‘Radio Home: Its x and y and the blue eyed descendant’

Good evening, Matāʻutu, capital of the Territoire des îles Wallis-et-Futuna, a French collectivité d’outre-mer in the South Pacific between Tuvalu to the northwest, Fiji to the southwest, Tonga to the southeast, Samoa to the east, and Tokelau to the northeast. If it’s almost 11 p.m. Thursday, April 4, 2019 in the Pacific/Wallis Time Zone, it must be almost 6 a.m. Thursday, April 4, 2019 in the Central Daylight Time Zone here in Thompson Manitoba, right in the centre of Canada, north and south, east and west.

There are 195 countries in the world today, and about 6,500 spoken languages, although 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. The most popular language in the world is Mandarin, and there are about 1.2 billion people in the world that speak it, according to the Dallas-based publication Ethnologue: Languages of the World.

While we like to think the internet, thanks to the World Wide Web (WWW), invented by Tim (now Sir Timothy) Berners-Lee 30 years ago, is the electronic realization of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” outlined 30 years before the WWW – then three or six decades into this, depending on whether you want to start counting with television or the internet, my global village is still pretty much English, very much commercial – and perhaps surprisingly parochial – more so than I might have expected of the near future during those halcyon days of the mid-1990s, when for just a moment I sipped from the new WIRED magazine Kool-Aid, and something more seemed possible. Mind you, in 1995 I was also reading internet pioneer Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he discussed his ambivalence regarding the future of how the internet would be used and suggested even then the promise of the internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I also read.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, almost a quarter-century on, the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms. As early as 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kids’ hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

I’m not sure anyone quite envisioned the angry world of online commenting, trolls, fake news and bots that would materialize sooner than later on the internet.

Why online commenting on news stories seems so often to bring out the worst in some people is a puzzle that researchers continue to study and those of us engaged in social media never cease to wonder about. Is it the anonymity afforded them by many commenting modules that don’t require real names, but only pseudonyms as usernames the problem? Perhaps. It seems likely much of what is said in online commenting would never be said face-to-face, person-to-person. If you are interested in a broader historical discussion between 2010 and 2013 on online commenting, you might check out these links: “Robert Fisk: Anonymous comments and why it’s time we all stop drinking this digital poison” at http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/robert-fisk-anonymous-comments-and-why-its-time-we-all-stop-drinking-this-digital-poison-3349527.html, or Margaret Sullivan: Seeking a return to civility in online comments at http://fores.blogs.uv.es/2010/06/22/01-seeking-a-return-to-civility-in-online-comments/, or Katie Roiphe’s Slate magazine article, “What’s wrong with angry commenters?” at http://www.slate.com/articles/life/roiphe/2011/12/what_s_wrong_with_angry_commenters_.html

I remember first using an internet workstation in the just opened Joseph S. Stauffer Library at Queen’s University during one of my early visits to the new library on Union Street in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the workstations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations. But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory” server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

And if the internet I experience is too English, too commercial and too parochial, it does offer me a portal to go beyond the default position on seemingly every Windows OS ever installed on a PC desktop, laptop or smartphone of a Microsoft News homepage that is distraction-saturated with celebrity clickbait, tantalizing trivia and polarizing polemics. If I can overcome my initial inertia.

One way I try and do this is by listening sometimes to radio stations available on the internet, private and public, English and non-English, around the world. While I might not understand the local broadcasting language, and I’m certainly not a linguist, there is a universality to music, I find, which often transcends spoken language. And the music being broadcast simultaneously around the world at any given moment is dazzling in variety.

The first op-ed I ever wrote for the Kingston Whig-Standard in 1983 was for a feature called “The Passing Show” that had a roster of guest contributors. My piece was on the phenomenon of sometimes being able to listen to AM radio late at night growing up in Southern Ontario with distant stations from places like Chicago coming in clearly, if intermittently at times, late at night.

Loosely, the main reason for the phenomenon is the composition of the ionosphere at night is different than during the day because of the presence or absence of the sun. You can pick up some radio stations better at night because the reflection characteristics of the ionosphere are better at night.

In those days, the experience, or lack of one, was left mainly to atmospheric chance. The internet has transformed chance to certainty, and “The Passing Show” has morphed into Radio Garden.

The Radio Garden website found at https://radio.garden/ takes the form of an interactive globe that can be rotated to pick up transmissions from every corner of the planet, clips from radio history and stories from listeners in different locations. Radio Garden is the transnational radio encounters online exhibition, developed by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and designed by Moniker, an Amsterdam based interactive design studio.

Good afternoon, Tangier! It is almost noon local time and the sun rose almost five hours ago over the Bay of Tangier in Morocco, as seen in the image off this Skyline cam. The forecast high is 17°C today, under partly cloudy skies, with a forecast low tonight of 12°C.

As Brantford, Ont. singer-songwriter, Scott Merritt wrote and sang in his 1989 song, Radio Home, a time that happened to coincide with the birth of the World Wide Web: “Its x and y and the blue eyed descendant … Why am I waiting at all? Why am I waiting on you? I don’t know why you don’t radio, radio, radio…” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Pw8ntinr4)

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The Internet of Things … things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing

 

 

A few weeks ago, I happened to capture from television for my PVR, an airing of the 1983 movie War Games, starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Woods and Ally Sheedy. War Games is a delightful, campy end-of-the-Cold War Ronald Reagan-era science fiction film, which didn’t seem quite so campy when I first saw it at a movie theatre in Cornwall, Ontario, the year the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on a scheduled flight from New York City to Seoul, after the flight deviated from its approved route and flew through prohibited airspace near Sakhalin Island at the far eastern extreme of the Soviet Union.

Perestroika and Glasnost, as it turned out, were just around the corner, but not quite yet arrived. Broderick plays David Lightman, a young computer hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), a United States military supercomputer originally programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The computer, now tied into the nuclear weapons control system and unable to tell the difference between simulation and reality, attempts to start World War III.

Flash-forward 34 years from War Games to WannaCry.

WannaCry?

Yes. Not because I am one of the unfortunates with a computer infected May 12 with WannaCry, which appears a dozen years after the first documented ransomware attack happened in the United States in 2005.

Rather cry because of the State of the Internet itself in 2017. That should make anyone, Bitcoin pirates excepted, want to cry. If ever their was a swamp needing to be drained, it’s the Internet (so ubiquitous The Associated Press stopped capitalizing it last year), a tangled network that more or less runs the world from up in the Cloud somewhere, while making cyberwar on us down below through a deluge of ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing targeting our computer vulnerabilities; with the words ransomware, malware, spam and phishing so common now in the public lexicon, they no longer challenge my spellchecker and I no longer need to define them.

WannaCry, also known as Wanna Decryptor, WanaCryptor, or wcry, is a specific self-replicating multilingual ransomware type of viral worm malware program that prevents or limits users from accessing their system by encrypting all their data except for two files: instructions on what to do next and the Wanna Decryptor program itself.

It is believed to exploit a vulnerability in older and unpatched Microsoft Windows operating systems to invisibly move from computer-to-computer. And unlike many other forms of malware, it can spread on its own: it doesn’t need a human to click on a fake e-mail attachment. WannaCry uses a hacking tool called the Eternal Blue exploit, believed to have been developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to give American intelligence operative access to computers used by terrorists and enemy states. But a mysterious organization called Shadow Brokers, which first came to public attention last year, claimed last month it had stolen a “cyber weapon” of that description from an American spy agency, and dumped it on the Internet for all and sundry to use.

Once installed and the software is locked, WannaCry demands a US$300 ransom to be paid within six hours in Bitcoins, a digital computer cryptocurrency created in 2009 by an unknown person or persons using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, to decrypt the files.

The ransom note indicates that the payment amount will be doubled after three days. If payment is not made after seven days, the encrypted files will be deleted. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the Helsinki-based cybersecurity company F-Secure, called the May 12 global attack, which has affected hundreds of thousands of files in more than 100 countries by early counts, “the biggest ransomware outbreak in history.” Bitcoins are encrypted to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds in a decentralized way, operating independently of a central bank, and placing Bitcoin over the last eight years usually beyond the reach of regulatory restriction and confiscation. A single Bitcoin is worth about US$1,734, which is about $500 more than a troy ounce of gold will set you back at around US$1,230.

A decade ago, if you weren’t trolling sketchy sites, knowingly or unknowingly, and had a half-decent firewall and anti-virus program, odds were you could manoeuvre around the Internet OK, plagued by little more than some annoying, but hardly crippling, e-mail spam. Today, for this WordPress blog, I use Akismet,which bills itself as “an advanced hosted anti-spam service aimed at thwarting the underbelly of the web. It efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. To fight the latest and dirtiest tactics embraced by the world’s most proficient spammers, it learns and evolves every single second of every single day. Because you have better things to do.” Akismet heitpfully tells me it has “protected your site from 11,379 spam comments already.”

If you were an Apple loyalist, working on a Mac, viruses were almost unheard of a decade ago, especially when compared to Microsoft Windows, first released in 1995. Apple Macintosh computer users still are less likely to be infected with a virus than Microsoft Windows users, but as Apple gains market share and Macs are used by more people, virus infections are becoming more common than they used to be.

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.

But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory”  server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

That said, I’m  bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.

So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he discussed his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, more than 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.

Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kids’ hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.

While the so-called “Internet of Things” is usually taken to mean the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data, perhaps the definition should be broadened to encompass things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing.

The only solution, at least how I see it, to virtual phishing may be to pull the plug and go fishing in real life.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Who suggests to their online readers they remember to log-off from time to time and bake some chocolate chip cookies IRL (à la Clifford Stoll) or maybe head down to the arena for a kids’ hockey game? Mea culpa

Every now and then over the years I’ve mentioned the pioneering effort in online journalism I was involved in briefly as managing editor from November 1996 to February 1997 in Kingston, Ontario. The Kingston Net-Times was an online-only newspaper going head-to-head with the Kingston Whig-Standard before even the Whig was online (which made competing online kind of easy for the brief time that lasted).

Everyone knows by now the fixed costs of online publications are a fraction that of bricks-and-mortar newspapers, some now with their high-end Goss 96pp Sunday 5000 presses, which weigh in as a total equipment package at about 1,371 tons, with the single heaviest piece of equipment weighing in at 43 tons. That’s bigger than the Goss press out back at the Thompson Citizen, which hasn’t printed a newspaper since January 2007 (but school kids invariably asked more questions about it on class visits to the newspaper than any other aspect of the operation during my seven or so years there).

But there is still a cost to producing an online paper, even if it is from your computer at your kitchen table, which was pretty close to how the Kingston Net-Times was cobbled together. By any measure it was pioneering but also under capitalized. So – and this is often how things go in the newspaper industry – while I was having great fun during an Ottawa CBC Radio Noon interview tweaking the nose of Goliath, in this case the Kingston Whig-Standard, where I had worked as a reporter and copy editor from 1993 through June 1996, when I left to work briefly as a copy editor at the Ottawa Sun, and making some sport of Conrad Black and Hollinger, the newspaper company he built with David Radler, I was also aware the publisher was having some, shall we say challenges, making payroll at the Kingston Net-Times. Ever the pragmatist or mercenary, take your pick, the CBC interview hadn’t aired more than a few weeks earlier when I decamped for a second stint at the Peterborough Examiner, which was not online then and producing old-fashioned ink-on-print newspapers. Oh. Did I mention the Peterborough Examiner was, of course, at that point a Hollinger paper?  Actually, I believe by then it was our sister paper, The Intelligencer, down the road in Belleville, Ontario, that was printing the paper for us, and it was trucked back to Peterborough overnight. The Peterborough Examiner press, too, had been silenced by economics when I returned in April 1997, if memory serves me correctly, although I stand to be corrected on the date, as I’ve been at several papers over the last 20 years, where silenced presses still sit physically in the building as some sort of behemoth over-sized metal museum pieces.

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.

But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory” server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

That said, I’m a bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’: Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.

So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he  discusses his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.

Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kid’s hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22