Friday Jun 18, 2004
Happy Father's Day!
My father sent me a note last night which said:
Your files are attached and ready to send with this message.
Take a look at this. What is your take? And What, then,
was the contribution of Vin Cerf, a deaf man widely credited
in Deaf circles with starting the system.
Dad
<GT1=3584.url>
The only attachments I ever get from Dad are photographs.
He is a scientist, recently retired as a lab director, who still
lives much of his life on the road with a Windows laptop. So my
"take," as it were, is that virus writers were getting much more clever.
Dad's field is hearing research. I'm very proud of him; in his career he has directly or indirectly helped many thousands of people avoid or cope with deafness. He's not without his detractors--mostly, it seems, people who believe that his desire to cure deafness equates with a genocidal intent toward the Deaf community--but the grateful far outnumber the hateful, and Dad's attitude towards the world has consistently been one of service. Most voicemail greetings say "Leave me a message." His has always been "Let me know how I can help you."
A virus couldn't have known his profession. It also could not have known that most of the email I get from him is forwarded jokes, or stuff about his second career. On the other hand, the reference to the deaf community seems genuine.
Having read "Computer Power and Human Reason" I knew that all it took was some clever pattern matching: find something that looks like a significant reference and copy it. I once helped a friend debug a "Doctor" program that used this technique; it kept track of family members mentioned, foods, etc. and would insert these where appropriate. When it worked, it worked astonishingly well. (When it didn't, a missing check for uninitialized variables led to hilarious exchanges like
"Earlier, you spoke of your NIL."
"My nil is none of your business!"
"OK. Then tell me more about your NIL."
"I told you, it's none of your business!")
So, had a cleverly-written virus invaded his "Sent Messages"
file, figured out that the signature he uses with my address is "Dad,"
and scraped a sentence (or at least a fragment) about the Deaf community
to lend additional credibility--all of it designed to trick me into
clicking on the attachment and executing some vileness? Toss-up.
Since I use a Mac at home and a laptop running JDS at work,
I figured I was reasonably safe, and clicked on the attachment. It
redirected me to
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5217598/?GT1=3584
so the message was genuine. And the question he was asking was one of
paternity: Who is the father of the internet?
I took a few minutes to collect links for him, and recapped the contributions of Vint Cerf (TCP/IP and the Internet ) and Tim Berners-Lee (hyperlinking across machines, i.e. WWW). There were many others. Having been unfairly passed over for recognition a few times in my own career, I'm leery of leaving anyone out. But I wasn't handing out accolades, just answering a question about these two men and their differing contributions to something we now take for granted. Hard to believe that the Macintosh existed for nearly a decade, and my employer's workstations even longer, before anyone could browse the web on them!
So, to the men who made it possible for my father to ask his question; my mother to become a champion online-shopper; my wife to advertise and run a business on a shoestring and never worry about her data (thank you Salesforce.com ); and me to prattle on about it; let me be among the first to say thanks, and "Happy Father's Day!"
(And to the women, my apology for not having a blog in May...and a belated "Happy Mother's Day.")
Posted at 06:56AM Jun 18, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in General |
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