Phishers of Memes

Sometimes, my friends worry me.

I don't mean normal worries, like are they home safe or are they happy or how are their children worries -- those are a normal part of the give and take of friendship.
Lately. I have worried, probably way too much, over how gullible they are to "just for fun" Facebook memes.

It started with the silly holiday names. Mostly they go by initials, but some are poking around for your birthdate. Or someone else's initials, such as your first child's. Or maybe your father's.Those are harmless, for the most part. The phishers are building themselves a "just for fun" reputation.

Once that is achieved, the goal becomes one's birthdate, in all its unedited glory.
You see, on Facebook, many of us are wise enough to not put the year. The day, yeah, but the year is questionable.
Because one of the cues/clues to your credit/financial identity is your full birthdate.

So how old were you in 1969? I can do math enough to know that if you were 11 that means you were born in 1958. And if I can figure it out, believe me, someone smart enough to code can do so in half the time. They may even have a chart.

Now, they -- either the memes or the phishers; you choose -- have become a bit more nosy. Now they have people posting their family tree by last name. I am a who. My dad was a who. His mother was a what. My mother was a why. Her mother was a how.

What is the standard security question for online access to financial accounts?
Mother's maiden name.
BINGO!

You have given them information not only to your accounts, but also to those of your mother and your father, and possibly your grandparents, if you went back another generation.

I have seen where some say, "Yes, but the information is out there anyway. If they want it that bad, they can find it."
True, but why on earth would they go looking when you just hand it to them? If you don't play along, someone else will.
Do you really think they care WHO they defraud? They'll take everybody they can get.

And boy do they get a lot.

Phishers bait their hooks, cast their lines, and plan their next trip.
Already the memes are sneaking in to spell your child's name with the last four letters of your dad's middle name and the first initial of your maiden name.

What will you fall for next?
And who will be to blame when your, or your parents, bank accounts are emptied and the credit cards maxed out?

How fun is that?

Writer's Dilemma: Diagnosis

Fellow writers, what would you do? What do you think?


I have written two things that include oddities -- one an illness; the other a behavior. Some of the feedback I have received is that I should be telling (not good storycrafting) what the diagnosis is or explaining the behavior.

The illness is the story of a child who died and her father.  the story is set somewhat ambiguously in the 1940s, USA. The disease that the child died of was not even named until 1938, and that was in Canada.
Therefore, at the time of the story, there was no diagnosis.
None.
Treatment was of the symptoms as they arose.

The fact is, I didn't know myself what the disease was until I had finished writing the vignettes, and looked up the symptoms myself. Not quite a textbook case -- are they ever, really? -- but variations were within the norms for the condition.

In the story, the illness went undiagnosed, even after the death of the child.
Because there was, in that time period, no (or rare) formal diagnosis for it.

It was what it was, and so was the outcome. Those involved had to deal with the situation as it occurred, with no answers.

That was the story.

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The other situation was part of a novel, a character trait that was not consistent with the character's general development. An irregularity in verbalizing, even though the character had an enormous (for his age and the times) vocabulary with a good understanding of most words and the ability to guess accurately the meaning of unfamiliar words.

In the novel, the child's caretakers do notice and try to have this idiosyncrasy checked out. They mention at different times that this that or the other was done. A thorough physical, and the boy's hearing was tested, even though that seemed an unlikely cause since he could understand.
In the end, the adults decided it was just a quirk in the child's development and let it be, just keeping an eye on it as he ages.

It isn't really a BIG IMPORTANT detail, just, as I said, something of a character quirk.

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In both cases, or in either case, inserting today's knowledge in a yesterday's story doesn't seem right to me.
I also have not been able to figure out how I would do it, if I wanted to. (Which I don't.)


It speaks loudly and is a sad commentary that readers want everything put in a box, sorted, and labelled, don't you think? I wonder why it is this way. Does this approach really make anyone happier? Are children no longer allowed to be themselves, unique?

There are still undiagnosable conditions, especially in children.
There are still unexplainable idiosyncracies in childhood development.
There are still unique characters whose entire existence is outside the box.

What's most alarming is that these demands were made, not by everyday readers, but by other writers.
Make no mistake, these were demands. One critiquer was infuriated that I did not tell her and every other reader what was wrong with that boy. In her opinion, if I didn't explain it, I shouldn't write it that way.
And she had only read an excerpt. Even when I explained that the 'issue' was addressed in other parts of the book, she was still insistent that nothing undiagnosed, unexplained, or unlabelled could be in the story.

If out creative peoples are thinking and writing this way, what hope is there for the individualists in our world and the world to come?