Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

True story. Way back when WHDL was getting ready to start broadcasting in stereo, the station’s engineers were encountering difficulties getting its multiplexing going.

A couple of times the station announced the date for the switch, and a couple of times things didn’t work right, so they decided to quit announcing the change ahead of time. They’d just keep working on it, and one day it would work, and then they’d tell us afterward.

You remember when most radio was monaural but some began broadcasting two channels at once, two signals that could both be detected by stereo-capable FM tuners? One signal would come out of the left speaker, another from the right, simulating the way our two ears hear slightly different versions of “live” sound. Stereo radio tuners had little red signal lights that would light up when a multiplexing station was encountered.

One day I was in my office working away and playing my Fischer tuner in the background, set to WHDL. I heard a difference in the signal, on and off several times. I glanced at the tuner, and sure enough, that multiplex beacon flicked a few times, then glowed steadily, and stereo came from my H.H. Scotts. The disk jockey was not aware that the engineers had finally got it together, so he kept on spinning the platters as usual.

What was coming out, in its two coordinated but individual channels of sound, was “Both Sides, Now.”

The perfect tune to celebrate, even accidentally, the inauguration of two FM channels at one point on the dial! Joni Mitchell’s hit song, sung by Judy Collins in 1967, and by Mitchell in 1969. A retake on the song turns up in the 2003 film “Love Actually.” It has been “covered” by countless other artists, including the Swingle Singers (a cappella) and Susan Boyle.

Joni Mitchell was reading Saul Bellows’ “Henderson, the Rain King,” on a flight, and she looked out of the window and  saw clouds below the plane, and the lyrics began to form in her head.

The first refrain goes, “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, From up and down, and still somehow It’s cloud illusions I recall. I really don’t know clouds at all.”

“Cloud” took on a whole new meaning in the 1990s, having to do with something we tend to think of as not earthbound, but ethereal, and spacious, assuming new forms and dimensions as needed, free flowing, amorphous, and wonderfully accessible through technology.

But now cautionary tales are being told. There is a growing concern about cloud storage, transactions in the cloud, data leaks, wholesale Hoovering of information sometimes by friends and sometimes by enemies, hideous security glitches.

All those rosy forecasts about the future of software being in the cloud, and storage becoming a service that would be performed based on cloud architecture—aren’t so rosy anymore. And the silver linings seem to be tarnishing like flatware in a drawer when a plant is making foamglass a block or two away. (It was the sulfur that did it.)

Security problems must be well nigh pervasive wthen the US Investigations Services (USIS) company is hacked and the personal data of 25,000 employees is accessed.

ISUS did notice the breach, which it believes could be “state sponsored.” That is, some nation may be behind the meddling. Perhaps ours? or an unfriendly, not just a suspicious, one?

The Department of Homeland Security has halted its work with USIS. DHS plans to let the affected employees know their IDs may be in the wind, along with other supposedly private info.

Some of these records include the kind of stuff gathered in background checks, of such a personal nature that “some employees may be exposed to blackmail.”

Yikes! How embarrassing for them, and for USIS. Hm. Haven’t we heard of USIS before?

Yes, last year, in connection with Edward Snowden. It was USIS that did the background check on Snowden. Later the DHS’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) disclosed at a congressional hearing that the investigation of Snowden, two years earlier, probably had been flawed.

Looking back at that time, and at all the technological developments of 2013, it seems likely that the most significant tech story of the year will turn out to be the Snowdon matter.

The Snowden revelations have chopped holes in the cloud cosmos as surely as the swallows of legend used their scissor tails to do so, and with as drastic effect.

Last year Twitter, Adobe and Evernote suffered major password breaches. But when Snowden leaked 200,000 classified documents and we began to get a glimmering of the extent of NSA’s digital snooping programs, our collective innocence was doomed. Yes, Big Brother is watching, and so are a whole lot if the clan, or should we say “Family”? Listening too. And sharing, sometimes selling, their information.

Fallout continues. Ripples keep spreading. Organizations are having to revisit encryption strategies—how extensive and layered it needs to be.

Countries and companies abroad are rethinking how, or how much, to do business with or in the U.S. Cloud computing is not so heavenly, after all, considering the security implications.

Some companies want Dropbox-type storage only on their own earthbound servers.

A federal judge ruled against Microsoft in a decision stating that any company with a presence in the U.S must comply with a valid warrant requiring them to produce data to U.S. authorities—no matter where the data is stored.

The cloud has a downside, after all. And we are getting to know that side a lot better.