two-pot screamer dot com

I hate using Internet cafes. I mean really hate using them. Using an Internet cafe is like using one of the portable toilets at the end of a hot day at a large music festival. You prefer to just hold on as long as you can, but sometimes you just have to … download a … big … batch … of email.

Keyboards stained brown with dead skin cells and grease don’t worry me. Studies that show that the average toilet seat is cleaner than the average computer mouse don’t faze me. The thing that makes my skin crawl is that moment when I have to type my passwords into a strange computer.

Last week I met a girl who did all her Internet banking in Internet cafes. I commented that she was probably reasonably safe because she wouldn’t have enabled electronic transfers, and getting that feature enabled was a paper-based process that involved the postal system. She replied that of course she had electronic transfers enabled, what use would it be otherwise? I think the groan and forehead clutching tipped her off that something was wrong. By the end of the conversation she was thoroughly (and justifiably) paranoid. I’m not sure that the concept of “untrusted client” really sunk in though. She will probably just restrict her financial transactions to her spyware-infested home computer.

The more you know about how computers work the less likely you are to trust them. Cryptography and computer security expert Bruce Schneier doesn’t do any financial transactions with a PC. I’m happy to use my firewalled, patched, and locked down home computer for financial transactions, but I wouldn’t use any other computer. And millions of innocents are more than happy to hand their passwords over to anyone who cares to run a keystroke logger on a public Internet terminal.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 13th, 2005 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.