James L Adams—People and Products

Bad Guys (?) and Good Guys (?) on the Internet

I have just finished an amusing and to me enlightening book entitled Internet (how crime went online and the cops followed) Police, by Nate Anderson, deputy editor at Ars Technica—see recommended books list on the left.  It is a series of cases of abuse of the internet and the attempt by various people to stop it.  Among other things, it highlights the disagreement between those who think the internet should be free and uncontrolled, and those who think it should at least follow the laws that pertain to written material and intellectual property.  Unfortunately, it is a very different media than paper, and easier to abuse than control, even if you believe it needs more control.  I have no doubt that it will be controlled more tightly as it grows, because that seems to be what happens when populations increase, and when anonymity is easy, money is to be made, and billions of people are involved, many of whom do not particularly revere the internet and view it as a source of quick money rather than something to cherish.

 Since I do not follow this topic in detail I found the cases quite extraordinary.  One of them, for instance, concerns a man named Nikolaenko, a Russian citizen, who quietly over time built a spambot network based on a virus he designed that infected more than 500,000 computers that would send out spam at his command.  It is estimated that at one time his network was producing over 30% of the spam in the world, and Nikolaenko was making millions from his clients.  He was finally identified, and apprehended during a visit to the U.S. (Russia does not punish its own citizens for such antics).  But U.S. courts could not do much with him, because spam, although very annoying, is difficult to prosecute, because those who do it claim freedom of speech, and old laws don’t seem to have much effect. 

 Notice that despite the “no call” attempt on the part of the government, telephone marketing is back in full force and even more annoying because it does not now involve real people.  We are thinking of dropping our land line, but marketing ads are now showing up on cell phones.  The trash quotient for our phone is on a par with the trash quotient in our surface mail (lots).  But the trash quotient in my e-mail is worse, and still growing rapidly.  And to make it even more insulting,  phishers are not even bothering to correct their spelling any more.

 A similar case involved a man named Steven Warshak, who founded a company that eventually was selling thirteen different medicines over the internet that supposedly increased penis size. He too was making millions, although the medicines not only didn’t work, they really didn’t exist.  He too was identified, but also escaped the punishment he would have received for fraud in the days of written documents.

 I knew there were problems in the internet, but not the extent of them, and how difficult it is to prosecute what many of us call “computer crime”, or “internet crime”.

 The book is well written, easy to read, and gives a good picture of the problems people have who are trying to police the internet. You will be biased as to how bad the problem is, but having recently gone through the exercise of sending an invoice overseas for some consulting I did, it seems to me that things are getting worse.  Sniffers love to find the word invoice, especially on overseas messages, because there is usually lots of valuable information on such things.  And I am also enduring Stanford University’s frantic attempts to escape hacking through two layers of passwords, one designed to foil sniffers,and therefore un-memorizable by humans,  and the other a constantly changing set of random numbers (encryption is coming), It seems to me that the usefulness of the internet is radically decreasing as a result of lack of control, and lack of laws that fit the media and its international nature.

The Hay Squeeze, a Good Product

I was visiting my older son on his farm a couple of days ago, and he was facing moving some 750 bales of hay into his barn from a large stack of them a hundred yards or so away.  He has three large Belgian work horses, and they consume a great deal of oat hay.  Granted this is more than a year’s supply, but he had planted more oat hay than necessary, sold some at a high price, and wanted to keep quite a bit inside of his barn, where it will last at least a year without being attacked by mold and other such things.

 When I was younger, I would occasionally come up against bales of hay, usually to make myself archery targets and such things, since my family had graduated to tractors and no longer kept horses.  I still move them around occasionally, but it is not easy, especially in the hot sun.  A well packed bale can weight upward of 100 pounds, and hay hooks can hold one, but the result takes a fair amount of muscle, especially if the goal is to stack them.

 Fortunately, Bob has a friend who owns a hay squeeze, an overgrown combination truck and fork lift, that squeezes the bottom of a stack of bales, picks up the stack, and moves it either onto a truck, to some other location, or in this case, into Bob’s barn.  The operator position in the hay squeeze machine can either face the bales he/she is moving, or turn 180 degrees and drive it a highway speed down a road—hence  a combination truck and fork lift, although a fork lift slides  its forks under a load, and a hay squeeze does not need to do this, depending on the squeeze on the bottom bales in the stack to move it. The photograph below shows Bob’s friend and his hay squeeze at work.

 Since his friend operates his hay squeeze for a living, he is highly skilled at using it.  In fact, if the stack is uneven, he simply squeezes various levels, jiggles them around, and straightens the stack.  And he places the stack within an inch or so of where he desires it, because the squeeze machine can move the stack a bit sideways as well as front and back.

I was fascinated watching this operation, because I could not help imagining moving 750 bales from the pile to the barn on a hot summer day in the Sacramento Valley with nothing but a pair of hay hooks and my pickup.  The hay squeeze grabbed 60 bales at once, and completed the job beautifully in well under an hour. Wow!

 Of course, moving the bales by hand would have made work for someone. The hay squeeze is another machine that obsoletes people.  But since I had a bit of experience moving bales of hay on hot days, I found it difficult to mourn the loss.  Bob and I could perhaps have moved the pile in a couple of days, but would have required a great deal of beer and naproxen sodium.

Tools That Change Too Fast

A couple of days ago, I spent a couple of hours in the morning helping my wife get her computer to do her bidding, and a couple in the afternoon building a new top for the wooden tank on the antique orchard sprayer I am restoring.  The computer problem was somewhat typical.  In the past, she was able to scan text to her computer from her printer, save it as a word document, and then edit it — the miracle of OCR.  Then the system quit working.  The scanner denied that it was connected to the computer (after insultingly telling us that we should check to make sure the USB connector was plugged in —we know that much—and to load an up-to-date driver for the printer).  But if it was working in the past, why not now?  Obviously  because someone was screwing with the software to “improve” it.  Before I did that, I tried a few other things.  Her system scanned  jpeg documents okay and transferred them to the computer.  Why not text in an editable form?

 I could not make sense out of it, so I downloaded the latest driver for the printer, but that still did not solve the problem.  So I phoned an IT friend, and he couldn’t make sense out of the problem on the phone, so he dropped by for a personal inspection.  After what I considered a number of wizardly moves, he found some code in the machine that allowed my wife to scan the text and transfer it to the computer in the form of rich text, which could then be converted to Word and edited.  Two hours of frustration, and my wife was back where she had been in the past. But that did not include hours of frustration for her before she asked me for help.

Switch to making a top for my wooden tank.  The photo shows the result.  About the same amount of time was required to build it as I blew away on the computer problem, with pleasure from the process and pride when I was done.  The difference?  I used a table saw, a radial arm saw, and an electric drill to drill holes and sink screws.  My grandfather taught me to use a table saw when I was eight or nine years old, and they have changed little since then.  I encountered my first radial arm saw in a junior high school wood shop course, and had used an electric drill for many years before then.  True, use of electricity to sink screws was rare then, but the principle can be easily extrapolated from using a screwdriver.  My point is, that the tools did not constantly need upgrading.  It was possible to learn to use them, and then set about accomplishing things with them—not spending time becoming comfortable with the latest release.  And certainly not having the tools lose ability they once had.  Such things as computers and printers are tools.

I quit using Firefox a couple of years ago when it seemed that a new version was coming out every couple of weeks.  The Firefox people seem to have calmed down now, so I am back using it because it is a good browser (assuming they quit telling me that cat videos are a new form of communication —not among my friends!).  I am feeling the same about many aspects of computers.  I  have a computer-sophisticated friend who is still using Windows XP.  He knows the system cold, and it does everything he wants it to.  I am still using Apple OSX version 10.6.8  for the same reason, as I am holding onto applications I have used for years, and will until I am forced to move, at which time I will resent the time and effort I will need to acquire equal facility with the new and “improved”.  Tools that do the work should hold still and let us develop and use our expertise with them.  Think of the hammer!