Beware of Malware

Now that my newish Dell laptop is maturing into a slightly slower, slightly more problematic machine, the free-trial McAfee software is starting to play hard to get. Thus I receive this type of welcome little pop-up every day or so:

Wow. Two hundred and sixty in the last minute? Congrats McAfee. You've  been hard at work!

Yes, I realize that when you want to know who is responsible for something (such as anti-virus creation), two of the prime criteria are: Who is the authority on the matter? (virus creators). And 2: Who profits from something (such as virus creation)? (Answer: anti-virus companies and their employees).

I know that if I was being paid to fight viruses, I'd be tempted to launch a few out there to ensure my ongoing employment.

Oh dear! Are these the mad ramblings of a conspiracy theorist!

I prefer to call  it cautionary logic. And as a matter of principal I don't do business with suspected extortionists.

Also I've become too old for porn. So really, what do I have to be worried about! I've tried to stick to mainstream web sites for years and not come down with any viruses of any consequence.

Well, except possibly for once, years ago, when I used to receive a bounty of lost-and-unreturnable  jump drives which I thought I was using carefully. But one day I received one which contained among many other things, some pictures of young people which were probably not illegal but fairly certainly betrayed a previous owner's unfortunate sexual proclivity. I deleted them but later, strangely, some of them turned up on my computer along with other bland documents not of my creation. All of this I deleted only to later find some of them, along with my own files, sitting around on a different jump drive. I don't know if this was an actual virus  or just some kind of file reconciliation process gone rogue, but after more file deleting and garbage-tossing of suspected jump drives, I've gone years without this meddlesome (and potentially reputation-damaging) phenomena turning up.

Cutting to the chase: DO NOT TRUST UNKNOWN JUMP DRIVES! I actually buy my own now. Like a big boy.