Tag Archives: Technology

Computer illiterate people

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As the treasurer of an organization, I’m responsible for ordering membership badges. At our Christmas Party last month, one member walked up and asked me if I could order a badge for his 10-year-old son. After I got home, I sent the member an email asking him to confirm his son’s name, mailing address and so on.

Today, 36 days (!) after my outgoing email, the father responded that I had the right name and address and then he offered the following editorial:

Sorry to take so long to reply. Our computer has been down since summer time and my brother-in-law just got it kind of working. It’s not perfect but it works so I’m trying to catch up on e-mails. We are the most computer illiterate people in the world – each of us has several thousand unread e-mails dating back at least 2 years. We live our lives in the real world and really could not [sic] care less if computers had not ever been invented.

The real world?

It’s not widely known, but the direct dial phone preceded the computer by 28 years. Prior to direct dial, you picked up the party line phone, Mabel answered and connected you … and then probably listened in. When direct dial became popular, you had to look numbers up and interface with that phone thingee – Actually dial the numbers yourself!

From a human interaction standpoint, I don’t see a lot of different between the transition to direct dial phones and the transition to computers/email. So when I apply the 28-year factor to this year, 2012, I come up with the following:

Imagine telling people in 1984 (28 years ago) that you lived in the “real world” and weren’t going to communicate via direct dial phone. Now that Mabel had been removed from the loop, you weren’t going to make the effort to master that confusing dial on the phone. After all, you now lived in the real world.

I feel sorry for the couple, and I really feel sorry for the 10-year-old who will soon want a computer of his own. What will be his parent’s reaction?

Troglodytes running McAfee

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From a New York Times article on computer hackers this morning:

“One of the U.S. government’s biggest worries is that the attackers will place that source code back into products,” said George Kurtz, the chief technology officer at McAfee.

Excuse me? First, I’d like to know who in the U.S. Government provided a list of “biggest worries,” and second, it’s incredible to me that contaminated “source code” is even in the top 100 U.S. Government problems – Something tells me Afghanistan, health care, infrastructure and many others are a helluva lot closer to the top.

If George Kurtz truly believes what he was quoted as saying, and he’s the technology guru at McAfee, then I would strongly recommend the immediate uninstallation of all McAfee products from your PC immediately. You don’t want to run software from a company with nut jobs at the helm.

With the exception of scripts, computer code comes in two flavors, source code and executable – Source code is the human-readable instructions, and executable is the actual program that’s distributed online or on CD/DVDs.

Essentially, source code is the cookie recipe, and executable is the cookie itself. Imagine someone contaminating your chocolate chip cookie recipe by adding a line that says “Stir in 3 oz of chili pepper.”

The two problems with Kurtz’ argument are that first, contaminating source code would require access to the secure areas of the company. Source code is highly proprietary and considered company jewels. It’s not something that Joe Hacker has easy access to. If a hacker gets hold of your source code, you have much bigger problems than contaminated source code.

Second, mathematical calculations done on the source code before it’s converted to executable for distribution (called check sums or MD5 calculations) will catch the contamination. Much like tasting the cookie dough would catch the cookie recipe contamination.

Kurtz! Maybe you want to rephrase those interview sound bites?