Screens that give and take

Warning: this story is trivial. But I think it is also illustrative. What it illustrates is two old truths about those robber barons of the 21st century, the people who run the internet. The first is that you can’t beat them. The second is that if ever you think you’ve beaten them, that’s the moment when they reduce you to pulling out your own entrails and eating them slowly without salt.

When the internet was born it looked like a gift. It brought everything we wanted to a screen – from goods to opinions to entertainment to sex. The mistake we made was thinking it was like the screen we already knew, the television. It wasn’t.

Television is one-way: it only gives. The internet is two-way: it gives and takes. What it takes is what we give it without noticing, which is our selves, and it’s by selling us to others that the robber barons have got rich.

In 1984 George Orwell invented the telescreen.

Mounted in every home, and unswitchoffable, it spewed propaganda whilst also acting as a surveillance camera. Orwell couldn’t imagine anything worse. He should have imagined the internet. For whereas the fictional telescreen was compulsory and much hated, the actual internet is voluntary and much loved. It has become like the family dog without which a house seems empty. Or perhaps like the family horse, that wooden one the nice Greeks left us.

Internet security is an oxymoron. As a boffin once put it to me: ‘‘If you’ve got a cellphone we’ve got you.’’ Nevertheless we imagine we get some privacy by using passwords. And it is passwords that are the subject of my trivial but illustrative story.

At the dawn of the internet I used the name of my dog as my password for everything. (Indulge me for a moment while I remember him. He was a lovely boy, old 1234.) But then the internet got cute and started demanding more complex passwords. One could hardly call a dog £3^%$=, so no sooner had I chosen a password than I forgot it. And if ever I needed to use it again, I had to reset it. It was tedious.

I solved the problem with a bit of kit we boffins refer to as pen and paper. (Note to burglars so they don’t trash the house – the notebook in which I have written down all my passwords is on the shelf to the right of the computer in my study, just under the jar of tarantulas.) With the help of the notebook I thought I had passwords licked. But see truth number two above.

This week a woman emailed to invite me to take part in a literary festival. When I clicked on the attached itinerary, the computer informed me that I had to sign in to a beast called googledocs.

The name rang a faint bell. I nudged aside the tarantulas and found I had once before signed in to googledocs for some forgotten reason. I duly typed in my email address and password. Nothing. Access denied. Ah well, one gets used to electronic thwarting.

But even as I wondered what to do, an email arrived entitled ‘‘Critical Security Alert’’, replete with exclamation marks and a sense of urgency. It was from googledocs. ‘‘Someone,’’ it said, ‘‘just tried to used your password to sign into your account.’’

It was a no-reply email address but I replied anyway. ‘‘Oh lordy,’’ I wrote, ‘‘can it be long now?’’ and then I went looking for a drink with which to wash down the entrails.

Nevertheless we imagine we get some privacy by using passwords.

The auditorgeneral’s independence ... is probably more akin to that of a judge than a senior civil servant.