Random Scary Internet Conspiracy Theories (15 items)

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  (#7) Superfish

  Your computer almost certainly either has been or is currently infected with some kind of ad-serving malware that broadcasts your personal information and passwords, and makes you vulnerable to serious hack attacks. This is the lesson of the Superfish debacle, when computer manufacturer Lenovo took a very public punch in the mouth after being exposed for installing this visual shopping adware on its recent computer models.

  Users were unaware that the software had been included, or that it was making it possible for ads to be placed on secure websites, and passwords from those sites to be intercepted and downloaded by third parties. The risk was so great that the Department of Homeland Security advised users uninstall the root kit and delete its accompanying certificates, due to the risk it posed for an organized cyber attack from another country.
  
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  (#13) China Is Taking Over the Internet

  Conspiracy theorists lit up with news in March 2014 that President Obama was going to be handing control of the Internet over to hostile regimes in Russia and China. The crux of the complaint was that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is the non-profit that controls Internet domain names and assignments, was going to become an independent corporation, free of US oversight, when its contract with the US government expired in late 2015.

  While Obama opponents and one-world-government types saw it as an unacceptable breach of US sovereignty, others pointed out that America does not, in fact, run the Internet.
  
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  (#11) Telematics

  Employers have long had the ability to monitor every keystroke their employees make on work computers. But the fairly new data science of telematics takes that monitoring one step further. It allows your boss to calculate and develop metrics for every single thing you do at work, developing algorithms for service oriented positions that can determine how much you work, what you make, and even if you keep your job.

  Telematics monitors, logs, and tracks how long it takes to edit a document, serve a customer, whether you upsell, if you have to ring something up twice, or even how many steps you take in an office. All of this data is stored, and can easily be hacked into – when it’s not being used to determine your workplace destiny.
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  (#12) The Great Firewall of China

  China’s Golden Shield Project is an ongoing effort to track, watch, and log everything China’s billion citizens do on the Internet – when it’s not simply blocking them from going where they want. The “Great Firewall of China” prohibits users from doing anything that might “harm national security; disclose state secrets; or injure the interests of the state or society, […] create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit information that incites resistance to the PRC Constitution, laws, or administrative regulations; promote the overthrow of the government or socialist system; undermines national unification; distort the truth, spread rumors, or destroy social order; or provide sexually suggestive material or encourage gambling, violence, or murder.”

  Needless to say, this can be interpreted to be just about anything, leading to an odious amount of censorship.
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  (#4) Remote Car Hacking

  With “the Internet of things” becoming more and more of a reality, it’s not a nightmare scenario for hackers to be able to insert code into the brakes, engine, or locks of an Internet-enabled car and take control of it. According to former White House counter-terrorism head Richard Clarke, “There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers - including the United States - know how to remotely seize control of a car.”

  Whether this has ever actually happened is debatable – some conspiracy theorists believe journalist Michael Hastings was “taken out” in one such attack, though evidence doesn’t support it. But clearly there is at least a theoretical, if not an easily achieved, way to use the Internet to take control of a car and make it do things its rightful owner doesn't want it to do.
  
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  (#14) Obama Is Going to Ban Internet Conspiracy Theories

  Did a high-ranking official in the Obama administration really say that he sought to ban the dissemination of conspiracy theories on the Internet? Sort of. Cass Sunstein was head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House for three years, where he was seen as Obama’s “information czar” and someone who wanted to exert socialist control over the American population.

  But before this, he had authored a paper called “Conspiracy Theories” that stated one way a government could get a handle on out of control speculation would be to simply ban it.

  Sunstein never actually advocated that the Obama administration do this, nor would they have any legal justification to do so. Plus, one look at the Internet proves that conspiracy theories aren’t going anywhere, no matter what any paper says.

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