Title could be: “We See What We Want to See”
Two days
after I ranted on my writer’s blog*about how much data was on the Internet, and
that books were dying faster than bugs on a sheep’s back after a good dipping—no
I didn’t use that analogy, just thought
of it. Have you ever seen sheep swimming though a trough of sheep dip? Anyway I
wondered why the government, the banks, anyone with personal critical data
trusted it to the Internet. And then yesterday I heard on the radio that the
IRS had been hacked.
Brother.
It appears that
the hackers gathered personal information, but haven’t yet used it. “Authorities”
figure they are waiting until next year to intercept any refunds entitled to
certain taxpayers. And to add insult to injury, the burden of monitoring falls
on the one who was hacked. These poor people need to keep checking to make sure
their data is clean.
And then this
morning I checked in on #Craig’s list, as I had placed an ad there, and they informed
me that their site had been “compromised.” They assured me, however, that it had been fixed.
This would
be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
We might as
well laugh at it I suppose—I wouldn’t laugh, though, if my refund went to someone
else. And I’m mad as hell that people aren’t buying books, but are reading on the
Internet or Digital devices, or not reading.
Fahrenheit
451?
There was a
funny post on #Craigs’s list—see we do love the Internet, just don’t trust it to
keep our culture alive. (Book were once burned—remember? How easy would it be
for a Hacker, or an on purpose “Authority” to erase us, our culture, our
literature, our personal data. Think about old scrolls, good old papyrus, or
leather, or clay tablets, or engraved rocks that have been found buried—that’s
how much some wanted to preserve old writings and sacred texts.)
About the
Craig’s list story: Someone bartered up from a cell phone to a Porsche.
How?
Beats me.
The topper,
though, was that someone bartered up from a red paperclip to a house.
Yesterday I was
sharing with my friend June who is an artist and would appreciate the movie we
had seen the night before. It was Arts
and Crafts, a documentary about Mark Landis, one of the most prolific art
forgers in US history. This eccentric man copied the masters, didn’t sell them,
but donated them to museums and galleries. The museums were happy, and greedy,
to get their hands on such “valuable” works, and even their “experts” couldn’t
tell they weren’t authentic. Landis was using gels and acrylic and colored
pencils, and instant coffee to age them—modern day materials, imagine, on such
artists as Monet. Because he didn’t receive any money from them it was not a
crime.
June told me
about Uncle Buds. I had heard about this eccentric old man she knew many years
ago, but not this story: Uncle Buds was a master engraver, and he could also
copy Rembrandt to a T. The FBI often
investigated him, for with his skill he could easily be a counterfeiter. One day the FBI visited, inspected his work, found
that no money was being created, and paid no attention to the many Rembrandt engravings
scattered about over this table.
“You always seem to have money,” June once
asked him. “Do you make it?”
“Oh no,” he
said, “never. But I make excellent Rembrandts.”