Stupid 'puter pricks

Oh, dear, I did that stupid thing where you see an e-mail and click on it even as you know you shouldn't, and the spiders and vipers come pouring out of Pandora's box—warnings of viruses and identity theft and file destruction. The message was addressed to me from ceaifacutma@aol.com claiming I had not paid for an item I had won on eBay and threatening me with negative feedback. I knew that I hadn't bid on anything on eBay, and I knew that even if I had, a bona-fide seller would contact me through eBay and not directly. The subject line was accusatory, and it raised my defensive hackles. And even though every neuron in my brain screamed, "No!," my finger said, "Yes." And now I'm waiting to find out whether my iTouch will live up to Apple's reputation for fortification against such attacks or whether I will lose all my lovely downloads—a year's worth of This American Life podcasts, a half-dozen movies, my carefully created address book, all those kirtans and Bob Dylan relics, and my e-books (Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Lewis Carroll's Alice) ...