Like ‘The Fonz,’ I was wrong
One of the funniest episodes of the old TV show “Happy Days” involved super-cool Fonzie having to admit he was wrong about something. He couldn’t even say the word. “I was … wrrr …” He just couldn’t do it.
Not me. I am wrong quite often. Just ask my wife.
For instance, a few decades ago, a friend told me he had been asked to invest in something called cable television. He explained the concept. It would revolutionize the way we watch TV, he said. No longer would we be limited to three channels. We would soon have 20 or 30. There was a catch: a monthly fee.
I laughed out loud. “No one is ever going to pay to watch TV,” I told him. “Not when you can get it for free!” He never let me forget that.
I also never believed that bottled water would catch on. Back in our country store, neither my dad nor I could imagine people buying water. I wonder what he would say about putting six quarters in a machine to buy air for your tires. A machine, I might add, that may or may not work.
I was also wrong about soccer and hockey. I never believed either sport would thrive in the South.
In fact, I doubted that Nashville would support a pro hockey team. “Come on,” I said. We’ve got the SEC, the NFL, NASCAR, the Braves, and rasslin’.” If anyone had asked me, I would have told them to take their puck and go home. Down here, “icing” is what Mama puts on the carrot cake.
How wrong was I? Well, the Nashville Predators are huge. And if you put a soccer game and a baseball game side by side, I guarantee you’ll find more kids kicking a ball than swinging at one.
Last, but not least, I was seriously wrong about surveillance cameras. I thought they would take a big bite out of crime.
My television station features a report called “Crime Stoppers,” which started long before the “caught on camera” phenomenon. When we began airing the stories, we created re-enactments, hiring amateur actors to simulate a particular crime. Some of the actors played the perpetrators, and others played the victims. We gave viewers a look at where and how the crime took place, and we used sketches when victims were able to describe the suspect.
Now that security cameras are everywhere, we have pretty much stopped doing re-enactments. We can usually show the real thing. What were once fuzzy black-and-white images are now full-color and high-definition. Also, the cameras are no longer confined to stores. For about a hundred bucks, you can put one on your front porch and in your living room. Every night on the news, the video is there for all to see. If you steal something today, there’s a good chance you will be on TV, the internet, and the front page tomorrow.
Yet, I was wrong about these cameras. I was naive enough to think that they would put a huge dent in crime. Who in their right mind, I thought, would even think about holding up a cashier, snatching a purse in a parking lot, or grabbing a package from your front porch? It seemed obvious to me the crime rate would plummet.
However, various studies done in the U.S. and Great Britain show that surveillance cameras have little to no positive impact on crime. In several of the case studies, crime actually increased after the cameras were installed. Now, get this: the cameras often aid in solving the crimes, but they have not prevented the next batch of criminals from breaking and entering.
One police officer told me, “There are websites devoted to the dumbest criminals caught on camera. We laugh at them to keep from crying. I think some of them know they are on camera, but they are so high, they just don’t care.” He continued, “For some of them, they steal to support their habit. Others do it for the rush. They got away with it before, so they take it a step further. That security camera is low on their list of concerns. They are shocked when we arrest them. They have no idea they have been on the news. I don’t think they watch a lot of TV. They have other forms of recreation.”
A judge added, “They are criminals, pure and simple. This is what they do. They’ll follow a UPS truck, just to see them put a package on your porch.”
So while the cameras may help the police catch that crook, they don’t seem to prevent the one right behind him.
Maybe someday, I won’t be wrong quite as often. In fact, I’m hearing that fewer people are paying to watch TV now. Maybe I was right about that, after all.
David Carroll, a Chattanooga news anchor, can be reached by mail at 900 Whitehall Road, Chattanooga, TN 37405 or by email at 3dc@epbfi. com.
You will often see that when setting a password, they require a strong or complex password. People have often used the same weak password or use the same password everywhere. Both these are problems. The most used password is password or password123, according to studies, and used about 70 percent of the time the studies say. This makes it very easy for hackers to break into your accounts.
The second problem is that people use the same password on all their accounts. Easy to remember but if your password is in information stolen in the various reports of large numbers of accounts information stolen, hackers don’t just know your password to that site but all sites you use.
You don’t have to have totally different passwords by sites to be impossible to remember but either a pattern to know how changed or using a mnemonic by the site.
A complex or strong password is one that contains lower-case letters, upper-case letters, numbers and special characters and usually at least 8 characters, although some require longer. For instance, we can make password a strong or complex password by changing to the following: P@ssw0rd. This becomes much harder to guess and dictionary attacks will not work where they go through using a list of words from the dictionary or known passwords.
If your name is Jane Doe and you were creating a password for Gmail you might make a password like D0gma1le where Gmail is inside “Doe” and characters switched. You could also take a phrase like Jane Doe Gmail account and use the first two letters from each word and change a to @ and o to 0 and get Jad0gm@c. That looks like it is totally random but has a pattern you can remember.
There are also password managers out there that will keep up with all passwords and/or assign random passwords. I do not use them, as I have this fear on all passwords stored in one location of hackers hacking them and stealing information and now they have all my passwords, usernames and accounts. They may not have been hacked yet, but they will be. There is not a 100 percent site, you just try to keep it as close to that as you can, and that keeps changing.
Send me your questions about computers to me at the paper or to my email dwight@dwightwatt.com and tell me you read this in this paper. I will pick a question to answer each week.
Dwight Watt does computer work for businesses, individuals and organizations and teaches about computers at a college in NW Georgia. His webpage is www.dwightwatt.com His email address is dwight@dwightwatt.com.