THEY

I just heard a report on the radio about a five year old boy that discovered a hitherto unknown back door into X-box. It allowed him to access his fathers account and play games he wasn’t supposed to play. It turns out that after the first password is rejected; if you just use spaces then the account is opened. The kid’s father reported it to Microsoft and they have since fixed the problem. The boy is listed as a security consultant and was given a few free games.

I remember when Hurricane was about three he changed the photo on my desktop. I had trouble doing it at the time, so I was pretty impressed. I think kids learn by experimenting and if something breaks during the experiment, dwell, mom and dad will fix it. You have to be willing to take a chance with the whole learning process and not worry about failure. I suppose that has been my problem all along, failure is just a step in the learning process, not an end to the process.

I have been thinking about our electronic society for the past few days, ever since our cable connection cut out for a few hours and Louise and I were forced to talk to each other. That wasn’t a bad thing, it’s just that we will generally turn from one electronic device to the other for entertainment, and when all of the electronics depend on cable, you have to go “old school”.

Of course I counted the forced absence of electronics as my contribution to Earth Day. I’m not a big fan of Earth Day; I am a fan of the concept and being cheap I embrace the idea of “powering down” all of the time. I suppose my complaint is that although I personally have an impact, businesses have a much larger impact and they could really effect change if they so desired. I worked at a plant that had the perfectly angled roof to mount solar panels on. They wouldn’t have generated all of the power needed, but I bet it would have made a dent in the power bill. Plus, being an arm of the government it would be setting a fine example.

Now that I am sort of talking about electronics, I might as well talk about my conspiracy theories. I have a friend that doesn’t want his name on the internet because “THEY” could track him down. This same guy has a job with a paycheque, bills that he pays, Taxes and any number of other ways that “THEY” could track him. If “THEY” want you, “THEY” can get you unless you seriously go off of the grid, and you can’t do that living in a city, working at a job.

Personally, I don’t care if someone wants to watch me 24/7. I don’t do anything interesting enough to keep them awake while they are watching. I do however feel that if “THEY” aren’t watching, then “THEY” could be it they wanted to. I have taken a cell phone apart and the cameras in those things are about 1/8^th of an inch in diameter. It could easily be placed inside one of those 50inch TVs and they could watch us while we are watching the crap they want us to watch.

I had to let a tech guy from my cable company remotely take over my computer once to find out what the problem was. The only thing I had to do was to keep my hands away from the keyboard. If I were in charge of the Watchers, I would have a back door built into every computer manufactured so that I could do security searches if need be. They wouldn’t bother for most of us because who wants to read a shitty blog that some old guy is typing every day anyways? But…“THEY” could if they want to.

Who knows, maybe next week some five year old kid will discover the back door. Unlike Microsoft, he won’t get free games; “THEY” will just make him disappear.