When I saw the above title in my RSS feeds, I thought “Oh, no, here we go again!”  I expected no less than a treatise on how the Mac was insecure and that its users’ belief in invincibility would spell the end.  But I was wrong.

Whilst there is a measure of talk about the trojan and what it might mean, the main thrust of the article is something I firmly believe in.  Enough to want to draw your attention to it.

Before you go on, have a read of Bill Thompson’s story for the BBC.

I have had similar problems with my own children.  The schools have taught them things like “how to use WordArt” and PowerPoint in general, but not the basics of what a computer is, what a computer does, and why you can never trust them  to do what you want 100% of the time.

Even the simplest of concepts eludes them.  I once intervened when my son was trying to get an application to start and was complaining it wasn’t working.  He had just shut down a different application and the hard drive light showed the system (a Windows XP system) was still dealing with that.  As his attempt to launch the new application had not shown any signs of life on the screen, he attempted to launch again, and again, and again.  Now the application concerned was trying to launch (massively) multiple copies and of course the hard drive was straining.  Finally the first instance of the new application arrives and is, of course, unresponsive!

I guess I was priveliged to grow up at a time when mucking around with very basic computers was the done thing for those who were lucky enough to have one in the house.  I started on my father’s Dick Smith System 80 (a TRS80 clone), writing programs to draw circles and the like.  Because of this, and my use of UUCP over dial-up (1200 baud) modems, I gained a strong appreciation of what computers, and the internet, actually are and how they actually work.  This kind of basic understanding has stood me in good stead in a 20 year IT career.

What chance do my children have in an increasinly IT-centric world, if they don’t even understand why that little red light keeps coming on?