Never attribute to malice...
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com, so the pithy statement is never attribute
to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
It is called Hanlon's Razor.
There's a link to the Wikipedia article
with this story in the article that this video is based on.
But it's something that comes to mind
often for me, because there are so many people who,
when they discover a problem or but their heads against their computer or software
or whatever, they are absolutely convinced that malice is, in fact, at play.
When, of course, I'll look at what happened and think
stupidity when it comes to computers and technology actually extend
the aphorism just a little bit further, never attribute to malice that which is
adequately explained by stupidity, error or failure.
Just as it's rarely malice at play, it's not always stupidity.
All people, smart and stupid make mistakes.
Failures happen.
Failure is always an option.
And any or all of those can be used to more than adequately explain so many
of the problems that we encounter on a day to day basis.
Examples.
So what I got is someone who claimed that his ISP was blocking him,
he could not get to a website that other.
Users of that same ISP had no problem getting to.
Clearly to him, his ISP was blocking him,
that could be it is certainly possible.
Doesn't seem likely, but it's possible. And that, of course,
is one of these underlying currents with so many of these assumptions is that,
yeah, sometimes what people jump to is possible.
It's just not very likely.
More likely are things like failures
at his ISPs DNS or it's possible that something he was
doing with that website was mistakenly interpreted as an attack.
Failed logins can do this.
I manage a couple of servers for which getting the password wrong
a certain number of times will cause the server to block you, not your ISP.
It will block you your IP address for a while.
And it's nothing malicious
except that it thought something you were doing was malicious.
Malice is, of course, possible, but again, stupidity along the line also possible.
More than likely, just a failure of some sort.
My computer is behaving oddly, that's one that I get all the time
and people immediately think, oh my gosh, I've been hacked.
No, just no being hacked is almost never
the explanation for odd computer behavior.
Again, I have to say almost never,
because it's plausible it's happened, but it is not the first thing I think of.
Software bugs, hardware bugs, filled updates, flaky Internet connections.
Weren't there just so many different
things that could more than adequately explain the behavior
that being hacked, even though hacking is always in the news because it makes
headlines realize it makes headlines because it doesn't happen that very often.
And the reason that it's news is because it's not common.
It's not happening to you,
I'm very confident in saying if you think you're being hacked,
if you think your computer is behaving oddly and you're being hacked,
you're not being hacked, there's something else going on.
And that's where you should spend your energy.
And, of course, there's always that,
to put it gently, concept of operator malfunction.
It's always embarrassing when the odd behavior.
Turns out to be you, it turns out to be something you've done again.
Yes, it's possible you could be hacked is
just not the first thing to jump to rule out everything else first.
Ads are stalking me.
This is one that I actually have a harder time getting people to accept as not being
malicious because they will visit a website or in some cases
do a search, and then all of a sudden they'll see ads for whatever it is they
were visiting or whatever it is they were searching for.
And I have this happen just recently to me.
I was searching for something.
I didn't do anything with it.
I just looked at something.
I went to a Web site and sure enough, you know, ads on other sites,
ads in my Facebook feed, all relate, should say all.
But many of the ads now relate to what I was looking at several days ago.
That's not malicious.
That's just marketing.
That's just, you know, taking
advantage of the fact that, OK, this person might be interested in this thing.
Let's show them ads about this thing. That's all it is.
And it's not even this person.
It's this computer or this group of people.
They've expressed an interest in these kinds of things.
So we'll show them ads for these kinds of things.
I don't see anything malicious there at all.
I don't really even really see that much of a privacy exploit.
I know many people do.
But as I've said multiple times, you and I as individuals are just not
that interesting masses that go out and buy certain things.
Yeah, they're interesting.
And the fact that you might be one of those masses.
Sure.
That makes sense then that that kind of a thing might get advertised to you.
The one that honestly annoys me the most
are people that say this change, they're just changing things to piss me off.
That, to me is one of the most nonsensical statements you can make.
Businesses don't make changes to alienate their customers.
They just don't
that alienation might happen. Sure.
But that's not the reason they made the change.
They make changes because they think it's
better or they have an agenda or they have a reason.
They have some kind of a reason in the back side that says, yeah,
you know, we need to make this change for this other customer that's big.
We're not trying to piss off the other
customers, but we have this big customer that needs this.
So we're going to change our product to make them happy.
Businesses that don't change and adapt
will die that much as simple change is going to happen.
Change always and I will say this without qualification, always has a reason.
You may not like the reason you may not
agree with the reason you may not want the change.
Nonetheless, the change was not there to piss you off.
So is there malice out there?
Of course there is. Hackers, hack scammers, scam. Spammers, send spam. Businesses,
knowingly leverage your information, sometimes in illegal and malicious ways.
It's not common.
It's not the first thing to jump to when you are having a problem.
But knowing it's there is important.
What is important is to consider all
of the information you have in front of you,
make your assumptions based on what you know, not based on what you've heard or
what you've guessed or what you're worried about.
Don't assume maliciousness
unless you have data that actually shows maliciousness at play.
If you first focus on maliciousness rather
than what's more likely to be happening, not only will you end up
generating more anxiety for yourself, you'll be wasting time.
You'll be wasting time chasing down things that don't actually solve the problem.
You might be facing focus instead on what's likely and work from there.
I hope this was helpful for links related to this topic.
For updates, for comments and more, visit askleo.com/83944.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.