Tech Talk

There I was, minding my own business, and I got a message from someone wanting to friend me on Facebook.

I was delighted, because this was a person who has been my friend for about 30 years, just not on Facebook. So I accepted right away. Pretty soon the chat box popped up. “Hi,” said my befriended old friend.

So I said “Hey” and she replied, “hope all is well with you? I was wondering if you have heard about the poker lottery. The poker company in association with the government is having a lottery promotion. I won $50,000. I saw your name as a winner.”

This does not sound like my friend. She knows I am not into gambling.

I asked her what poker company and what government.

No reply.

I did a search and soon found an account of a similar incident. That one happened in August of 2012.

Is that the latest twist? It must be Obama’s fault, or at least a side effect of ACA It does sound a little Palinesque. The death panels could have morphed into lotteries? How do we find ourselves winning lotteries we have not entered? Some states are involved in lotteries, but they seem to want people to buy tickets. And I don’t do that.

Scammers can hijack accounts and profiles, apparently using the friend request and acceptance function, and impersonate someone known to the target, even using a profile photo.

•    •    •

This is the season for backward looks at the news that we read (or covered) in the year that is waning. Which events will have the greatest impact, going forward?

One very big political, international relations story, also a technology story, was the leak, by Edward Snowden, of 200,000 secret documents, which revealed surveillance programs carried out by the National Security Agency.

We knew NSA snooped, peeked and eavesdropped. But we did not know that it did so on us, any or all of us, perhaps indiscriminately, without warrants. And on our allies, broadly, like a powerful vacuum cleaner with no attachment on the end of its huge hose, picking up everything it gets close to, including shoes, cooking utensils and the family cat.

Who would have thought it! Well, conspiracy theorists and militia cult people and those who believe TVs operate both ways, capturing our activities and revealing them to, um, whoever set them up to do that. Oh, wait, didn’t we just read that LG Smart TVs actually can do that? Yes! That was in TechTalk last week, wasn’t it!

Officially, the gummint assures us that they are just interested in terrorists, or people who might be terrorists, and that is a very good thing for all the rest of us. I can’t help thinking about what we keep reading about some of the evil people who commit acts of mass murder and terrorism: they seem quite ordinary, and blend in with the rest of us.

In the wake of Snowden’s revelations, corporations and groups of many kinds are rushing to protect their data. Encryption has been recommended right along, but many of us have had the feeling that it wasn’t really necessary in our case.

Internationally, companies based elsewhere have become somewhat leery of doing business with American companies. Snowden’s leaks made it painfully obvious that the NSA has special access, backdoors, to many of those big companies.

Cloud computing was the way to go, with adoption being so eager we were beginning to think hardware was becoming obsolete! At least, we would not need more and more RAID systems. But now it seems that it could be easier to invade our stored date, and our stored emails, if they are not only off-site but in the cloud. So cloud deployments have slowed dramatically.

For myself, I have been known to kid, on the phone, that those beeps and clicks we were hearing were just the feds, who had tapped my line. Hahaha. As if! This would conjure up the scenes in The Sopranos where the Feebs would be breaking into Tony’s house and installing microphones in the basement. But it is so much easier now, isn’t it? And the NSA seems to bother with people as insignificant as I am, not really knowing what they are looking for, going in. But run enough metadata through the Juicemaster, and there’s no telling what all will come out of the spigot.

Besides, we now know that Verizon and At&T were handing over phone records upon request, to the NSA. The feds don’t have to break into the house or shinny up poles to eavesdrop on us, and there are no tell-tale beeps.

•    •    •

Recently I heard a cautionary account of betrayal. It reminded me to remind readers: don’t share your passwords!

It’s easy to grow accustomed to using a department-wide password. A system at a local meeting place asks for a password when going online, but the password is right there, on a Post-it note. Someone from an agency probably assigned the password. For all I know it is in use in many other places, by many other users.

It is possible to sabotage another user’s work, commit many acts of mischief, or frame another user for a crime, to say nothing of obtaining financial information enabling a person with some hacker-cracker abilities and desires to make off with funds. Information can be stolen that way, and data can be planted.

It’s too bad, but technology can be used for good or evil. It brings out the worst in some people, and we don’t always know who those people are. So we have to operate in defensive mode. We need to take precautions. And we have to trust very sparingly.