Some notable events from other July 1st’s

2003 – Installed a network aware fax machine, and then attached it to Groupwise. My god, Groupwise. This is such a walk down memory lane! And this of course was the first of a repeated meme that online shared mailboxes at work are upsetting to people because they aren’t “private”, in the same way that a regular fax machine is “private” by hovering over it and muscling out anyone who might try to use it. It of course begs the question, what are you transmitting at work that is “private”, that you shouldn’t be doing at say, a FedEx shop or Office Depot?

2003 – Toppenish, Washington was in the news because a keyword blocker at a library got upset because it found something it didn’t approve of in the text of the domain name itself. Nowadays we don’t search domains for text fragments, we actually categorize them.

2004 – Again with the Fax Machine. In this case, not having long distance on the line requiring the use of an AT&T calling card, with a 60-digit calling sequence just to send a fax far away. And the merry mixups when people who work for an Institution for Higher Learning demonstrate no higher learning by being unable to comprehend digits. Ah, those were the days.

2004 – Farhenheit 9/11 – Hah, those were the days, weren’t they? When it only felt like scandals were rare and maybe all the crazy conspiracy theories were just theories. Oh, the memories.

2006 – Sharing the photos of the bathroom rebuild. It was a long while ago that we tore the guts out of that bathroom and updated it.

2007 – At O’Hare, running through security, on my way to visit family in Syracuse.

2008 – Another trip to Syracuse. This time through Detroit.

2009 – The problem with the cloud is poor security and access points everywhere. What happens when people plant incriminating evidence via a route, like junk mail, that you pay very little attention to – and then make an anonymous tip about the evidence? It was an interesting consideration and helps reinforce how important it is to keep everything digital tidy.

2013 – I wrote a lot of things about the security threat that our very own NSA represents. And little did he know that in 2017, the tools they collected and wrote would leak out and turn into WannaCry ransomware attack. Thanks NSA!

2015 – Facebook Notifications get an enhancement and they can accept a GPG Public Key, so all the Facebook Notifications over email are all encrypted. This was a really good proof-of-concept option from one of the worlds biggest Internet sites, alas it won’t ever take off because GPG is an all-or-nothing technology, and since you aren’t going to have all, all you get is nothing. It was this day that I also gave a lot more thought to The Golden Rule and started to reshape my life around it as a moral compass.