I, for one, will be really glad when LJ’s network problems are cleared up. The site has been annoyingly slow of late. It is amazing how dependent we become on modern communications and their speed.
A clear example of this is happening with Small and Feisty, who is off at camp. Campers do not have access to phones or the Internet (evidently, counselors do in the staff lounge after-hours). Thus, they must do the old-fashioned thing: write letters. Parents have it a little better, but not much: they can write letters, or they can go through bunknotes to send an email message to their camper (at between 1-3 credits, $1 each, per message), which is then printed out and given to the camper. Thus, we have the old-fashioned delay. Yesterday (Thursday), we received a letter written on Tuesday, mailed on Wednesday. Our reply went in the mail today (Friday), which the camp will receive on Saturday, and deliver on Sunday. It should be noted this is with the reasonably fast turnaround we get from the US Postal Service. She’s been getting letters we wrote before she left. Thus, we have absolutely no idea whether she is over her homesickness, except for the fact that the camp hasn’t called us (which I presume they would if she was inconsolable for over 48 hours).
Just imagine living 100 years ago, when your time for a letter was much longer. Consider before there was universal postal service, when your letters might take weeks or months to arrive. What was the effect of this on communications? On the ability to convey information in a written letter? On having a conversation via mail? Perhaps our era of instantanteous communications is having more insideous effects on our ability to write and communicate than we realize.
As I work in the area of Computer Security, I have one more observation with respect to modern communications. Right now, there is a worm (I’m not 100% sure that’s the right term) that is infecting IIS sites (the Microsoft Web Server), and then taking advantage of IE vulnerabilities to download a keystroke capture program to unsuspecting users. It takes advantage of a yet-unpatched IE vulnerability, and the recommended solution from Microsquish is to turn your security settings to high (I guess they couldn’t write to cross your fingers and pray). The most interesting part of the article was “Security experts noted that users can avoid the exploit by using alternative browsers such as Mozilla and Opera. Users could also turn off the “Javascript” feature on their Microsoft browsers, though doing so cripple functions on some sites. The infection does not affect Macintosh versions of Internet Explorer.“. That’s right: This is an Active X exploit, for none of the indicated browsers can use Active X. Boy, am I glad I use Mozilla as my standard (although I do worry about the risk from all the tools that use the IE rendering engine internally, such as Semagic and HoTMetaL Pro).
Evidently, this worm has infected some major IIS sites. So why am I mentioning it here? Yet another risk of modern communications.
