Are You tech or Untech
What the bleep is this?
Tech: An electronic device for storing and processing data, typically in binary form, according to instructions that are given to it.
Un-tech: A cool machine that can surf the web, play games, crunch the numbers, and send, receive and post messages and videos.
We’ve all looked at a computer and wondered where the heck did it come from? To be honest, it is a simple machine. It is sleek, modern, kinetic, colorful, and full of imagery too. But a computer is just a lot of simple switches that are either on or off. All those electronics, the chips, the circuits, and the circuit boards are just ways to turn simple switches in arrangements of 8 on or off.
Can it do that?
Tech: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: the use and development of computer systems that can learn and adapt without following explicit instructions.
Un-tech It better not be talking to me about my love life because it’s bad enough now; I don’t need advice from a thinking machine.
It’s considered commonplace to say, “my computer is thinking.” Or, as so many people wonder, how can it know all that information about me, my life, my world? Well, it can’t. Computers can't reason. It Doesn’t Do anything; it is told what to do. Even today’s advanced systems that mimic intelligence are just that, mimics. They are a set of instructions that the computer cannot change. Computers are followers, not reasoners.
One of the many ways we address the fact that computers are “learning” is to remember that building new instructions from old instructions is an artificial or superficial mimic of learning. There may come a time when computers can “think,” but that time has not arrived yet, even if many people say it is coming. The gargantuan steps that need to be taken will take years, even at the speed of technological innovation.
When using a computer, there is nothing to be scared of, except if it starts talking back to you when you’ve had a few glasses of wine.
What did I do?
Tech: computers are mirrors of the real world
Un-tech: I’ll hit the back button hundreds of times and use profanity. It’ll work, trust me.
There are so many places on a computer to make mistakes, and people often do. Even the savviest engineer can get turned around using a new software or system. The developers often use buttons and places to move to the next screen, which they feel are easy to use, when they forget we are a tangible world, where buttons close shirts and jackets, and links are somewhere to play Golf.
The truth is that a link is flexible in that you can always return to where you found the link; just hit the back button. Or use the right mouse button to open the link in a new window. Then the original page remains.
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Where did it go?
Tech: Miscalculated instruction sets, causing multiple error states.
Un-tech: Worked two hours on a report for the board, now gone. Throw the bleeping thing out the window.
All of us have experienced the fantastic disappearing information on a computer, phone, or tablet. This is when you are typing something, an email, a text document, a post, or a message, and the text just goes away. This is because the gremlins that live in the computer get confused and want to start over.
The reasons for this are varied and often just as confusing as the problem itself. It is simply the computer’s version of resetting because it is getting constant updates to its information, and the text you are typing is new and not held in the permanent memory yet.
This is especially true for phones and tablets, where often the information is temporary or held in the cloud. The cloud is not a secret code for the sky, heaven, or even hades; it is a bunch of computers that share memory space to store information that can be accessed over the internet.
How the techies often don't know either.
Tech: The truth is I understand the complex systems and languages that control almost every device in your life. You don't.
Un-tech: What genius came up with the word Fungible, anyway? As in a Non-Fungible Token.
Let's say this gently, techies, geeks, and nerds aren’t omnipotent. They have specialized knowledge of a specialized area of electronics, just like plumbers have that type of knowledge about HVAC systems.
Bill Gates is a perfect example. He is considered one of the smartest of all the techies, but he did not invent the desktop so integral to the Windows computer system; someone else did. He did not invent the operating system developed years before Windows came out.
He is a businessman who knows much about technology but is not an engineer or scientist. He is brilliant and determined but not omnipotent.
Techies may think they know everything all the time, but they don't. The next time a techie tells you there is no progress without tech, show them a toilet.
Savvy peeps get scammed all the time.
Tech: I knew they wanted my information. I was testing my security levels.
Un-tech: I got played, big time!
It's hard to admit, but everyone who uses the internet has been scammed. That includes savvy users. The scams have kept pace in development along with advancements in technology. The scams are sophisticated and look and feel like legitimate messages, login portals, and links.
That being said, technology has also grown in identifying and preventing scams. The security platforms that exist today are just as slick as the scammers. The virus-detecting software is better than ever; ransomware can easily be blocked. The consensus as to which virus and malware-fighting software are best is to stay away from claims that you can catch identity theft bundled with virus detection.
The rule of thumb is that it has to be legitimate if it barks like a duck. At least the notice I got from a bank I don't use that my account was debited $659.00 was a reason to click the big button at the bottom that said "support."
That's a good reason to learn the basics of computers and the Internet. Tech is more accessible than we make it.
Computer Basics
The basics, I mean just the bottom line
Tech: In the beginning, there were Integrated Circuits
Un-Tech: In the beginning, there were rotary phones
In the beginning, there were wires that carried packets of electronic data fast, and those wires were named the Super Highway or Cyberspace. This is very misleading. The computer seems left out of the equation.
Networks are like buildings along the superhighway. They aren’t large file cabinets with millions of draws; they are buildings with different interconnecting rooms, all filled with different stuff, but having things in common, like walls or doors, locks, and furniture. Rooms are interconnecting a network. The rooms are devices, and the devices are computers of different types.
At its core, a computer is a way to make complex operations easier. One of those operations is communication. The internet allows everyone to communicate - at light speed, through word and image. This makes the computer, phone, or tablet a window into the world.
That makes getting to know technology, a computer, phone, or tablet, a vital relationship to encourage.
The bottom line is that it is a different way of looking at things. It is simple for itself and getting simpler. But for many, it's gibberish.
Let’s take it from the beginning in a little different way. Let’s look at computers, phones, and tablets as simple rooms in a building. The building is the home network. That building has an address just like a house. It’s called the IP address (Internet Protocol). Just like the rooms in your house has different names, each device that uses the IP address has its name.
In your building, your home, there is a myriad of different things, a bunch of stuff. On the computer, phone, or tablet, there is also stuff. Stuff you use, stuff you don’t use, stuff you have accumulated over time, lots of stuff.
That is the content on your phone, tablet, or computer.
In your home, you have windows to look outside and let things in. There are many windows on your computer, phone, or tablet, and they do what all windows do: let in the outside world and let people look out.
The building is your place on the internet, and that’s what the internet is: endless buildings (computers, phones, and tablets) along roads and highways, with all the parts and pieces of a building. It is your home, and inside your home, everything is interconnected. It is a network. Rooms interconnect different functions in different rooms. There is different stuff for each room.
Forget the super highway or cyberspace; think of your computer, connected to the internet, as your home. Everyone has a home (at least, we hope so). There are large homes and small: apartments, multifamily and mobile, offices, skyscrapers, and even single rooms we stay in that are rented for short periods of time.
Your computer, phone, or tablet is your home, and it has places for your particular stuff, and we let that stuff in through windows. When you click a link, you open a window into another building. When you send an email, you ask someone to look in through your window.
Desktops
Tech: The desktop is an integral part of the computer system
Un-Tech: My desktop is covered in papers, but I swear I know where everything is.
There are computers, PCs, Desktops, and Laptops, all names of the same thing. A personal computer. A PC. PCs come in many forms and have names that signify their uses, but they are all PCs. All PCs have similar parts
Screen
Keyboard
Case
Mouse (human interface device)
A little bit about what’s inside the case - because this helps to ground understanding: it’s okay if you don’t remember all of these parts, but all PCs have these parts.
The motherboard - the electronic board that runs the computer
The RAM, the memory that holds onto what you see on your screen, goes away when you turn off your computer. The images, videos, and windows are all there because RAM memory keeps them stored temporarily.
ROM is where your information is stored. The Hard disk drive, drive, memory, and all saved information are saved in ROM. That includes USB flash drives, SD Cards, Hard Drives, and SSDs.
Fans (Not fans who want autographs, cooling fans)
Power supply
Phones & Tablets
Tech: My smartphone is a necessity.
Un-Tech: My smartphone is dumb; it never knows who is texting me.
Phones and tablets are mobile devices. That doesn't mean they aren't computers; they are. They have all the parts of the computer.
Screen
Keyboard
Motherboard
Case
Human Interface device (touch screen)
They have a motherboard, RAM and ROM, a power supply (battery), and some heat dispersal systems. They are a computer, like all computers out there.
Phones and tablets have some of the most genuinely bizarre behaviors. Some might call them possessed.
There was a time a phone was left unattended and called someone. Hearing voices, the owner came over to the table where the phone was resting. On the screen was her dead mother’s name, and someone spoke rapidly in a foreign voice. She never found out who it was or how they had gotten her mother’s device to call her daughter.
If that’s not bad enough, there was a time Siri had something to add to a conversation without being asked. Two men were at a conference listening to a scientific speaker when one turned to the other and said, “he doesn’t understand astrophysics at all.” That was all he said. The other man was holding his iPhone when Siri said the speaker’s name and added, “He has written twenty papers and three books on the topic.” The guy with the iPhone traded it in the next day.
Many times, tablets forget to do things they have been told to do, like ringing an alarm or emailing something to someone, even after the sender hits the send button.
There was that tablet that liked to talk in the middle of the night. No matter what the owner did, the tablet if left unplugged, would say, “there are times I feel run down, like depressed. My lack of energy is so debilitating.” Whatever passage the tablet had been speaking from was never known. But it was discovered that it was in the text-to-speech mode all the time, and what was broken was times when it was supposed to be speaking but wasn’t. If the battery went below 15%, the passage would play. The strange part was the owner got spooked and sold the tablet with full disclosure of what it said all the time at night. The new owner said she had never heard the tablet speak on its own, low charge or not.
One of the many wonders of modern smartphone technology is attaching to the phones through Bluetooth to devices. Pairing is still a manual process for many devices, such as headphones. The proper way, the only way to pair a device, is to press the pairing button, release it, and then hit the pairing button on the phone or tablet. It will usually connect immediately.
Some of the great stories of pairing go down in history. One teenager paired his device to a speaker and was somehow connected to data analytics for a laboratory five miles away. That was one strong and very open signal.
Often sunspots are to blame for the erratic behavior of smartphones. One such spot blasted from the sun’s surface at noon – or thereabouts – on a Monday, and all the smartphones online at that time, in the direct path tuned into the atomic clock for Switzerland, which tells time and calendar date, somehow turned to New Year’s Day 2198 at noon. Time sure does fly.
In the grip of the carrier
Tech: Data is the best thing to happen to telecommunications.
Un-Tech: Data is evil brother to my evil carrier
The things carriers do to keep you connected are funny and sometimes outrageous. All the carriers with a backbone, which means hard wires come into their service distribution centers and out to the cell towers. The best kind of connection is a hardwired one; although much is changing, it hasn’t changed that much, and cellular traffic is still slower than hardwired traffic. The backbone is the company, which means having as many points as possible to catch cellular traffic is the point. To have as much access as possible, they put up cell towers all over the world. There are millions of cell towers, as we all know. The more hardwired towers, the better. Everyone wants to build a network; what do they do, build cell towers one on top of the other? Some do, like Verizon, Charter Spectrum, T-Mobile, and AT&T – but they also share cell towers, and much of the signal traffic coming into those cell towers is shared across network carrier companies.
The privacy issues here, and with Apple and Google, are enormous. The implications are a bit frightening. The distribution of cellular information is already digital, and digital signals all go somewhere. Encryption happens at the final destination, not in the middle; here is the problem.
Your data is encrypted once, not twice. And any guarantee that the encrypting company is not keeping your messages is bunk. They keep everything for an eventuality like the January 6th riots.
A private company encrypts your messages, keeps those messages, and stores them on the deep web – not the dark web – where most of the people who were planning the January 6th riots speak to each other, or hackers plan attacks – Russia lives on the dark web. The Deep Web is completely raw data and makes up 80% of the World Wide Web, or what we refer to generally as the Internet.
When you send a message to someone on WhatsApp, Signal, or any other anonymous chat application, your message is encrypted right before it goes to the recipient, not once when it leaves your phone when you send it and then again when it reaches the recipient. It would be impossible to decode unless it is decoded twice and encrypted again. The complex ciphers used to encrypt data are costly. They are getting more and more complex every day. It would cost huge sums of money to encrypt billions of messages, decipher them, and then encrypt them again at the final destination.
That means someone is getting and keeping your messages in their original form.
Think of the implications. We have free speech in this country; your messages are protected. But what’s to stop someone from targeting you for harassment? Privately.
The honor system is alive and well, but just barely.
The smartphone keeps us honest with its high-resolution camera and video capability. To take the edge off the privacy issue, let’s see what the camera has caught.
A man had decided to cheat on his wife with her friend. This never seems to get old and never seems to end well, for obvious reasons. They would videotape themselves going to different places to meet but also to send messages to their spouses telling them they would be late or delayed, or spending time with co-workers when they were actually meeting each other for a romp in the sack. To prove they were actually at work or out with co-workers, they would video record themselves at those places. They would then send the message, wait a couple of minutes to get a reply from their spouses, and then send a video recording of the lover doing something sexy.
The wife of the man got suspicious, as always happens, and the husband of the woman spoke and found out that every time the man stayed late at work or out with co-workers, so did the woman. In order to catch them in the act, the pair hired a private investigator to tail the couple.
The wife and the husband of the cheating spouse started to spend a great deal of time together, they would make sure to encourage the cheaters to meet, so the investigator could take pictures.
Eventually, they wound up in the sack, just like their cheating spouses. Instead of using the pictures in a divorce, they decided to keep the cheating spouses secret.
One day the wife and husband of the cheaters were set to meet. They had been exchanging video clips, just like the cheaters. The wife answered the door when the bell rang, expecting her lover. Instead, it was her husband. Turns out he got suspicious of the wife and started to have her tailed by an investigator. He had the pictures and wanted a divorce.
The wife and husband of the cheaters sued the man and woman who had been cheating in the first place, and all parties were ordered to sell their homes, keep joint custody of the children, and try to get along.
Within a year, all the parties were dating other people, their children were in therapy, and they were already starting to have new affairs. What goes around comes around; it’s a never-ending cycle. They exchange video clips and selfies almost all day long.
It’s all chalked up to the video clips, the encryption, or email, or the chat; it’s all one thing in the end – messages.
