Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Defrag, reboot, and virus protection

I let my brother load his IPOD at my house. He had some weird setting on it that allowed him to load like a billion songs, they all showed in my ITUNES library, but they could only be listened to on his IPOD. We couldn’t listen to them on ITUNES, and we couldn’t download them to any of our IPOD’s. Should be harmless enough, right? Well, Cox Security does this thing that I was not aware of. They scan your computer. And they found one song that was a file sharing violation. They shut off my internet. This really ticked me off. One stinking song that we couldn’t and wouldn’t listen to. No notification via phone call or e-mail, just shut it off with a pop up notice to let me know. So I fixed the violation, clicked the button to reconnect, and guess what? Their automated fix didn’t reconnect my internet. So 70 minutes later, after talking to customer service, the automated system, two tech services guys, two supervisors, suffering 36 hours without internet, two dropped calls, being talked down to by two tech services guys (YES, I do know where the command prompt key is, and I do know how to type the word config, and I do know what it means when they talk about releasing my IP address), my internet was back up.
I don’t like the idea that someone is watching what I do and I’m not aware of it. I didn’t do anything illegal, I didn’t have a song on my computer that we could listen to that was illegal, and my brother does own the CD that the song was recorded on. The appearance to this security scan was that I had done something illegal. Actually, I had just done a favor for my brother. My choices, as I see them, are to get rid of the internet, or accept that someone has access to everything on my computer. I will be cleaning up files, and saving some files to disks, but does that really matter? Once they are saved to my hard drive, can I ever really get them off? There really isn’t much on my computer for someone to hack into. (I have had my purse stolen, so all my information has been compromised, as well as my information was on a company laptop that was stolen from an employee so I’m doubly in trouble).
Then when I read Proverbs 15 this morning, verse 3 really spoke to me. “The Lord is watching everywhere, keeping his eye on both the evil and the good.” Someone is watching everything I do. External and internal. This concerns me more than the computer. I may fool some of the people with my external actions, but I don’t ever fool God because he “scans my hard drive”. I need to “defrag” and “reboot” and definitely utilize my virus protector (is it sacrilegious to call God my “virus protector”)?

I’m way more afraid of God watching then I am afraid of Cox. (But I’m still ticked about Cox).

3 comments:

  1. As we see the day approaching, may the Lord have mercy on us and pour out gifts of increasing discernment upon the body of Christ.

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  2. I had never really thought about it that way. Awesome post!!

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  3. What an awesome post I never thought of it that way. I like God as my "virus protector"

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