About that order you didn't request ...

The creativity and persistence of perpetrators of email "phishing" scams never cease to amaze me. The latest trend in this bizarre underworld of massive amounts of email sent to naive (or thought to be naive) email users is the email designed to look like an innocent business transaction.

I've received a large number of emails that alert me that payment is due on the order I sent or that I need to confirm my order before it can be shipped or that information on the payment owed to me is in the attached file. Only thing is, I didn't place an order, don't need to confirm any order and am not owed any payments from these enigmatic senders. I'm confident that if I were to click on the attached file or the embedded link, I would find my computer infested with malware, a virus or who knows what.

The fact that I have received nearly identical emails, right down to the subject lines of the emails, several time in one day, all from different senders, shows me the ubiquity of this latest scam. Word is apparently getting around in the phishing community that these fake orders and payments work better than the Nigerian prince who wants to deposit $6 million in your bank account.

The popularity among phishers for this ruse indicates to me that the scam is successful. There must be millions of infected computers around the world right now as a result of curious people clicking to see what they had ordered or what was owed to them.

The Internet has made it easier for thieves to find and steal from their victims. No need for guns or threats; their weapon is their victims' curiosity. That natural curiosity is probably wiping out bank accounts and ruining expensive computers.

Celebrate the 30th birthday of a revolutionary

I'm writing this post on a Macintosh computer, 30 years after the Mac was introduced to the world in that memorable Super Bowl "Big Brother" commercial. At that time, my family had a PC Jr., or maybe it was an earlier Radio Shack computer. We could do little more than word processing on whatever it was. There was no Internet, and the only things online were birds and fallen limbs.

The Mac was revolutionary (which justifies the Super Bowl commercial) with its small, monochrome screen and its (voila!) mouse. The computers I used at the newspaper in those days were very basic, monochrome DOS machines with a blinking green cursor and green type. Commands had to be written in arcane code to do something as simple as boldface or italicize a word. There was no mouse and no icons.

It was a lot like the Apple IIC computer that I used in a BASIC programming class I took at Atlantic Christian College in 1981. Everything was in code, and you better get it right! The early Apples had been heavily marketed to schools, and many of today's adults got their introduction to computing on Apple IIs.

My wife got to use one of the early Macs when she went to work as a church secretary in the mid-1980s. She soon mastered the word processing, page layout and spreadsheet functions, creating her own church software package. Macs swept the newspaper business, and sometime in the late 1980s, my newspaper bought one Mac for the use of the entire newsroom. We used it for designing logos and occasionally for getting online. Later, the Associated Press stopped sending photos via its patented Laserphoto scanning machine and began posting photos online so that member newspaper could download them, via that Mac computer.

When that Mac, which cost about $8,000 with its software, monitor, printer, etc. became archaic, I purchased it from the newspaper for a few hundred dollars, and it became our family computer. We could dial up to get on AOL, and we used the installed word processing and other software. We used the mouse to get around.

It was the 1990s before the newspaper invested in Macs for the entire newsroom, and we became a truly connected newsroom for the first time. I loved the Mac and got into good-natured arguments with my older brother, a long-time IBM employee who sneered at all things Apple.

The newspaper stuck with Macs for as long as I was there. We had the basic rectangular box Macs and the short-lived Mac Cube (with its "toaster" CD drive), some early iMacs and some eMacs. When we were contemplating a major software change in the 1990s, we considered dumping Macs because Apple Computer was deeply troubled and rumored to be headed for bankruptcy. Then Steve Jobs returned, the iMac and iPod came along, and Apple became one of the most admired and loved companies in the world.

When our oldest daughter went off to college, we bought her an electric typewriter. Four years later, when her sister headed to college, we bought her a used Mac Classic — which looked just like the original 1984 Mac. When her Mac's screen failed to light up, I purchased from a friend (for shipping charges only) an original Mac — one without a hard drive; everything was on those revolutionary 3.5 inch discs — in hopes that I could swap out the monitors (picture tubes) and have her Mac working again. When I got the case off (no easy task, by the way), I discovered that the "yoke" that held the wires connecting the monitor to the guts of the computer had fallen off when she hauled the computer home from college. I put the yoke back, and it continued to serve her needs. I ended up using that original Mac for a bookend.

Our family is on its sixth or seventh Mac, some bought new, some bought used. My current working companion is a Mac Mini, a cube barely larger than a CD case that has all the speed and computing power I need. It's hooked to an HP monitor (I went cheap). We've had three iMacs, none of them the fruit-colored plastic blob that was the original iMac style, and now we own iPods, iPhones and iPads, too.

Computers have come a long way, and so have we, in the last 30 years. The ingenious, revolutionary Mac led the way.

Computer glitch brings household to a halt

A simple glitch late Saturday afternoon almost brought our household to a grinding halt. My wife noticed that our Internet connection was down. No e-mail. No Web surfing. No connection to the "outside world" — unless you count the telephone and cable television, which we weren't. She walked her way through the diagnostics to check the computer's Internet connection to no avail. I also checked the connection without finding the problem, and I went upstairs to check the other computer to see if it might still be connected. It wasn't, so the problem was not just in our "main" computer but had to be in the cable modem or the wireless router that kept our two household computers, plus my wife's work laptop that she uses more and more often at night to complete job-related tasks, connected to the world.

With a nice dinner with our son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and a national basketball semi-final game awaiting us, we decided to wait until morning to try to fix our computer problem. But it nagged at me through the night and was among my first thoughts on Sunday morning. We keep our downstairs computer going 24/7. No one walks past the computer (in a high-traffic corner) without checking to see if any e-mail has arrived. We habitually check the weather (our browser's home page), and my wife will check for any activity on her social networking site. I check for any comments posted to this blog several times a day. And I do nearly daily searches of job listing in my search for a new career.

We're hooked on high-speed Internet. We might be able to give up cable TV (now that college basketball season is nearly over and college football hasn't begun). We might even get by without a land-line telephone. I might even give up my cell phone. But not high-speed Internet. We use it to send and receive photos, to communicate with children and other relatives in distant locales. When we can't remember something or don't know the answer or want to know more about anything, we "google it." And there are a gazillion YouTube videos I haven't seen yet (I was just watching the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing "Take Five," "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and "Unsquare Dance").

Our computers have been reliable. We bought a cast-off Macintosh from my newspaper employer 10 or 12 years ago and have been Mac people since then (though my wife works in Windows at her job). The computer on which this is being written is 7 or 8 years old and has never given us any trouble. We bought our "new" computer about five years ago to get the new features (a DVD burner and faster processor) that we wanted. I added a wireless card to this computer and bought a wireless router so that we could have Internet access on both computers. It's not unusual to find both of us on the Internet at the same time. 

Sunday morning I sat down at the computer and called our Internet provider. Because it was before 7 a.m., I was quickly connected to a tech person, who began walking me through the diagnostics. As I was about to follow her directive to restart the wireless router, I found the trouble: The ethernet cable from the modem to the router had come loose. Although I had checked the connection before, the looseness had gone unnoticed. I reseated the cable. Problem solved.

We are connected again. Hallelujah!