mikeg's blog

Read: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/22/1615212 Discuss below the jump, but first some background" -- My friends and I grew up way back in the early pre-paranoia days. For me, I had a string of "computers" (Atari, Commodore and their ilk with acoustic-coupler modems and BBS services), got my first real PC at around 7 or 8 (idunno, it was for-fucking-ever ago - I still have the motherboard though - a 286 with a blazing 12MHz clock and a modem that actually plugged into the wall! OH HAPPY DAY!), I was running Unix in 4th or 5th grade and writing reports in TeX markup. In Jr. High I traded in my BBS accounts for ISDN and a shell account on a box that would let me run PPP, and the bandwidth has been growing ever since. For my friends - well, were all ahead of the curve. I used to chat with propeller-headed nerds, including two guys who founded a local ISP (Lightning Internet - www.lightning.net - Hurricane Electric bought them), some of the first botnet masters from back when compromised hosts would join an IRC channel for orders, and their ilk. My former business partner Joe Po and I started up a shell account provider back when shell accounts were something people paid good money for, and he and Ross were among the first (if not THE first) people in our area on the Optimum Online cablemodem network back when the modems were fugly blue things with heat sinks on 'em and "optonline.net" was still "nassau.cv.net". We've lived through large-scale internet renumberings, we remember the coming of CIDR ('least I do), and we've witnessed or participated in our fair share of history. All this is by way of saying that my parents (& probably theirs) wouldn't be able to figure out what the hell was going on on my computers if they had a map and a seeing eye dog. And even if they knew what to look for they probably couldn't bypass the system security with anything short of a hammer and a magnet. I have a younger brother (10 years younger than me). He has grown up his whole life around computers. He has never known a world without CIDR (he's technically disinclined, so to him CIDR is something that has an E in it and gets made from apples), he has always had antivirus software on his PC (which has always had a GUI made by Microsoft), and perhaps most importantly he "just doesn't get it" (i.e. "You mean the sexy female elf on WoW is a GUY??? EWW!!!") Background over! Continue reading "Lions, Tigers and The Big Bad Internets"