New Orleans   The current global ransomware hack impacting 74 countries could gross the bad guys up to $3 billion, experts say. A couple of intrepid computer guys, one in Britain and another in the US, thwarted the hacking temporarily in a couple of lucky moves, reportedly. Many believe its impact will continue to be felt as more computers fire up this week.

Digging deeper it turns out once the finger pointing starts that computers are susceptible when they are not updated. A kneejerk reaction is to say, whoops, someone got lazy here or there, but it’s more complicated. Much of it has to do with the business model of Microsoft and the rest of the tech monopolies. They discontinued “supporting,” which really means fixing, Microsoft XP, so if you were a huge outfit that had paid them millions for XP, like FedEx or the British National Health Service, if you didn’t move all of your thousands of computers over to whatever their latest product was, then you were a sitting duck.

Anyone who has a computer operating on Microsoft Windows has mixed feelings about the way they do these updates. On Windows 7, the number of times I might wake up and find that overnight my computer had been updated without so much as a nevermind, and I had lost whatever websites were on my browser for study or had to recover Word and Excel files endlessly, there was time lost and cursing involved. Then in an update recently my computer was caught in an endless update cycle until Windows 10 was installed, their latest shot at the world, forcing me to start all over on everything. Suddenly, 10 doesn’t recognize my camera, and it won’t let me send emails from a right-click from my Passport or tape recorder. They do kind of let you schedule updates, but it’s all brute force. Bottom line, it’s easy to imagine tech departments in a lot of big shops, deciding to pick and choose and turn off updates until they are good and ready, but the notion that Microsoft can sell a product and then stop supporting it is absurd. When my car breaks, GM and Ford will still have the parts and fix it, regardless of how old my vehicle or how many miles I have on it.

Apple is certainly no better, and possibly worse. I’m still trying to figure out how to recover all my iTunes that are supposedly on their cloud, but now they are claiming they don’t recognize any of my passwords, and don’t email me a the protocol for a new one. A friend lost all of what they had on their iPod when they got a different computer. I have the same old, beat-up computer, but I’m in a new world. Google…hmm… maybe better but trying to get on their Project Fi phone program for international calls, they didn’t ever say exactly that the version of the phone it accepted has an X on it, and won’t take any responsibility. Wonder why so many people buy stuff from Amazon, they actually refund on mistakes and have some customer service.

So, hey, we’re all on computers, and we’re all vulnerable, and a lot of us are techno-peasants, and I’ll admit it, so we’re going to mess up, but these huge tech monopolies are treating us like cattle, rather than customers, and that’s going to mean more worldwide computer meltdowns. Don’t blame the victims, and be careful even on the criminals, because the tech monopolies are creating and enabling these disasters.