Crashing Heaven’s Gate

Twenty-two years ago today I was living in Kingston, Ontario and driving along Peterborough County Road 2, just outside of Hastings, when I learned of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide on the car radio. It was a Wednesday. The suicides took three days, in shifts.

Members of Heaven’s Gate took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols,  best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

Heaven’s Gate was an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. Applewhite also wrote under his cult moniker “Do.” Nettles was known as  “Peep.” Later they became known as “Do” (pronounced Doe) and “Ti” respectively, from the end of the musical scale.

On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group, who had participated in the mass suicide in nearby Rancho Santa Fe, California, in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.

A tragically surreal moment in the now almost forgotten and often surreal years of the late 1990s, leading to the end of a millennium and the Year 2000.

Applewhite’s theology was based in part on the notion he and Nettles were the “two witnesses” spoken of by John of Patmos, also known as the John the Revelator, in his apocalyptic Book of Revelation (11:3-12); two witnesses who are killed, but stay dead for only 3½ days and then are taken up to heaven in a cloud. While Biblical scholars are not certain of their identity, many believe the two unknown witnesses are either Moses and Elijah or Enoch and Elijah. One of my favourite scenes from the 2002 movie, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, shows the fire-breathing two witnesses at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, as rabbinical scholar Tsion Ben-Judah and journalist Buck Williams cross the militarized no-man’s land during the Tribulation to meet them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SJipNpSFnQ&feature=share)

At their final celebratory meal at Marie Callender’s Restaurant in Carlsbad, about 15 miles from Rancho Santa Fe. the weekend before they committed suicide, eating 39 identical turkey pot pies, ice tea and cheesecake with blueberries, waiter David Riley asked where they were from,” Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher wrote in the Washington Post a few days later in a story headlined, “The cult that left as it lived,” published on March 30, 1997.

The answer they gave the waiter as to where they came from? “From the car,” one replied.

Applewhite’s journey to the edge of the zeitgeist and beyond began in the early 1970s, first when he was a music professor in Houston, teaching at the University of St. Thomas, a conservative Catholic college.  In 1970, he was fired from his post after administrators there learned that Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student, according to local news accounts. The University of St. Thomas called the reason for the firing “health problems of an emotional nature.” Applewhite would wind up having himself castrated.

Nettles, who died in 1985, was an astrologer and, according to several academic studies of the group, had dabbled in numerous metaphysical theologies, combining Christian ritual with elements of paganism, science fiction and millennialism.  Applewhite, who died in the Rancho Santa Fe mass suicide in 1997, was 66.

Born in Spur, Texas., Applewhite attended Austin College, a Presbyterian-affiliated school in Sherman, Texas., then studied music at the University of Colorado, where he played the lead in both South Pacific and Oklahoma. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he directed choruses at First Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, North Carolina, and later St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and at First Unitarian Church of Houston, before joining the faculty of the University of St. Thomas in 1966.

There are believed to be four surviving members of Heaven’s Gate. Two of the surviving members still maintain the group’s website, making sure the hosting bills are paid annually and the domain name continues to be actively registered, although the Heaven’s Gate website has not been altered since the 1997 mass suicide. The two do not identify themselves in interviews, but they are believed to be Mark and Sarah King, a couple in their sixties, from Phoenix, Arizona, who left other cult members in the late 1980s and set up a company called the TELAH Foundation, which stands for The Evolutionary Level Above Human.

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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.

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‘I remember that show’

It seems hard to imagine now that the first YouTube 19-second video, “Me at the Zoo,” featuring co-founder Jawed Karim, was only uploaded at 8:27 p.m. Saturday, April 23, 2005, which is less than nine years ago. Karim, and the two other co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, went on to sell YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in November 2006. YouTube (and Google for that matter … who remembers Lycos and Alta Vista search engines today?) seem like they have been part of our pop culture reality forever.

But maybe that’s not so much because YouTube has been around for so long, but rather because it is an ever-growing retrospective feedback loop for our dimly-remembered pop culture from an era featuring something called “network television,” which constituted CBS, NBC and ABC in the United States (pre-FOX 1986) and CBC and CTV in Canada (pre-Global Television Network 1974).

In the days when network TV was king, you watched your favourite shows when they were broadcast, whatever time and day of the week that was and often in black-and-white – or you waited for summer reruns. Simple enough. No iTunes, AirPlay, Apple TV, MacBook Pro, smartphones, no DVDs and no VCRs. How quaint.

As recently as two or three years ago, I remember having to go to some of the “free” services such as MovPod – “Just watch it! at: http://www.movpod.in/” and “Tv-Links: Free Movies links, Watch Tv Shows links online, Anime, Documentaries” to watch such oldies as Dennis the Menace, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Green Acres – and 2009-10’s FlashForward. MovPod and Tv-Links invariably had numerous hoops to jump through in terms of registration and often mindless or just plain unseemly advertising (which I guess isn’t so different than network TV) but they had some old gems if you were willing to pan for the gold, as it were (and perhaps put up with Russian subtitles.)

As for movies – at least beyond the trailer – you might find it on YouTube, but usually in multiple segments of seven or eight minutes each (i.e. Where The Heart Is Part 1/16) sort of thing, rather than the full movie.

Today, my anecdotal impression anyway, is that you are finding more and more full-length movies on YouTube and most of those 1960’s sitcoms you had to go previously to MovPod or Tv-Links to watch have also migrated to YouTube.

It is a rich cornucopia of popular culture. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, over a bowl of Cheetos®, we watched in black-and-white a double-bill of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, also known as The Head That Wouldn’t Die, a 1959 science-fiction-horror film, directed by Joseph Green (made for $62,000 but not released until 1962), and Plan 9 from Outer Space, the 1959 American science-fiction thriller film, written and directed by Ed Wood on a $60,000 budget, and dubbed by some critics as the worst movie ever made.

As well, most, if not all, of the 107 episodes of My Favorite Martian, a television sitcom that aired on CBS from Sept. 29, 1963 to May 1, 1966, are now readily available to be viewed on YouTube, whereas in early 2012 you would have been hard-pressed to find them for free online, including at MovPod or Tv-Links.

Take the episode “Now You See It, Now You Don’t” that was first broadcast on Feb. 16, 1964. Uncle Martin (the Martian roommate played by Ray Walston) explains to Tim O’Hara, a young newspaper reporter for The Los Angeles Sun, played by Bill Bixby, that a trip to the museum will be more rewarding than a golf outing on his day off because “voices from the past have lessons for us if we have ears to listen.” Since I was six years old and definitely not a newspaper reporter when it first aired, I can’t recall whether I saw it first time around in 1964. Now, I think, not bad. Not bad at all.