Page 36 - the NOISE October 2014

Timmy’s World
I sometimes wonder if my hacker and spammers are the same people. Maybe my financial spammer is hacking in to see if anyone is reading his shish-kebab recipe, and maybe it’s a ex- ceptionally good recipe, which would make his unethical behavior more sympathetic. But I’m not a shish-kebab person, so he’s just wasting his time and mine.
As much as they amuse me, I have to quit horsing around with these people. The computer overlords at Google and Microsoft are urging me to change all my passwords on a routine basis, so I’m cooking up a fresh batch of indecipherable and yet unforgettable passwords to shield me from this nonsense. Yes, my email is mostly garbage, but I do have to keep my identity from being stolen. I learned the hard way the police can help you only so much with identity theft, and then you’re on your own. Tell the police you’re identity’s been stolen and you get the same frown of concern you get if you report a stolen bicycle. You get the feeling that nothing’s going to be done about it.
Maybe everything is different now, but when my son got his identity stolen a couple of years ago, it took several months to resolve the issue and no arrest was ever made. Instead it was im- plied that my son was to blame for the crime because he was not adequately protecting himself from hackers. Message received — I would’ve gotten a quicker and more satisfying result had I gone straight to a hacker and given him a hundred bucks to solve my case. You won’t find a hacker in the Yellow Pages, or hanging his shingle in a strip mall — but, research enthusiast that I am, I did find one tucked away in a nondescript office building right here in town, an entrepreneurial computer geek who I’ll call Hershberger, who made me sign a confidentiality clause and makes a decent living as an internet gumshoe, charging reasonable fees to solve identity theft cases.
It took all of twenty minutes for him to identify my Reno hacker as a high school student named Timmy who was using password-hacking software that anyone can download online for free. Timmy did not have a police record and was probably getting away with all sorts of computer mischief because it was easy to do so. Hershberger charges by the hour, so I asked him to track down my good old El Mirage hacker. After forty minutes of clicking and reading the digital clues that hackers leave behind, he surmised this person did not know English and was most likely an illegal immigrant looking for an identity to cop so he could get a job. He sees a lot of those.
This was all I needed to know about my hackers. It made me angry — not at the hackers, who were too pathetic for me to hold a grudge against, but at the pickle we’ve gotten into as a society. I don’t have to change the locks on my front door once a week. It made me want to not rely on computers so much.
But why me? I asked. Where did they get my address? Hershberger laughed. There’s an end- less supply of email lists online, and my address is probably on a lot of them. Then he leaned back in his chair, rested his fingertips together and launched into a sales pitch — for a reason- able fee, he could erase my email address from all these lists. Indeed, he could erase me com- pletely from the online world, and remove all trace of my existence from cyberspace. And for a monthly fee, he could perform something he called “cloud maintenance,” which involved some sort of routine filtering of the internet for the digital detritus I’ve left in my wake over the past twenty years. He had a gleam in his eye — he knew how tempting this was. He was offering me a new life.
Hell yes, I was tempted. Then I remembered a friend of mine who “scrubbed” himself off the internet before a job hunt a while back, and could probably tell me how to do it for free. So I told Hershberger I’d think about it, but I’d pay for another hour of detective work if he could tell me something about my spammers.
This turned out to be child’s play — Hershberger recognized these spams like postcards from an old friend. Freddy Pivnik, “The Spam Master of Moab,” sends a million financial emails a day that detail his dining adventures around the Southwest. George and Thelma Peterson, a retired couple in Iowa, take shifts spamming the globe with random chunks of scripture as their nod to evangelism. Robert Panato, a former police officer who is now a security guard, blankets the country in meat spam as a way to spread his anti-government message. All these spams have links you don’t want to click on, unless you want your computer infested with annoying pop-ups, phony browsers or whatever virus is going around. I learned that lesson a long time ago — what a pain in the ass that was.
My curiosity sated, I bid adieu to Hershberger and got down to the business of creating new passwords. I like words that make it sound like I’m having a stroke when I try to repeat them, my favorite thus far being furfuffefomfuff. Let’s see Timmy guess that one.
But enough about Timmy. I don’t want to make him angry. I’m sure he’s just a curious young- ster trolling innocently through the digital underbrush like a boy scout on a nature hike. And who can blame him? We brought this on ourselves. For us Seventies types, democratizing infor- mation was a way to enlighten the world, bring people together and create empathy between cultures — I’ve been on board with that from the get-go. But freedom of information doesn’t guarantee people will use that information wisely. We knew that all along, too: the internet would become a new way for people to reveal their greed, intolerance, ignorance and petti- ness. Unfortunately, we’re addicted to it now, and have to conform to the rules of Timmy.
So we can now add computers to that long list of inventions that started out as miracles and quickly became one more thing for us to complain about. Boo, short-sightedness!
You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? That’s right — in the future, we will all be hack- ers. It’s either that or back to The Stone Age. Today’s generation would sooner plow with an ox and an ass together than stand in line at a bank. It’s not going to happen.
If you’re looking for a rebel to break ranks and go against the flow, don’t look at me. I’m typing my list of new passwords on a Word document right now, and saving my work every ten minutes. When I’m done, I will copy and paste the passwords into their respective fields to avoid using keystrokes, and thus evade the prying eyes of hackers using keystroke-logging software.
Hey, it’s Timmy’s world, I just live in it.
| John Abrahamsen is a local playwrite & radio host as well.
john@thenoise.us
story by John Abrahamsen
illus by Omar Victor
Got an email from Google today: “Suspicious login detected. See google.com.” I quickly opened my gmail account and discovered a hacker in Reno had figured out my password. Reno, huh? Interesting. My usual hacker is from El Mirage. He never breaks in, but God bless
him, he keeps trying. My email is so boring and trivial that this is of little concern to me. But I do believe there should some sort of hacker etiquette, like any hacker who takes the time and effort to figure out my password should then take a few more minutes to clean out my spam.
Boy, do I have a breach in my spam filter. I don’t know what happened. A few started getting through, the trickle turned into a stream, and now my email is like a giant flea market. I haven’t fixed it yet because I don’t care all that much. My hacker is more gung-ho about my email than I am, so it’s his problem now.
I assume my hacker is of the male gender — this is a guy thing, right? Of course it’s possible my new hacker is the Aileen Wournos of computer fraud, but it’s not likely. Couldn’t tell you why. I changed my password immediately just to be on the safe side, because I use the same three
or four passwords for everything. But I’m more concerned about the mental state of my new hacker because he figured out wisenhymen17 — I’m a little frightened of anyone who shares my sense of humor, especially when it’s the guy breaking into my computer.
I know, the safest password is a computer-generated mishmash of random letters, numbers and symbols, but by the time I remember it the Pony Express could have delivered my message. So I come up with my own nutty passwords which have been hack-proof for years, until today. Now I’m in the absurd situation of having to protect unsolicited email from an unauthorized user.
My account must be a big letdown for this new hacker, as it provides very few opportunities for mischief. I suppose he could break into my Goodreads account and change the order of my favorite books — that would really cheese me off, you rascal!
I don’t want to be too rough on the guy — maybe he’s an apprentice hacker, practicing on a nobody. Or, he’s a developmentally-challenged hacker — I am low-hanging fruit, you know. Serious thieves would quickly discover they could burn through my bank account with one trip to GameStop, and move on. So I don’t know what this guy hopes to find.
He’s welcome to my spam. He might appreciate the email from Genie Zip Bra Coverage, which promises a “full back control panel that smooths and minimizes back fat.” This break- through technology is lost on me. Nor do I need the email that promises How to Get Thin Quick
—“Take the product regularly and lose almost a pound a day!”That is disturbingly quick, I’ll give them that.
I have an email that exclaims, “Find toilet paper coupons!” I didn’t open it, since I’m not losing sleep over the price of toilet paper, and not feeling the unbridled enthusiasm for the coupons. If my hacker gets excited over this, he should scroll down to the email from Coupon Mountain
— they’ll hook him up.
But hacker beware — much to my shock, I’ve discovered that some of these spammers are
not who they claim to be. Meat vendors, for instance — I clicked on the email that declares, “Time for a treat ... get the BEST meat,” and it was an argument against capital punishment. “Or- der Delicious Juicy Steaks Online” turned out to be a treatise on Abraham Lincoln’s position on
slavery. I just wanted some meat.
Spammers offering financial services, on the other hand, were all about food. I opened an
official looking email from Vistaprint Premium Business Cards and it was a food review of the gluten-free pancakes served at a hipster café in Denver. “Financial help for seniors” was, inexpli- cably, a recipe for shish-kebab. I’m not seeing the connection here, unless both emails are from the same spammer; come to think of it, I think my meat spammer is one guy, too. That would explain a lot. I also have a religious spammer who likes to dispense obscure Bible verses about smiting foes under innocuous subject titles like, “Lose your belly fat for good!” My favorite one from him came under the heading, “NASA Doctor Reveals How to Reverse Brain Age,” which then, ironically, unloads hoary scriptures like “Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass to- gether,” one of the lesser commandments that has lost its relevance over the years.
36 • OCTOBER 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
SHORTstORy