Ornoth

I was probably 15 or 16 years old when computers first started appearing at the consumer level.

In the late 1970s, these were mostly for playing games. I played Pong (1972) and Asteroids (1979) on the first arcade consoles; Air-Sea Battle (1977) at Sears on the Atari VCS; Carriers at War (1984) on the Apple ][, and Crush, Crumble and Chomp! (1981) on the TRS-80.

My first experience using a computer for anything other than games was the University of Maine mainframe in 1982, long before the invention of the Web (1989) or even the TCP/IP protocol (1983) that heralded the creation of the Internet.

This was a time when card punches and readers were still being actively used. Students preferred to do homework on paper-fed teletype terminals like the DECwriter II rather than video display monitors, because they would still have a printed record of their assignment if the mainframe crashed and lost their work. It would be years before the first IBM PC model would appear on campus.

It’s a fair question to ask: with no games and no Internet, what did we actually do on the university computer?

Herein lies an interesting tale. You see, before TCP/IP, IBM had created its own networking protocol called RSCS, and in 1981 – a year before I arrived at UMaine – RSCS was used to connect computers at UMaine, Yale, CUNY, and a handful of other colleges in an academic network known as BITNET. BITNET allowed users at different sites to send programs and data files to one another, exchange email, and send interactive messages, and it would eventually grow to over 3,000 universities across much of the developed world.

In 1982, the idea of being able to send an instant message to someone across campus – or even across the country! – was incredibly compelling.

But RSCS messages weren’t all that. An incoming message would interrupt whatever you were doing, whether that was running a program, archiving files to magnetic tape, or composing a term paper. Each message was separate; there was no concept of an ongoing conversation, and there was no way to include anyone other than the sender and one recipient.

TeleVideo 925 terminal

That all changed in 1983, when one of our university’s computer center staffmembers took an example program from a magazine and ran it on his mainframe account: WGH@MAINE. The program was what we called “a chat machine”; users across BITNET could sign in and send messages to it, and the program would echo those messages to all the other signed-in users. It was the ultimate ancestor of later services like Chat@PSUVM1, Relay@Bitnic, IRC, and Discord.

And its use spread like wildfire among the undergrads. If you were a smart kid who wasn’t into partying, then hanging out on a chat machine was how you spent your time. I devoted endless hours with a cadre of other geeks in the mainframe’s “user area”, idly hanging out on these early chat machines, conversing by text message with an increasingly familiar set of students from random sites across the world. I joined several other Mainers in making the trip down to New York City to attend the world’s first ChatCon meetup in 1984.

These days, I still retain a deep sense of nostalgia for those early days, and keep a few of the memories alive in odd, eccentric ways. Not only does my laptop’s “Terminal” window open in the classic green-on-black of a monochrome mainframe terminal, with the standard CMS “Ready;” prompt, but it also paints the default character-graphic VM/370 login panel. I wish one of my friends still had a copy of the old CAPS/UMaine login panel: an outline of the state of Maine, done in asterisk characters!

My Terminal window also uses the same idiosyncratic font-face as the huge old IBM 3278 terminals of the day. That’s kind of an indulgence, because I never used one… The only 3278s were kept inside the mainframe machine room; lowly student users like me only had access to TeleVideo 925 or 955 terminals… And no one has bothered to port those terminals’ fonts to modern Truetype or Postscript files!

One of the attributes of those mainframe terminals that I recall most fondly were their industrial-strength keyboards. They were of the same vintage as IBM’s “Big Iron” mainframes, long before “planned obsolescence” was a thing. Those keyboards were built to easily withstand a decade of student use, or a direct thermonuclear explosion, whichever came first.

Those old 4½ pound mainframe keyboards were so different from the flimsy, commodity rubber membrane actuated keyboards you get today, or the 1.4 pound Apple Magic Keyboard with its little scissor switches and a mere 1.15mm of key travel. And frankly I really missed the typing experience of a solid, durable keyboard with mechanical switches.

So now I have to admit… This whole nostalgia dump was really just a lead-up to this: I recently bought my first mechanical keyboard.

Now the first thing I’m gonna do is warn you: if you get intimidated by too many choices, selecting a mechanical keyboard is a complete morass! You’re absolutely inundated with choice, beginning with what size keyboard you want, and what keyboard layout. Then there’s tons of different keycaps to choose from, coming not just in different colors, but with different heights and profiles. Next there’s hundreds of different types of switches, with different travel, activation, and sound profiles. Mechanical keyboards are – unexpectedly – one of those incredibly detailed, technical areas that enthusiasts love to submerse themselves into, for reasons known only to the cognoscenti.

Saving you all the drama, I chose a Keychron V6 Max. I wanted something really traditional: a full-sized keyboard with dedicated function keys, arrow keys, and a number keypad, similar to the original IBM Enhanced PC keyboard, which is probably the most famous keyboard in history. The V6 Max is also wireless, which I prefer, given that I often type with the keyboard on my lap. And it’s sturdy, weighing in at 4.47 pounds, only half an ounce lighter than my beloved TeleVideo 925!

I kept the stock keycaps, which are a nice two-toned blue, with reddish ESC and ENTER keys. The keyboard has modes for both Mac and Windows, as well as dedicated keycaps for both OS’ idiosyncratic command keys.

Not knowing much about switches, I ordered two sets: the Gateron Jupiter Brown and Gateron Jupiter Banana, but I quickly opted to run the latter, which have a more satisfying sound, which will hopefully not perturb my housemate.

Other features… The keyboard is customizable with industry-standard QMK or VIA software. It also has a handy dedicated volume/mute knob on the top row just to the right of the F12 key. Like many modern keyboards, it comes with (often maligned) programmable LED backlighting, which I’ve set to simply flash blue underneath each key as it is activated. I also bought a nice clear plastic keyboard cover to put over it when not in use.

Having had it for six weeks, I have to say that it’s been a pure delight, and I find myself looking for reasons to sit down at the keyboard and bang away on it. In fact, I enjoy typing on it so much that I’ve been thinking about setting up a Discord text chat for a gathering of BITNET friends to revisit those old days when we used to spend hours upon hours typing to one another across the ether (hence the reminiscing about chat machines, above). And fair warning: another way I’ll satisfy my rejuvenated enthusiasm for typing is to produce more longwinded blogposts like this one!

I’ve only had two minor niggles. I had one bad switch – which happened to be on my ‘s’ key – that would register a double-strike about half the time. However, that was easily remedied by swapping the switch out. The other niggle is one I’ve had in the past with several other keyboards: the little rubber feet on the ends of the keyboard’s prop-up legs always seem to come loose for me, requiring an end-user application of superglue to stay put.

So after all that, the bottom line of this post was just to spend time gushing about having finally bought myself a quality keyboard. I’ve been dealing with garbage chiclet keyboards ever since I left college back in the late 1980s, and – given the amount of time I still spend sitting at the computer! – I was way overdue in treating myself to a higher quality input device.

And I’ll type, type, type till my baby takes my key-board away…
(no apologies to Brian Wilson)

I’m not a packrat, but I have an eye for memorabilia, socking away strange little keepsakes that would otherwise land in a dumpster. Examples include circuit boards from the PDP-11 system I managed in college, and the brass corporate mission plaque from MediQual, my first post-college employer.

Another such item is a poster-sized oil painting that hung over Sapient’s front desk back in 1995, when I was first hired by the nascent internet consulting company.

It was an original composition by Courtney, Sapient’s receptionist, who had recently graduated with a bachelors degree in studio art at Dartmouth College. Painted a year earlier, it depicts a streetscape of brownstones in Boston’s South End, where she lived.

During her years at Sapient, Courtney left the front desk and led new employee orientation, then ran Sapient’s People Strategy Organization (aka HR), and finally took overall responsibility for corporate culture. Over that time we had several moves and refreshes of our office space, and her painting was thrown into permanent storage and forgotten.

When the Dot-Com bubble burst, Sapient needed to shrink its physical footprint. Being a curious little opportunist, one day I accompanied our Operations team as they cleaned out one of the storage areas. Unearthing Courtney’s painting, and knowing that she was no longer around, I received permission to adopt it.

That was around 2002, toward the end of my tenure at Sapient, and just after my purchase of a condo in Boston’s Copley Square. When I brought the painting home, it took pride of place on the brick wall in my front entryway. And there it hung.

Years later, before I left Boston, I reached out to Courtney and offered to pay her or give the painting back. Despite initial interest, she never made arrangements to pick it up, and I never heard from her again.

The painting has been with me for nearly two decades, and now graces our Pittsburgh dining room. It is a treasured reminder of Boston, my time at Sapient, and the Back Bay condo I loved.

Begemot the cat found a packing peanut and kinda went to town on it. Fun, but we don’t want him injesting chunks of polystyrene. So I looked online to see if we could obtain any packing material that was kitteh-safe.

However, when I entered “edible packing material” into Amazon’s search bar, the results weren’t *quite* what I had envisioned.

Here are the sixteen “matches” from the first results page:

	Top result? Silica gel. Silica gel? Doesn't that shit have "DO NOT INGEST!" printed all over it?
	Saran Wrap. Well, I guess you could use it as packing material, but it sure ain't edible!
	Wait... Decorative muffin tins? How? What? Huh?
	A leather messenger bag. That's not packing material...
	Apples! Well, a photo of apples, anyways. On a mousepad. Didn't those go the way of rotary phones?
	A cold pack. Again, isn't that expressly marked "DO NOT INGEST!"?
	Oh! Another leather messenger bag. Still not packing material, tho.
	Dollar bill paper tissues? What the fuck?
	Oh. An ice cream cone maker! Just what I was looking for! Now how much would you pay? But wait! There's more...
	A V-thong. Are those edible?
	I always protect my fragile items by packing them inside this virtual Wedding Dessert Chef Android app.
	Nasturtium seeds! Just what I would use to protect my laptop from damage.
	Kung Fu Panda cake topper! I guess Dreamworks must be pretty hard up for cash if they're selling these as packing material...
	I had to look this one up. It's an exfoliating scrubber sponge. Might actually pass for expensive packing material. Don't think Begemot would be very interested, tho.
	An airbrush! Oh fuck it, I can't even. These search results are stupider and funnier than any caption I can make up.
	Somewhere, a woefully self-important online marketer staked his career on making sure that "Gucosamine for Dogs" appeared on page one of these search results.

A world-changing piece of software was released recently, and you need to know about it. It’s called Firesheep, and it makes stealing your login information for the web sites you visit as easy as: point, click, done. I strongly urge you to Google it and educate yourself about it.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that your login credentials have never been secure. After all, email, the world wide web, and the underlying packet switching protocols: none of them were designed to carry encrypted communications. And it’s not in the interest of commercial web sites to spend more time and effort than the absolute minimum necessary to convince you that that their sites are “secure”.

Still, up til now you’ve been able to reassure yourself with the belief that only people with very specialized knowledge and tools had the ability to hijack your web sessions.

Firesheep has changed that forever by putting those techniques behind a point-and-click interface that anyone from a four year old child to an eighty year old grandmother could operate.

All someone needs to do is (1) download the Firefox plugin, (2) connect to a public network, and (3) when presented with a list of other users’ sessions on that network, click the one they want to log in as. With no more skill or effort that that, they’ve got instant access to your account on Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, Foursquare, Wordpress, and so forth. The rest, as we say, is YFN.

This is doubly bad news for anyone with a smartphone, because most of those devices automatically and indiscriminately connect to public WiFi networks, then send your login credentials to any sites you regularly monitor, without your knowledge or involvement.

There are solutions to this problem, and the people who create and maintain web sites have known about them for years, but balked at putting the extra security measures into practice. Firesheep was actually intended to bring this vulnerability to everyone’s attention, so that the problem might finally be addressed. How quickly do you think that’ll happen?

So here we are. After decades of playing fast and loose on the web, keeping your head in the sand about the risks, it’s finally time to get serious about securing the information you send over the public channel.

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t even take your username and password seriously. How often do you change it? How hard would it be for a human to guess? How long would it take a password guessing computer to crack? Do you use the same username and password for several sites?

The username/password security that we’ve gotten used to is largely just a placebo. It wrongly makes people think they’ve taken an effective security measure. But if your network traffic isn’t encrypted, Firesheep makes it easy for everyone else on the network to hijack your login.

Ideally, all public web sites would immediately transition to sending all web traffic via SSL. But deployment will certainly be extremely slow and spotty.

So what are your options? The first is obviously to carefully regulate your use of public networks. Another is to use a tool like Blacksheep, which might alert you when someone on the network is running Firesheep.

You can also ensure that all your traffic is encrypted by setting up a virtual private network (VPN). The problem there is that you need a trusted host to serve as a gateway, and if you use someone like your workplace, you might discover that they block the sites you want to visit on your personal time, like Facebook and YouTube.

In the meantime, it also makes sense to review your password policy.

I’ll admit my own culpability there: up til now, I’ve only had two passwords. I had one password that never changed, that I used for dozens of sites I didn’t consider that important; and I had another that I changed annually for sites that needed an extra level of “security”, like brokerage and bank accounts.

Needless to say, I’ve decided to fix that. My first change is to start using purely random generated passwords, making use of the full gamut of permitted characters (e.g. mixed case letters and special characters). I’m also using as long a password as each site allows (many allow passwords to be 15, 20, 40 or more characters). These measures are all designed to make my passwords harder to break.

The second change I’m making is that I’m assigning a different password for every single site I use. That ensures that if someone does break one of my passwords, they can only use it for one site, containing any possible damage they can cause.

My third change: turn off all password caching in my web browsers, and remove the existing memorized passwords. This has always been a huge, gaping security hole, and one that should never be used in the first place.

You might think those sound like a big pain in the ass. While it is some extra effort, it’s a lot better than handing a fifteen year old Russian hacker unlimited access to my bank accounts, yanno?

And actually, it’s not that much of an inconvenience if you use one of the many specialized password database managers that are out there. I started using KeePass, which—now that I’ve got it set up—seems like a no-brainer. Look into it.

For years, you’ve gotten away with not putting any serious thought or effort into your internet security. Like the companies that run the world’s major web sites, you did the bare minimum, and, like an ostrich, buried your head in the sand.

That was then, but this is now. Armed with weapons like Firesheep, there are lots of ostrich hunters out there now. People who continue to keep their heads in the sand will soon be meat on the table.

Don’t be one of them. Start taking care of your shit.

So. Lolcats. I gotta say I like the lolcats.

You can find out what lolcats are, you can browse the lolcats, or you can make lolcats outta your LiveJournal.

I did the latter, using my own journal, and came up with the accompanying image. It amuses me.

Generally I try to avoid insipid reposting of material you’ll find elsewhere, but I thought this article on the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s most-frequent searches might be of interest.

List your five favorite beverages.

1. Orange juice
2. Gatorade
3. Chocolate milk: Hersheys
4. Scottish ale: Belhaven, McEwan’s, Skullsplitter…
5. Coke: either Classic or Cherry

 

List your five favorite websites.

1. DargonZine: my writers’ community and zine
2. OrnothLand: me!
3. LiveJournal, and of course ornoth
4. boston.com, the local newspaper, and especially Starts and Stops
5. B3ta
6. Graham Watson: the best cycling photographer on the planet
7. Northeast Hill Climbs: great local cycling reference
8. FlightTracker: so I know when to pick people up at Logan
9. TopoZone: I’m a map freak
10. Mappoint: I’m a map freak

 

List your five favorite snack foods.

1. Ice cream: particularly chocolate chip and Oreo cookie
2. Berries: fresh or dried
3. Fererro Rocher, or any other combination of chocolate and hazelnuß
4. Jalepeño flavored potato chips
5. Health Valley Wild Berry Granola Bars

 

List your five favorite board and/or card games.

1. Diplomacy: the greatest game ever invented, period
2. Ubi: combines illuminati, trivia, and geography
3. Poker: particularly our permutations on the Fifty-Seven variant: Hurt Me and the Bates Motel
4. Xiang chi: that’s chinese chess
5. Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game: tons of blowing up fun with 1/700 scale models!
6. Knighthood and the Middle Ages (KatMA): 25mm medieval miniatures

 

List your five favorite computer and/or game system games.

1. Civilization: strategy games rule
2. Moria: spent half my undergrad on a VAX, bashing blue yeeks
3. Marble Madness: physics, rendered beautifully
4. M.U.L.E.: ancient exploration game from EA, with killer theme music!
5. Quake: solo or network death match, I’ve got an axe to grind…