Techies to secure & protect
OUR Emperor Elect Donald
Trump might send out decisions via drums. Maybe smoke signals. Or carrier pigeons. He’s saying in today’s tech heck you can’t trust computers. He’s right. I was just allowed into a highly protected Internet Data Center outside New York. Undistinguished neighborhood. Its buildings lacked markings. Multiple gates. Doors upon doors. Cameras overhead. My passport documented. I was photographed, fingerprinted. Car license plate noted. One ID’d worker was fingerprinted six times in six hallways.
Technologist Don Harris: “People using the term ‘the cloud’ don’t know its meaning. Nothing goes to the sky in some mysterious satellite. Nothing’s ever deleted. Everything sent — photos, voices, messages, games, whatever — all end in similar facilities. Thousands of data centers are all over the US.”
The point made? “From now on information remains available always. Nobody’s safe anymore anywhere.”
All seeing
AIR-CONDITION units, plus microwave and directional Wi-Fi antennae, top the building. Inside cold and hot aisles alternate. Cold for the front of the servers, hot for the electric heat emanating from them.
“Using metrics, cellphones, cell towers, dates, times, credit card usage, E-ZPass and all other pointers, even rogue hackers have ability to find you. Computer technologists all know who you are, with whom, when, what you’re eating, what time, when you’re traveling, ads you answered. Everything about you. “Users take pregnancy photos, birth photos, baby pictures, grandparent closeups, high school graduation shots, stills of bedrooms, celebrity selfies. They mark dates. We know birthdays, nicknames, favorites, addresses. “Worst is users typing ‘Out of Office . . . back Jan. 29.’ Hackers know your place is empty. Time to rob. Never leave that message on your screen. Computer scientists can utilize this type stuff. There’s no firewall. Ways exist to pierce encryption. From inside their own kitchen, if your computer’s on, specialists can monitor your conversation. Nothing stops them collecting data.”
Forever lasting pix
FIGURING no benefit to retaining content indefinitely, some companies purge the images after 72 hours, but daily snapshots of it all get stored elsewhere.
Say a “Let’s meet for coffee” social networker’s a bad guy. If his computer’s in Maryland, hers isn’t and they agree to meet in Arizona, it crosses state lines. Also, different international laws exist. You’re robbed in France, but the info’s here. FBI and law enforcement have employed data center experts to track it down.
There’s terms like load balancer, $50,000 wires, but if electricity goes down, and Web traffic halts and those trillions of lights stop blinking, then what? There’s backup, plus an emergency generator kicks in. And this is only one tiny section of the US. Not classified material. Not sensitive government issue. Not high security. It’s social media.
SO watch for smoke puffing out of 56th Street and Fifth Avenue’s White House North. Soon, high above Gucci, shoppers will be able to detect our Emperor Elect’s decisions. It’ll be: One if by sea; two if by Libs.