Hackability

I will make some more observations about this online world that we find ourselves living in in 2016, as the entire world is going in this direction.

First, you must understand that I have a love\hate relationship with technology. I’m a tech guy and, if I had the money, I would own every little gadget that was ever produced on this great planet, but being on disability still and loaded down with eight kids, I can’t afford much. But still: I’ve got a degree in computer science, have worked in the field for thirty years, read about it all the time and dabble in it as much as I can. Our Church has a project going on, and I am setting up some equipment I’ve never worked with before – along with the software – so the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing has never stopped me, nor will it this time. You just figure it out – that is, if you happen to like this stuff, which I do.

But liking this stuff and having worked with it on a daily basis for years means that I know it up close and personal. Perhaps too up close and too personal. It’s like living with a roommate whom everyone likes but you know where they throw their socks and the odd combinations of food they somehow eat, as well as their belching schedule. They’re great, but you know the inside scoop. And that’s how I am with technology.

One Take

I have many takes on technology but, for the purposes of this particular blog, we will deal with one and perhaps the most egregious: security. The assertion for this blog is this: everything is hackable; some more, some less, but in the final analysis, it can all be cracked. The entire infrastructure we’ve designed is about as secure as leaving your front door thrown wide open, with no cars in the driveway and the lights off. Welcome, Oh Hacker, to my abode!

Ok, something of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.

But how bad is it really? Pretty bad. I read a lot and constantly come across egregious hacks and hacks that you wouldn’t think possible. I will not bore you, but we can consider the following:

• A 15 year old hacked into NASA and shut down the computers on the International Space Station for 21 days. “Yes, James hacked into NASA’s network and downloaded enough source code to learn how the International Space Station worked. “

• Kevin Poulsen hacked into a radio station using his knowledge of telephone systems and set himself up as the winning caller of a new Porche.
• Criminals in Pittsburgh ATM machines to think they were giving out $1 rather than $20, thus astronomically upping the cash the machine dispensed. They used just the banks keypad to accomplish the hack.

Ok, these are pretty amazing examples, but closer to home it’s possible for students to hack into their school’s grade database when using the computers in the computer lab (Youtube can show you how to do this but I’m not going to include the link, for obvious purposes); the signs on the roadway that admonish us to “Buckle Up” – those signs can be hacked and replaced with your own private message; wireless printer\scanners have been hacked; when you scan a bank document and leave it, the hacker takes control of the device, re-scans it and makes off with your bank information (or whatever you left on the glass.)

You may not be convinced but, surely, a huge corporation with lots of IT guys running around must be safe. Not true. The biggest bank in the world, Chase Manhattan, got hacked in 2014; the hackers were in the system for three months and had deep administrator access to their servers. Target, Home Depot etc. have all been hacked. Sony Pictures have been hacked – very hacked. We can add Premera Blue Cross, Anthem, the US Postal Service, Staples, Kmart, Dairy Queen, P.F. Changs, Government employees, Ebay Users, to name a few.

You can ask: Is anything safe? The answer: no. Some are more difficult to hack, some less, but its all hackable.

The fact of the matter is that security is difficult to fully implement and keep implemented. There are just so many pieces that have to come together to have a secure system, and one of the biggest potential problems is the human being running the computer. Hackers infiltrated Chase Manhattan reportedly through a single server that happened to be left unpatched – one server out of thousands.  And another bank in Eastern Europe was hacked when the hackers, in the system for months, figured out how to get the ATM machines to spit out money at certain times and sent a person to collect the cash. How did they get in?  By sending fake emails to employees, who opened them and followed links therein – thus infecting the entire bank. What is neat about this hack is that the hackers watched the operators for months, figuring out how the system worked, and ended up stealing millions. 

Then there’s Me

I’m a computer guy, and we can ask the question: “Well, Mr. Nerd, how do you do with your own security?” The answer: ok but not so great. Like my passwords: I have about 345,203 passwords to just about every web page ever produced and use LassPass to keep it all organized, lest I lose my mind, but even here: LassPass allows you to create complex passwords for these many websites and you only have to remember one master password. A great idea. Have I created complex passwords for these sites? For a few I have, but mostly not. And why not? Laziness.

And of course when you’re out at DD, you should have a VPN setup – obviously. But here I am, right now, sitting at DD typing without a VPN. Of course I know these hotspots are incredibly insecure, but type away I do on their wireless network.

Online banking is a big issue. You should dedicate one computer to this and this alone, and with my computer expertise I could easily setup a virtual OS and use that for banking, and nothing else. Hey, I wouldn’t incur the cost of dedicated hardware just for that. But I don’t. Even worse, I do my banking on my smartphone.

I should know better, but don’t . Like banking: it’s just too convenient to whip out your cell phone and check your balance or transfer funds. Setting up a VPN is not hard but it’s another thing to do. Hey, I’ll probably be ok. No problems so far, right?

Yes, there’s also been a time when I almost responded to an email that looked like it was from my bank, Chase Manhattan. It looks so like a Chase email, I almost fell for it. I was in a hurry, and it’s too easy just to keep clicking. Then, at the last moment, I noticed the URL was not even remotely similar to Chase’s and stopped, and I’m a computer guy. What chance does the regular user have?

I do better with keeping my systems up to date with Windows Update and Ninite, which updates my applications, and I don’t use Internet Explorer (spawn of the devil), so I’m not totally crazily insecure. I do use an anti-virus but know enough to realize they are not the silver bullet most users think they are. Anything I download I check with an awesome site – www.virustotal.com – that inspects the download and certifies that it’s not infected or filled with stupidware.

Little Old Me: Hacked

A year ago odd charges showed up on our banking statement. Apparently I used a taxi cab in New York City and got a hotel there; also ate out for a fair amount of money. It must have been fun, but I was never there during the time period when the transactions were posted. What was going on?

I called my bank, and all the charges were reversed. Our little bank in Cato, Community Bank, had been hacked and from this we believe my information ended up with someone in New York City, who ended up having a nice time out on my money. When we were getting the charges reversed, the representative from the bank told me, “Oh, it looks like they presented your card when they made the charges.”

“That can’t be,” I said. “I have my card with me.”

“Oh, they can make a copy of your card once they get your numbers.”

“Really!” I said.

“The scary part is that you can buy a machine that does that on the internet. It only costs about $100.”

Would you agree: scary?

Conclusion

None of this would really matter except that we have committed our entire life to this online world and, if we haven’t done that ourselves, major corporations and the government have done it for us. Think of all those government employees whose background checks were stolen by a hacker; they probably just filled out the forms, not knowing that their information was out there for someone to steal. The same goes for the patients at Anthem – who knew the information they gave to the insurance company could be stolen, and the same for customers who gave credit card information to Home Depot when buying items.

All of it’s just out there, ready to be hacked.

What can be done? Not much, I’m afraid. Technology has moved faster than our ability to secure it, and as yet there is no movement to slow it down for something as unsexy as security. But I do think a tipping point will come: that if we want to continue to build an online world, security will have to be a high priority. At some point, all this this gets out of hand, just from a business perspective. But we’re not there yet.

So, keep your operating system patched (Windows Update) and be very careful what you click on and download. There’s a chance you might just be ok.

Growing up in the 1960s

I was brought up a suburban boy on the streets of Gates, New York, a nondescript suburb of a mid-sized city named Rochester in Upstate New York. Gates was the type of place that never had a town center or anything remotely resembling community; it was suburban sprawl emanating from Rochester and connected to the great city via a four lane highway, and the streets were all straight and the houses the same distance apart, but we had some variety: they were different colors.

Me in about 1968

Luckily for me, over-development had not quite happened, so there were lots that were empty here and there: one next to my friends house, for instance, and many open at the top of the street I lived on and several that were especially good: a series that cut through the roads that ran parallel to one another, making a great place to play football and other sports. We could also catch rabbits in these lots (or try to; they always eluded us) and build forts out of the long grasses we found in the fields, trying to tie them together in a lattice that never seemed to work, and we rode our bikes through the foot trails and did wheelies, and it was all fun.

This was the 1960s, when there was no question that America was great. We had virtually invented everything in the world and were putting a man on the moon as no one else had, and wasn’t that cool? Our cars were fast and our roads were paved, and you felt like you could still become rich in America if you just had a good idea and some hard work. We were a very middle class family and, though we knew we were not rich, we also knew that we were not poor either and had pretty much had everything we needed. This was the time when the factory smokestacks were still belching smoke into the sky, and not one smokestack but many. This was the era when Kodak was employing 60,000 people in Rochester and you could graduate high school and easily get a job in manufacturing and thus, a middle class lifestyle.

But also the craziness of 1960’s filtered down to our little world in sanitized ways but the message was still clear: something was going wrong. I found out that Bobby Kennedy has been shot in the parking lot of a big box store and remember my Dad going to a nearby college despite the student protests, as well Walter Cronkite reporting on how many US serviceman had been killed that day in Vietnam. I learned that George Wallace was bad because he didn’t like the blacks and still remember election of 1968. When we traveled – which we did much in our middle class pop-up trailer – I remember seeing line after line of camouflaged army vehicles on the interstates; I honestly thought that this was normal – just how life was – but realized later it was only because there was a war going on.

Drugs were starting to seep into the culture also. I remember an older relative with a smile telling me to ask my parents for “speed.” I wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but I did know it wasn’t good. I also remember us singing in school, “LSD, LSD teachers can have it, teachers can have it, why can’t we, why can’t we?” I can still sing it if you ask. I did hear stories of people jumping out of windows on LSD, a vain attempt at flying, so I knew on some level that this was not a good thing. And of course there was Woodstock, and I remember opening the Democrat and Chronicle, the Rochester newspaper, and seeing the entire page filled with a picture of nothing but people.

Back then I could ride my bike four streets over but shouldn’t venture onto Lyell Road, whose traffic was far too fast for a little guy my size. Once I left my front door, the world was mine – I could go anywhere within my boundaries – and we never heard about gruesome killings for no point whatsoever. We also had a pop-up camper and traveled around the East quite a bit and also camped at Hamlin Beach State Park in the summer. It was all the same: I could ride my bike anyplace in the campground without a thought that someone would kidnap me or abuse me or do any such thing.

There were no electronics, but we survived with Mad magazine and color TV for entertainment. Since there were no air conditioners, the house was hot, so we went outside. We lived outside in the summer. The big thing was a 10 speed bike back then, and if you really wanted to be on the cutting edge, you had a transistor radio, which amazingly picked up all stations on one little device. I was with my father when he was out fixing one of his rental apartments and the tenant showed us something astounding and quite expensive: a calculator, and just press the buttons, and you could multiply 453 times 43. Had we not arrived, I ask you?

As I was staying at his house, my uncle let me stay up late (or got me out of bed, I forget) to watch Apollo 8 go around the moon, and I remember the Christmas message*. What technology could possibly supersede such a great leap for mankind? You read about it in the magazines and saw Tang commercials between your shows, and back then we still had a few old black and white TVs around, though color was definitely in. Our stations weren’t that exotic (three, to be exact, plus PBS) but we were satisfied. If we had known that 346 stations would be coming, then perhaps we would have murmured, but we didn’t. In fact, we watch great shows like Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island and Mission Impossible, The Walt Disney Show and more.

My children find it odd that we never ate tacos, and the question comes: did we not suffer dietary abuse, having never eaten Mexican food? No, we did not. When we made a call on our rotary phone, no one ever asked us if we wanted the call in Spanish. I remember my father taking us out to get the car fitted with something new: seat belts! Everyone smoked and we flew down the new four lane highways the car full of smoke; in the summer, we switched the air conditioning on by opening the windows. Speaking of the new four lane highways into the city: I remember my father saying how much time they would cut from his commute to work.

The schools were packed back then. We’re talking about 30 students in each classroom, and all the kids had traditional names like Tom, Sue, Fred, Karen, John, Mary. No one was named like, Tavana or something exotic from another language or culture. There were three Davids in every class I was ever in. It was not exactly the good old days, as they were doing a grand experiment called Open Classrooms, where we learned at our own pace. That often meant we didn’t learn at all, but at least they were not oppressing us into their molds by making us learn. I remember being taken out of one of the open classrooms and being put in a classroom with a teacher who was so old its like she was born during the Revolutionary War. We all sat in rows, about five rows with six chairs in each. How odd was that?

I should mention that as a kindergartner I actually walked to school, about a mile an a half away.  Not only did I walk there and back, but I walked there and back for lunch also.  Who could image such a thing these days?  There were several railroad tracks between my house and the school, so rather than have us dodge the trains they put a grandiose black metal bridge over them, which in the winter we could slide across a good way to the end.  There was a laundromat also between the house and school also, and in the laundromat was a candy machine.  Can you guess where I stopped on the way to school?

My sister had cerebral palsy, and this was the era of big medicine. She had a huge operation every summer to correct this or that; some worked, my Mom said, and some didn’t. They don’t do this anymore. This was not the era of mainstreaming. My sister went to an inner city school that was designated for children like her, and the friendships she made there have lasted a lifetime. I myself had the unfortunate experience of being dyslexic, so I couldn’t read hardly at all when I was in third grade. None of this was fully understood at the time, and since I was learning at my own pace in the open classroom experiment, no one noticed. My Mom, however, was astute enough to do some research and managed to get me into a program that brought me up three grade levels in six months. Back then none of this was paid for. It was out of pocket.

I still remember stepping on a nail when running around as a five year old and had the now very unusual experience of having the doctor visit the house. He actually came into the house. How odd. All my friends had their tonsils out but somehow I managed to keep mine. We took aspirin. We had the best medicine in the world. Someone had actually done open heart surgery.

The woman were starting to go back to work but still, I think many still stayed at home. My Mom had to stay at home, as she had to take care of my sister with cerebral palsy but she is glad for this experience now. I don’t remember there being a lot of divorce among my friends but there might have been, though I do remember when a relative got divorced: that was a big deal. But I think back then the nuclear family was still in.

In terms of social issues, I don’t remember gay meaning homosexual; it seemed to have a tenuous relationship to happy, as “She’s gay [happy] today.” It wasn’t talked about much or thought about much, it seems – definitely an outlier, like a very weird thing that very weird people would do, and that they should be ashamed. There was no such thing as LGBT, and no movement in this direction. Bathrooms were used based on gender at birth, and it would be interesting the reaction you would get if you championed another arrangement. Abortion was off the radar. Living together was a new strange thing a few were doing on the fringes. But promiscuity was coming to the fore, and people would joke about wife-swapping but I never thought it was done much.

We definitely had the coolest and most modern cars ever, but they were simpler and no one had ever heard of a using a computer to help run a car. My Dad could fix our cars, and fix them he did. I imagine he saved a ton of money this way. Cars had carburetors and needed tune ups and came apart easy and went back together easy.  All cars were of course American made except for the strange looking VW Bug, which I remember a friend of the family owning. He was huge and had to more put the car on than get into it.

This was the era when newspapers gave us the news. Every morning a paper boy delivered the paper to our door and every day my parents read it. Then once a week he would come to collect his money, and my parents would run around seeing if they had the correct bills and change. I read the comics and kept up with the sports teams, as my friends were interested in them. We also had the 6 pm news, which were the local stations, and the 6:30 national news. It may have been primitive my today’s standards, but we managed to know something about what was happening in the world.

Our phones were rotary phones and black. Rotary phones, in case you don’t know, have a circular dial pad, so if you wanted to dial a 3, you put your finger in the 3 slot and turned the dial all the way to the right. The 9 had the most overhead associated with it, as it was farthest from the right-hand stop. If the other party was busy when you called, the phone would ring and ring; if they were talking to someone else, you would get a long string of beeps. No one left a message except with another human being, and no one was interrupted by another caller in the midst of their call. Long distance was expensive.

Along these lines, if you were out and had to make a call, you were covered. Most places had a pay phone. What is a pay phone? It is a phone that you would deposit coins in to make a call. The cost back then? Ten cents. Sometimes when you made a call, you would have to talk to an operator who had a pulse and a heartbeat. There were no Press 1 for xxx, press 2 for xxx. When you called, you called a person. A person picked up, and you talked. Obviously no computers ever called you. That was unheard of and unimagined.

Popular culture for me pretty much meant television, and we had a few in our house. The one in our family room was a color TV: it was not exactly high definition and had a screen size of about 24 inches, I’m guessing. We could not have even conceived of a 54 inch flat-screen. We also had one or two other, smaller black and white TVs in the house. (Yes, black and white was still around!) There was no cable; no, we had rabbit ears to get the TV signal and they had to be adjusted if the screen was fuzzy. We were told not to sit too close to the TV because of the radiation or something, and if you sat too close you could see the pixels that made up the image. The shows had their stupid moments but I don’t remember them being gross or raunchy. Regarding music, I don’t remember listening to rock and roll until I was older but, yes, I did hear Johnny Cash being played, and who couldn’t like The Boy Named Sue? My Dad’s friend had a pool table in his basement, and my Dad would play pool with him with – you guessed it – Johnny Cash playing.

We had our storms, the biggest being the great snowstorm of 1966. I don’t remember it but have heard many stories about it. After a week, a payloader came down our street and cleared the road. My father didn’t go to work for a week. And I remember the great Hurricane Agnes and remember visiting the Mount Morris Dam at Letchworth State Park shortly after it hit. The water almost crested the top and, if it had gone over, Rochester would have been flooded they said.

That was what it was like growing up in the 1960s. It seems like a simpler world but then again I was a kid. I think it was simpler, though. There was less moving parts and more functionality. What an interesting time, and how long ago it seems, and how different!

*I encourage you to listen to this; it is very edifying!

Computerland – Part I

We may not fully understand how much our world has changed in the last twenty or thirty years.

Yes, I actually used one of these a loooong time ago!

We can take the following simple example. When I worked at General Electric in the 1980s, coworkers and outside vendors had two – and only two – ways to contact me: 1) Pick up the land line phone (the what?) and call me or 2) Walk down the hall and talk to me. Let’s count again: one, two. That’s it.

In the 2000s all this changed. Suddenly, we no longer have two ways to access co-worker or employee Stahl, but none less than six. Let’s count, we can be reached via (or, I have to monitor the following communication channels): 1) the phone, of course 2) Email, a newcomer 3) My beeper 4) My cell phone 5) voice-mail and 6) Faxes. So in the space of a few years, the way we can contact this Mr. David Stahl has quadrupled.

It’s as if at one time, back in a mythological age, there were only two worn footpaths into the city but now, in a burst of modernity, we now have six super highways, each four lanes across, with cars racing along at 80 miles an hour – a far cry from the pedestrian walking and the horse drawn buggy.

You might think that with all these new avenues of access, there would exist some commonly understood priority among them; some organizing principle that society has originated to sort out the mess, like “If you contact him via phone, he will prioritize this highest and call back, then Email comes next, then the beeper and so forth” But no such organizing principle exists. Every time something bings or rings or bleeps or flashes it is expected by all the senders that you will immediately respond in some way: email back or text back or do something back right way, and now is too late.

I am speaking of work now, but home is even worse. There’s an explosion of avenues into me there; it is communication on steroids day and night, and who can keep up with it? Well, we can start with Facebook, but then there’s Instagram, and of course Texting, and Twitter (tweet, tweet!) and someone told me about LinkedIn – which I just have to be a part of – and the Blogs of different friends (even this one!) and do you have a Skype account? Oh, there’s Pinterest too! And on and on and on it goes. (And how could we forget Facebook Messenger?) (Oops, then also Snapchat!) (And different forums and on-line support groups – tons of them.)

I love technology but at some point it makes you want to find that desert island with one palm tree on it and just sit in a soft ocean breeze – let the world turn, you’ll have none of it. Or those survivalists: off the grid in some makeshift cabin with a puff of smoke lazily floating heavenward in the splendor of winter. You get the idea. Just check out. Leave me alone.

Alas, we can’t. This is the world we live in; it is the world we have been born into, and whose fault is that? But we must negotiate this world as it is and get wisdom about what is profitable and what is not. You cut off a chickens head and get what you get; you wire a man so many ways, and he runs around the yard clacking. We can only take so much communication. And when was the last time we really talked?

On Positive Vibes

As we have drifted more toward a post-Christian culture, we find some amusing trends, one of which I will discuss here.

In the old days if someone’s daughter had been in a bad car accident, we would say something like, “I’ll pray for her.” This was supposed comfort the person, showing we cared, and – hey – if the person actually carried through with it (entreating the God of the universe, after all) then the person in question perhaps would get better, sometimes miraculously. It happened!

Enter the atheist age, and we now have a different formulation.

Whereas once we prayed for people, we now “send positive vibes your way.” There was a storm and a the giant oak in the backyard fell on Grandpa as he mowed the lawn, and to comfort the family, we send vibes, and positive ones.

At least with prayer, there’s a middle man: God, who can receive the prayer and who happens to have all power on Heaven and Earth to do what we ask, if he feels it best, and – hey – Moses twice changed God’s mind via prayer, as have other men of faith. So if the above Grandpa, smoshed by the great oak is destined to die, then the prayers of the righteous can make it so he recovers.

Amazing.

But when we are sending positive vibes, there is no middleman, and how do we send them, and how are they received? And what is a vibe anyway? Well, we could alternatively send positive thoughts, but once again: what is the medium, and how? Then there’s positive energy, and if you want to be especially thoughtful, you can send healing thoughts.

Probably the most respectable way to give comfort without the dreaded word prayer is to say quite simply, “Keeping you in my thoughts,” which is entirely possible in this universe. Unfortunately, we aren’t enlisting the God of this universe to help the poor person in question but at least we aren’t blurting out stupid crap and embarrassing ourselves.

No, I was on death’s doorstep nine years ago and if everyone sent me positive vibes, I probably wouldn’t have survived the operation, or the radiation would have killed me or the chemo truck, delivering the deadly drug, would have run me over in the parking by mistake, as my time was up. As it was, people – very good Christians and also others – prayed for me. That has meaning. But positive vibes? Only some liberal with a surfboard would ever think of that.

Beard Update

All my dear readers deserve an update on my beard after my post My Stand on Beards in November, as I did sprout one, and up it came.

Me sporting my ever-so-cool beard

I let it grow and grow after the initial stubs, so now when I go in to my barber to have it trimmed, I say, “Give me a two,” and that is enough to get what I want.  Before, when we were just starting this, I would go in and say, “Give me a one” or a “Give me a one and a half,” so we have made progress.  If we graph this out, the graph is going up, and soon I’ll be able to say, “I’ll take a three!”

I may never get to a three, though.  My wife says I’m more sexy and my kids say I have more authority now, but still – off it may come, at a time and date of my own choosing.  I hold all the cards, and only I know when that date will come.  One morning, I’ll get up and just feel in an “off with the beard mood” and Walla! – it will be gone – in one fell stroke me becoming less sexy and having reduced authority – in essence, returning back to the class of a normal beardless commoner.

That day has not come, though, and I still walk around with a beard. I’m getting used to it, I have to say, which surprises me, really.  And my wife says that one bad thing about the warmer weather that may sometime come* is this:  the beard might go.  So I’m in a quandary, and why does life have to be so complicated?  Maybe I’ll split the difference and go for a goatee.  It’s strange where life takes you!

*April is a continuation of winter this year!  See April 3rd Snow.

Advanced Economic Theory and Family Life

The last two centuries have hosted a lot of -isms that have become set in motion a concurrence of events that have forever changed history: capitalism, communism, fascism, to name a few. The 20^th century alone is replete with the rise and fall of many of these ideologies and each crest of the wave and breaking thereof has altered the life of millions.

Sorry, Karl

As I wade into the realm of political theory, I will offer my assessments of each of these -isms. This assessment is based not on honed political theories and arguments, but something simpler and I believe more accurate: family life and specifically, children.

Ah, family life: it’s all there; it’s a perfect laboratory for all the -isms, and children by their nature exhibit – or fail to exhibit – them. We can take a look at each.

Communism

Karl Marx had seven children but it’s hard to believe he paid attention. Anyone with a cerebral cortex who has lived with a two year old instinctively knows that human beings are not programmed out of the box to share. No, they are not. Try giving a two year old a sucker and then asking him (or her) if they would like to share it. If they pop it from their mouth and hold it out to you, then communism is a viable political philosophy. If they give a resounding “No,” and plug it even deeper into their mouth and suck harder, then it is not.

Besides this, a two year old owns everything in the universe. When they say “Mine” they don’t mean “ours.” They mean “mine.”

Sorry, Karl.

Capitalism

One of the central tenants of pure capitalism is that everyone is nice, as there is little need for regulation or oversight of the markets.

We have not found this to be true in the market of our household. The older dear child would appear to not have a conscience toward their younger sibling, as that red fire-engine birthday present that was given to the younger brother – hey, want to trade that for a single half-eaten candy bar? And if you do, I’ll be your friend forever!

The moral: oppressing ones neighbor is baked into the human psyche, no matter what Adam Smith said.

Socialism

Socialism is the belief that great things can be accomplished with other people’s money, and this holds true in a household with kids.

I do remind them of this: in this welfare state called the Stahl household, I happen to be providing – free of charge – food, heat, electricity, phone service, much transportation hither and thither and, most importantly: internet service. It is not exactly a cradle to grave safety net, as the latter condition is not met, but it’s a safety net from the cradle to – like, somewhat midway through college and perhaps beyond.

We have the same conversation time and again it seems, as when we are out they will ask, “Can we go through DD?” or “I’d really like xxx at McDonald’s,” where xxx is something tasty but expensive, or “Hey, there’s a Taco Bell!” My answer is always the same: “Whose money do we plan to use?” Here they hem and haw, and mutter something about “Dad’s money” and, after all, you are so nice, aren’t you?

Yes, socialism is great as long as there remains any wealth to distribute, and then it’s bust. Why does redistributing the wealth always mean: taking it from me and giving it to you?

Oh, as an aside, we have the same problem with our cats. They are always eager for a handout; my dear wife is the embodiment of the socialist government. The cats are sleeping on the furniture (one on the couch, the other on the chair), and then it happens: Angela walks into the room. Bing! Up they sit, assess the situation for a moment, and in a second are in the kitchen at her feet, rubbing against her legs. Do they love her or her food? I think the food. This is the welfare state, and the cats are a very good representation of the average voter.

The Moral of the Story

There you have it: the great ideals of communism, capitalism (pure capitalism) and socialism being defeated by a couple of children in a household. Its amazing how great minds could miss this, but maybe its fools who have called these minds great. The children would just think it all ridiculous.

http://www.brunstad.org

A Scam Story

There is some background to this story, so let’s start there.

An elderly lady in Cato often calls me to help her with her computer, and I stop by and fix this or that and answer her computer questions. She called me three weeks ago, since a Microsoft technical support representative had called her, took control of her computer and then asked $199 to “clean the viruses off it.” I told her not to pay the fee; it was a scam.

A few weeks later I got a call myself from a “Microsoft technician.” My computer was sending email to their servers, she said, and could they remotely control my PC to clean this up? I argued with her for about 15 minutes, asking why I would ever want to give someone I don’t know access to my computer and – hey, I was a computer guy anyway. Amazingly, she wouldn’t back down – she insisted she was a Microsoft technician, and I finally hung up.

Fast forward to this week. My daughter gets the following pop-up while playing a game:

I just couldn’t resist. I had to call the number.

The Setup

Mind you, I’m a computer guy; have a degree and also have tons of experience (like 30 years worth). So I setup what is called a virtual operating system on my server. That is, I run Windows 7 in a window, just like you would run Microsoft Word in a window. So you have an operating system in an operating system. The idea here is to give the “technical support representative” access to my virtual operating system and not my real one. If they destroyed the virtual system, no big deal. My real system would still be fine.

I also ran a program called Wire Shark to track their IP address. With their IP address, I can determine which country they are located in.

At the beginning of the call I plan to act like a complete computer novice but during the course of the call I plan to reveal my real expertise. I’m wondering what they will actually find on my computer and what they would do once in it. Oh, by the way – the virtual OS is clean – just installed, so it has no viruses. It’s perfect.

The Call

I call the number and am placed in a queue, awaiting the “technical support representative” who is answering other calls. My turn comes up, and I am talking to Annie, who I can at least understand but has something of an accent, but I can’t quite make out where it is from. India? Philippines? I’m not sure. She is nice in one way but also very businesslike.

She first asks about the pop-up I have on my computer, and I read the text in the pop-up (I had copied it to a file). She says its unfortunate to get such viruses on your computer, and we both agree that I have a problem. Can she take control of my PC to investigate and fix it? Sure, I say, and she then – apparently dealing with complete morons on a daily basis – asks me to find the Windows key on my keyboard: the key with the flag on it, located on the bottom left of the keyboard. I find it. “Hold it down.” I do. “Press the R key.” I do, again. “What do you see?” I tell her I see a box with “Run” at the top .

“Ok, now type this: “I” as in igloo, “n” as in Noon, “t” as in Thomas, and on an on we go, letter by letter. I follow along, the ignominious that I am, and when we are done, she tells me to press the Ok button, which I find and press.

“What do you see?”

I tell her. The screen wants me to enter a six digit code to allow remote access. She gives me the code and tells me to approve everything – blow through all the prompts and allow all security, which I do because, as you know, my computer is infected and needs to be fixed.

We arrive, and she has remote access to my computer. She moves the mouse from somewhere in the world – I have no idea where – and the mouse moves on my screen. What I see, she sees, and it’s like she is sitting in front of my computer, able to do anything. Complete access.

She goes to the System Log in the Windows Event Viewer. Now, Windows logs many events, both the critical and just informational; it’s really meant for nerds to get more information on what is happening with the computer. She clicks on the Filter Current Log button and selects only the Critical and Warning log messages to be displayed. I see this:

“Do you see all these Critical messages and warnings?” she says. “They’re all viruses.”

I am amazed. Wow, I didn’t know I had all these viruses! The only problem is, this is the Windows Event Log – it has absolutely nothing to do with viruses.

It’s like bringing your car into the shop and the mechanic tells you, “The engine is in upside down!” “Really?” you say. He pops the hood and shows you. “Do you see that dip stick that says ‘Oil’?” he says. “That should be facing the ground, so if there’s too much oil, it can be discharged. It’ll should cost about $600 to fix this.” “Well, do it!” you say. “I can’t have a car with an upside down engine!” It’s like that.

I ask her what her company name is, and she mentions Microsoft but when I ask if she actually works for Microsoft, she says she works for a third-party firm: Technology PC Repairs. Fair enough. I ask if they have a website.

“I can show it to you right now,” she says, and on the screen types in www.technologypcrepairs.com.  I see:

Pretty legit, I have to say, except that the main office is in Chisinau, Republica Moldova. I’m not sure where Chisinau, Republica Moldova is, but at this point I’m somewhat concerned. It says, though, on the Technical Support page that it is a non-profit organization, which makes me feel better. Also, it says that there are “No Hidden Fees” and “Our Prices are discussed up-front, so you know what you are paying and nothing more.” Wow, isn’t that nice!

We have been on the phone about 15 minutes, and I am having a fairly good time but a stroke of genius hits me like a thunderbolt.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t think this would take that long,” I say. “I have to get going. I have to pickup my son at school in ten minutes.” And this is true: I do have to pickup my 16 year old, but Annie is not happy.

“Oh, I’ll call you back a bit later,” I tell her. “How late are you open to?” She says to 8 pm. “Can I get your extension? I’d like to have you as my support representative again.” She says something, but I have to clarify as she is not clear this time. “Is that an extension?” Yes she says, and I write down, “Ext 406.”

I thank her for her time, and I’m sorry about this – I really didn’t think it would take as long as it did, and hang up, the ignorant and stupid mark that I am.

Second Call

Well, when I get home a few hours later, I just have to call back to get my issue resolved. I call but now end up waiting about 10 minutes for a technician to help me, as many people must have these viruses on their computer. The music is tolerable and the soothing voice tells me how important my call is to them and to not hang up, and I don’t.

A technician answers, but this time it’s a man. Ryan is his name, and I ask for Annie at extension 406 but he seems not to register this and asks me about my pop-up. Ok, perhaps he can help me, I think. Hey, maybe Annie at extension 406 is using the bathroom or something. It happens.

We dive right into it. Interestingly, he takes remote control of my virtual computer in a completely different way, which is too arduous to explain here, but he does. Like Annie, his associate, he goes to the event viewer and shows me all the viruses it has caught. This is horrible, I tell him, and ask how I could have gotten so many on my system? “Do you have kids who download stuff?” he asks, and I say I do. “That’s how they get in!” I tell him I’ll have to talk to them, but I do happen to ask this: if they are viruses, why does the screen say under the source column Kernal-Power and DNS. “That shows the type of virus,” he says, and I say, “Oh.”

This is not enough. “Let me check something else.” He then types in msconfig into the Run box, and while he is trying to get to the bottom of what ails my PC, I ask him for his company name. He says something but I don’t get it, as he has a thicker accent than Annie had and finally spells it out for me: “UV Tech.”

“Oh,” I say.

He is working. In the msconfig box he clicks on the Services Tab and shows me that, in the huge list of services, some have a Stopped status. “You need to renew this software,” he says, and I tell him that, well, the computer is a few years old, so that would be logical.

“You have a major problem,” he finally tells me after doing a few more things. “This is going to take 30 to 40 minutes to fix.” I am amazed. I didn’t know I had such a problem! The cost is a one time charge of $99 or, if I want a two year plan, it is $250.

At this point I am tiring of all this; it’s been fun, but a body can only have so much fun, after all. I tell him that the viruses in the event viewer are ridiculous, and the software that has to be renewed in the Services tab of msconfig is laughable. I am a computer guy, I say. I tell him there might not be many jobs in Moldavia, but perhaps he can find an honest way to make a living and not take money from innocent nubes who don’t know any better.

He fights me, assuring me that my computer has a problem, and he would like to fix it for me. He also challenges me. Sure I’m a computer guy, but he is a professional and a lot of people say they’re computer guys. At this time I notice that he is starting to install something on my computer and when I shutdown my virtual operating system, he protests, “Don’t lock me out. I can show you what is wrong with your computer, Mr. computer guy.”

At this point I am really tiring of this entire episode. I do the nuclear option. I ask to speak to his supervisor.

The Supervisor

“Ok, give me a minute,” he says, and I hear the pleasant music and expect a disconnect. Surprisingly, the supervisor comes on the phone. What is the matter, he wants to know.

I tell him the entire operation is a hoax and a scam. I tell him that I know that everything Annie and Ryan showed me was bogus. Again, like Ryan he fights back, saying that Ryan is new; he’s only been on the job three days, and he would like feedback to know how to help him do his job better.

But I am unrelenting. They are a scam and are stealing money from innocent people who don’t know better, but he assures me this is not so. I am not going to argue the point, but start to tell him that if he gets honest work, his life will go better, since it is not right to cheat people out of their money. He protests a bit and I listen but then tell him that there is a God up in heaven who sees everything that we do, and we will have to deal with Him someday.

Click. He hangs up. I hear a dial tone.

What we can Learn

Many times young computer professionals graduate from college in these off-beat countries and can’t find a job, so they turn to writing viruses, hacking into systems and – yes – running scams. I should mention that I did encourage Ryan to find a legitimate job but got the distinct sense that he wasn’t interested in following me down this line of thought.

Also, I would guess that they turn a pretty good business. My elderly friend in Cato was just about to give them $199 but had the good sense to call me, her computer guy. Many don’t have someone like me and, when they see all the viruses on their screen, they get out their credit card. If 100 people call the call center in Moldavia and only one percent pay the fee, I’m sure Annie, Ryan and the supervisor make out pretty good.

There are many ways for a fool to be parted from his money, and this is just one example. I get calls all the time for free vacations, and I’ve won so much stuff I should be wealthy by now. It’s amazing how good people are to me, in that they always seem to have a great deal for me and want to give me something for free. I guess it’s my good looks or nice smile.

It’s all very sad, though. What a world we live in! It’s not so hard to fall for this crap either, since the scammers are pretty good at what they do. Let the buyer beware – now more than ever, as this is the computer age.

April 3rd Snow

My kids sometimes ask why we (or anyone) ever settled in – of all places – Central New York. I shrug my shoulders and mumble something like “I was born and raised here,” and they begin to list all the bad weather conditions that we have to deal with. Bad weather conditions mean one thing: snow, and besides snow, perpetual overcast skies, and rain.

What we woke up to on April 3rd

I was able to hold my own in these conversations by remembering and then verbalizing that Central New York has many good qualities about it – actually, very good qualities. The thing is, I’m pretty sure that my house – which is standing today – will still be standing tomorrow. We don’t have earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes or other very bad weather events. When you put this on one side of the scale and snow on the other, you have to admit that the Catastrophic Events side makes the scale plummet with a thud.

Still.

They are somewhat convinced but, in the final analysis, they still cannot go outside much of the year. Like seven months. More than 50%. And if they do, you never know what the weather is doing in the next 15 minutes.

Enter April 3^rd, 2016, into this discussion. We get up this fine April morning, and spring has sprung! Well, not exactly. Actually, we have snow. Snow, and about six to eight inches of it. We can’t believe it. Turns out our potted plants, ready for the healing rains of April, are covered in snow, and my son has to unfreeze them with a hair dryer.

Our Plants after the April 3rd Snow

Potted Plants Being Unfrozen by a Hair Dryer

I wax historical and say that one year on April 3^rd – I remember the exact date but not the year – we got a huge snowstorm: like 3 feet of snow in the early 1990’s. Compared to this, our little snowfall is comparatively good. Well, we have to look on the bright side of things, now don’t we? After all, this is Central New York – and why would anyone ever want to live here?

On Blogging

When I first started blogging, I was all enthusiastic and tried to write something everyday, but that was far too taxing on this dear blogger, and, besides that, I had to come up with something to blog about every single day. So I backed off and instead blogged every other day – about three times a week – and was able to keep up the pace all the way up until my 50th Blog, and then something happened.

It’s not that I didn’t want to blog anymore, but I seemed to have run out of ideas. Eight kids is surely a great foundation for tons of material, but we’ve looked at many aspects of the eight kids angle (food, chores, teenagers) and I’m sure there’s more angles to glean, but I couldn’t think of any. Then there’s the cancer angle, and I dredged up another blog (yet unpublished) from the depths but, unless something again happens to me cancerwise, I’ve pretty much emptied the well.

There’s other topics, such as holidays, and I can and have expounded on the meaning of these; we’ve talked about cats and politics, and both are deceitful – that’s for sure – and also other sundry topics.

At some point we’re trying to roll paint over my fairly boring life, and so far it’s worked. Well, it’s really not so boring; how could it be with eight kids, and cancer always promises to jive it up, that’s for sure. And every day I’m challenged to hear from God and do his will, and what is more exciting than that! If you doubt – well, just try it!

What I’m trying to say is that I’ll be blogging every Wednesday and Sunday from now on, unless like lightening striking several places at once, suddenly thunderbolts cross my mind and I write blog after blog! It’s happened, especially at first. But I do have other things in life to do other than write blogs. Hey, I have to do something, after all, so I have something to write about!

[P.s.  I already broke my own guideline, having been thunderstruck in my brain when I saw six to eight inches of snow on April 3rd and just had to wrote yet another blog, and on the same day as this post. Sorry for violating my own standards, and so soon!]