Computer Viruses

I get very annoyed with my english teacher sometimes. In fact, I get annoyed at most older ladies sometimes. Why? Because they are terrified of computer viruses.

Take my grandma for an example. She doesn't have internet because she's afraid someone will hack her computer and steal her personal information. Well it's not like she put her credit card number on her computer! Anyways, usually it's web servers that get hacked(translation for people who don't know much about computers: websites get hacked) or government computers, which have been hacked before. I can see the weakness there, and I'm just a teenager who doesn't even hack. It's obvioius. Because of the way they've got things set up so that all these computers are relying on each other so much, they can't update very well because it could open a weakness. I don't know much about hacking, but the fact that the government's computers don't change much is obvious. I found out because my mom works for the Public Health Service, and she was telling me once about how computers at her work can't be updated very often because the system would have to be built up again, which is why parts of the clinic she works at are using different types of programs than others, but each department runs on old-fasioned, DOS-like programs. I've been in the pharmacy a few times, and I've seen the programs they use, and it really does look almost exactly like DOS. And when I asked about it, it turns out they have to use several programs when they could probably update to something that does it all in one.

OKAY back to viruses.

Anyways, whenever something goes wrong with my teacher's computer, she says "It's a virus," like it's common. It was clear to me her computer just froze, probably because she was using an ancient-looking Mac to run very new programs. And the school doesn't even have virus protection of any sort. Not a great idea, considering ALL THE STUDENT ACCOUNTS HAVE THE SAME FREAKING PASSWORD. And what a stupid password it is! Well at least it's not "password"! XD

Anyways, the school system seems very unstable to me. I mean, a mac can connect to another mac of the same OS and view their files if they're in the same area. Someone could easily hack a student's computer, and from there figure out the password for an admin or a teacher, and bring down the system. Heck, I could probably find a way to mess up the system.

And the internet has blocks on the whole wireless to stop from viewing certain websites, and it's so freaking primitive I want to scream sometimes. I mean, it blocks the weirdest sites, and doesn't block the ones that it's supposed to. We're not supposed to be on game sites, and yet almost all game sites in existence can be viewed from our computers. And websites like Myspace and Gaia Online should be blocked, while Youtube should probably not be blocked because it is the main video hosting site, and who knows when we'll need to view a video to find info? Something that makes me very pissed is that it blocks starmen.net because it thinks they have games ON the website. It makes me want to say something like, "IT'S A WEBSITE ABOUT GAMES, NOT A GAME WEBSITE, YA DUMMY!!!" but I know the block is too stupid. I bet it's hard to modify so that it blocks or unblocks sites. Sometimes the tech guys at my school who run the computer system are idiots.