the actual child...it varies depending on your individual child. Quality of schools? (Virginia rules. Maryland, minutes away even by kayak or bicycle, drools.) Quality and number of libraries? (Are there any good public libraries any more?) Access to healthy outdoor experiences? Closeness to grandparents? Indigenicity, number and strength of family connections? Pollution levels? Homeschooling requirements? Type of house you can afford?
The Internet is full of web sites that offer ratings for schools, neighborhoods, etc., but these web sites were not designed by children. A few years ago, for instance, a school rating site rated my local public schools low, despite their stellar athletic programs and superior academic programs, because too many local people are legally White. Your child might be the only Black or Asian child in the class! The horror! Actually, most children in the United States are legally White and, although popular books and TV shows can induce them to say that they'd like to have a multiethnic social club like the Baby-Sitters Club or some current equivalent, the emotional weight they put on ethnic diversity in the classroom is minuscule. They care more about having a nice healthy place to play outdoors, even though some teenagers might say they put a higher value on being able to walk to the mall.
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