Rage in the Machine

The waters are receding. I checked the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration homepage, suspicious, and was pleasantly surprised to see the banner over the map of the Atlantic Ocean that there was no tropical cyclone activity. This morning there is nothing coming our way, but turning to the Pacific, I saw that China is going to get pounded again with a super-typhoon. 

Rita will contribute some rain to us here today, but that is all she has left. A little moisture would be good here. But it is Monday, and that is bad enough.

The alarm was insistent and penetrating. It took a minute to separate the sound from the dream and stumble to the kitchen to grind the beans and dump the fine powder in the top of the coffee maker. On my way, I turned on the computer and the radio, in that order, since the computer takes forever to start.

I wanted to listen to a biography of the young Mao Tse-Tung on the radio, or at least had decided that it would be a good thing for me the night before. I was having some problems with the computer. It is more than a year old now, getting geriatric with all those interlocking programs piled on top of one another, living in uneasy synergy. Besides, I am not at my best on the box just before bedtime.

I thought I had succeeded in loading a new play-list on the silver IPod Mini, but wasn’t sure. I was hopeful that I had updated the thousand songs on the little player, and had not deleted all my music from the hard drive.

I put myself back on the bed and listened to an unauthorized account of the early years of the Great Helmsman. He seemed to have been quite the Lothario in his day, pioneering the concept of the open marriage before the Allies handed over the German mandate in China to the Japanese. That was the stage Mao was going to take.

Then there was something about Port Arthur , which I took to mean that the Typhoon might strike it, but realized slowly that the news was referring to the waterlogged town in Texas . I was halfway to China in the dark. I naturally thought of the port in Dalian province, named after a Royal Navy lieutenant who had his ship towed there in the Second Opium War. The Chinese call it Lushun these days, which is entirely up to them.

I contemplated turning over and resting my eyes in the darkness. It was an attractive proposition. I looked over at the computer screen to see if the various demons had completed their struggle with the start up boot.

I find it curious that as computer chip speeds have increased, my box running slower and slower. There seems to be a rage in the machine that is almost painful to watch. The activity light on the hard drive goes to bright sapphire and stays there, frozen in baleful brilliance. If I am over-eager, needing a map or a bit of data as I am heading out the door, my keystrokes wind up in a buffer somewhere, and then execute all at once, crashing the system.

I have learned to walk away from it, and allow it to make up its own mind. I am at a loss as to what to do. Most of my life is in the box somewhere, pictures and music and stories. I like my box. The Japanese did a fine job on it. The keys ripple along with crisp authority, and the memory appears to be bottomless.

I used to worry about space, and was careful about saving pictures. Now I don’t even worry about copying all my music CDs onto it. What I worry about is who else is living down in the digital drive.

I have been running a firewall program from Zone Labs that they call “Zone Alert Pro” since I realized how serious the threat was. That was back in 2002. I was Director of Information Operations Policy for the Community at the time, and a wise old Cryptologist told me the facts of life. He told me to wake up and smell the coffee.

Which I could smell emanating from the kitchen as the computer ground out its process. I poured a cup and wandered back to the desk. A banner popped up, telling me the wireless network was unavailable. That was good. I used the wireless feature on the machine before I realized there were at least three other wireless networks in the immediate vicinity, and I could access the internet through at least two of them. And that meant the other invisible users could access the net through mine.

I could not figure out the encryption algorithm to make mine password protected. It was a string of 12 or 24 letters and numbers that I would never remember, and rather than offer a public service to others in the building, I turned off the wireless feature and plugged the machine back into the wall.

The big change was when we stopped using dial-up and went to broadband, whether it was DSL or cable. Dial up gives you a constantly changing IP address; “Always On” broadband makes you a sitting duck with a fixed and permanent assignment.

I have kept AOL all these years because that is the e-mail that always gets to me, at some point. I downloaded the latest version of AOL 9.0 Security, thinking that more of that was better, right?

Not so. I had invited another gorilla into my hard-drive, and the two security fire walls fight with one another all the time. There is even an annoying two or three pop-up programs that appear that are AOL licensed spyware of a sort. I don’t like it. The Zone Labs program seems to be ecumenical, and has never alerted me to programs like that on their ad/spy scans, but of course, they wouldn’t if they were up to something, right?

I am torn. I do all my banking on the net now, and am reasonably certain that my bank and their e-check writing contractor are secure. But I am never sure about the backside.

I bought my Mom a new IBM desk-top computer, since her Compac machine was seven years old and developing serious bugs. I thought I was doing a good thing, and was disappointed when she reported that it didn’t work. I told her to get some anti-virus software, but she didn’t know how to load it, or the criticality of updating it frequently. Living in a rural area, my folks have a Mom-n-Pop service provider and AOL is a long-distance call for them.

When I visited early this summer, I could not get deep enough into the operating system to fix the problem. There were programs that looked familiar but were not, and the browser constantly directed me to dead ends or come-on ads for things I did not want. It was impossible to get to Google, or anything useful.

The Mom-n-Pop service desk recommended that I download some free anti-adware, and I managed to do it. I discovered to my horror as the program chugged along that there were over 800 separate entities living and working in her box, most of them hostile and malevolent.

Since that time, I heard that an unprotected computer, out of the box, will stay uninfected on dial up for about twenty minutes. A new unit on broadband is contaminated in less than five.

But I have found that now my stupid Microsoft XP operating system takes five minutes to load, and crashes after about an hour of work. Not completely, just enough that AOL won’t work anymore because Zone Labs doesn’t trust it. And both of them hate Desktop Weather, a service on which I rely in storm season to know when I have to unplug the box and take it higher ground.

They say there is an entirely new version of the internet coming to us that will fix everything. They are calling it Internet Protocol Version Six (IPV-6). I’m confident that it will be easy to use, and sooth some of the rage in the machine.

In the meantime, I just wait, and watch the firewalls duke it out. There are some days when I think Bill Gates has got something in for me, personally. I resent the fact that he moved into my house and blinks at me with that blazing sapphire eye of his.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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