World War III or IV has begun!

Email to President Barack Obama via whitehouse.gov.

You are considering what to do about the atrocities committed in Syria, but if history is any guide, you will be fighting the wrong war.  You will be fighting an aerial bomb war but somebody has already started an electronic war.  Your bomb war will only make the electronic war worse.

The Syrian Electronic Army has already claimed to shut down the New York Times web site twice.  What have they done besides annoy a lot of people.  We don't know, but they may have stolen passwords and credit card information.  We don't know, but they may have planted little viruses that change a story or even plant their own stories.  We don't know, but they may spread a virus to the computers of readers of the New York Times.  I do know that after attempting to access the New York Times I had more and more difficulty accessing other sites.

How will your aerial bomb war make the electronic war worse?  Your bomb war will recruit more electronic warriors on behalf of Syria, and this will happen without any help from the Syrian government.  Many of these warriors may not even be in Syria.  Are you going to bomb Moscow because the Syrian Electronic Army's site is hosted in Russia?

And the more Syrian Electronic Army Units there are, the more damage they can do.  Bring down NASDAQ?  It recently had an outage.  Was it a coding error?  Or was it an attack?  What other weevils lurk in the hearts of these men?  Instead of stealth bombers, you need to find lots of Shadows!

See also http://magree.blogspot.com/2013/08/syria-letter-to-president-of-united.html.

No spam!!

Yesterday I had not a single piece of spam to my main mail account. Unbelievable! Maybe word got out that I report bank spoofs to the banks and to the FTC. Maybe my name has been taken off the spammers' lists.

But like one cold day doesn't disprove global warming, one spam-free day doesn't prove spam has disappeared. As of this posting I had received one spam today.

Where did that anti-virus ad come from?

Yesterday I was reading the New York Times online and went to a commentary entitled "Democracy 2.0" but instead got a window that said I had a virus on my computer and should get a certain anti-virus software. I couldn't cancel the window; I couldn't get any other window, and I couldn't quit my browser. So, I just rebooted.

When I tried "Democracy 2.0" again everything worked fine.

I didn't think I had a virus and sent feedback to the New York Times.

Today, cnet.news had an article, "Rogue ad hits New York Times site". It described everything I encountered yesterday.