It's a fact of modern life that we have to learn new skills if we are to keep up with the younger generation.
I don't mean we have to wear pants that could sleep a family of six, baseball caps with the beak sticking out to one side and adopt hand movements as if we are "scratching" on twin "decks" while "kicking rhymes".
What I mean is that as we get older and everything gets more complicated, we need to adapt to the technology of the day.
Our grandparents had radio and television to contend with, while our parents broke in video-recorders, CD audio technology and alarm clocks. While many are still 12:00 flashers (they never remember how to set the clock, hence the display shows a perennially-flashing 12:00), they did their best in an ever- changing technological landscape.
Fast-forward a decade and computers are our toy of choice. Many lament that computers are hugely complicated contraptions that we love to hate and the first time they break down we find we can't do without them.
The kicker is we need to learn all that computer lingo - words and terms we must know if we are to ever be the master of our machines.
Take cars, for example. We have to know at least some related jargon so we can explain what is wrong to our mechanic.
A typical exchange goes like this; "The engine makes a funny noise and won't start".
This, of course, isn't much help and the mechanic has to practically start from scratch to assess the problem.
On the other hand, if we rocked up and said "the cam-belt perambulator has failed, forcing a piston and valve contraction in the number three pot which caused the big-end to choke the gudgeon pin journal and now we're pretty certain the head will need to be planed", our mechanic would probably give us one of those looks that they reserve for "special" customers.
It may surprise you to learn that the computer universe is very close to this example.
It seems everyone knows someone who "knows about computers" and often those in the computer repair business only see machines after they have passed through several pairs of "helping" hands, which, it turns out, often make things worse.
My point is, there is all this computer-related jargon we have to learn, just to give the impression we know what we are doing.
Even something as simple as surfing the internet involves seemingly mission-critical messages telling us to make sure "cookies are enabled", or "Javascript is turned on" and other equally mysterious dialogues.
What does it all mean? What happens if we click Yes and navigate away from a secure site without it being encrypted? Will we be robbed? And aren't cookies dangerous?
Didn't we hear that allowing scripts to run spreads viruses? Our anti-malware software keeps finding "tracking cookies" and makes it sound like we should be scared.
Should we be? Well, yes and no.
Like everything with computers, the issue isn't so cut and dried.
To help websites be more clever, developers use snippets of code to make everything work properly. Cookies are just small scripts that are temporarily stored on our machines while we surf the web and are used for a wide variety of tasks like security, tracking our movements within the site, helping with logins, forms and shopping-cart systems, or simply to help sites provide the best content for our particular web browser.
Other scripts and Browser Helper Objects are there to make certain everything works as it should. This is a widely acceptable use of web technology.
The problem is that anything used for good can also be used by bad people to do bad things.
For example, very few cookies are malicious, but most anti-virus (AV) software treats them as a potential threat because one might be nasty.
Besides, AV software likes to be seen to be doing something to justify the price tag or, if it is free, validating your decision to use it.
Shopping sites like Amazon require you to have cookies enabled because, besides other uses, the shopping-cart system uses cookies to keep track of your products and purchases.
While it is unlikely you will ever see a truly malicious cookie, they are a reality, which is why opening your browser settings and enabling "delete cookies on exit" is a good idea.
Likewise, JavaScript and other scripting can be malicious but the majority of it is harmless. My advice is surf with JavaScript and cookies disabled and simply turn them on if required.
Learning any new language is hard but you only need to know a few choice words to be computer literate. I'll leave it up to you to decide which ones.
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