[BC] Digital Archiving <grin>

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

Controlled obsolescence
Three years ago last Monday, the electricians at
the company for which I work, started installing those
“Dairy Queen” light bulbs, you know –the ones with
the small fluorescent spiral tubes. Anyway, they
removed all the incandescent bulbs in the cafeteria
and installed those 15 watt replacements. On Monday
morning sixteen were dead, burned out, having lasted
exactly three years. Yesterday, the rest of them failed.
There is a statistical impossibility for all those bulbs
to have burned out simultaneously unless there was
a built-in timing mechanism to cause them to fail at
once. No, no lightning storms in the area yet this
year, so it wasn't a glitch. 

Back doors
IEEE Spectrum had an article this month about back-
doors being built into microprocessor chips so at
some time, an enemy could cause all processors
in all control systems to fail simultaneously.  Now,
I thought I was getting paranoid, but with both of
these items being revealed to me in the same
week, I thought maybe I should start looking
under nearby rocks.

Monitoring
Observed: I have a network switch-box on my
desk. Sometimes, without me being (knowingly)
connected to anything on the network, the LEDs
will flash every time I hit a key on my keyboard.
They will illuminate brightly when I move my mouse.
Therefore, I already know that the IT Department
has installed something to watch me. I also know
that it’s not very efficient if it sends a data-packet
for every keystroke. A keyboard generates a byte
when a key is pressed and another byte when
it is released. The minimum Ethernet packet is
64 bytes. That means that there are sixty-four
times more data being sent to monitor me,
than what an efficient program would use.

The next war
When the next war comes, it will be network
overload that will be our undoing, not some
enemy in a foreign land because IT departments
hire the clueless with IQs matching their age.

Selling advertisements
I-phones, satellite boxes, game boxes …they
are all sending usage data to their mama nodes.
There’s an article in this week’s “Telephony” rag
about putting targeted advertisements on cell-
phones. Apparently it’s perfectly legal to ring
you up on a cell-phone and force you to read an
advertisement before you can hear the screams
of a family member calling for help. Telecom is
going for, what they call the $3.5 trillion global
telecom revenue. Have a nice weekend!

--
Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Read about my book
http://www.LymanSchool.org