Three not-so-wise Monkeys

You won't believe the futurecast on this one

One grey morning, not so long ago, I found myself sequestered in an even greyer county conference room. Surrounded by grim bosses, human resources execs and notetakers, I questioned my career choices.

Let me backup - it’s not what you think.

I was running the IT department for a county agency. Many of you lovely readers have zipped past it on the freeway unawares. It’s just northeast of the intersection of the 680 and the 4 north of Concord and it’s called the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District or Central San for short. Many of you have used its services. When you flush a toilet in Contra Costa County, Central San takes care of it.

We called it the dookie district. Well at least I did.

Three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

I joined the dookie district at the glorious time when the internet was blowing up, enabling information access to all, in new ways, every day. Government is ever behind the technology curve and the dookie district was no exception. After a disastrous implementation of a new accounting system, they brought me on to get it all sorted. I had a lot of fun bringing them up to speed. It was my last gig working in local government before I switched over to consulting.

One of my first projects was connecting the dookie district to the internet. The engineers wanted to work with peers in other agencies, the business office needed email, plant operations needed access to schematics and updates.

First I needed to get a connection to the Internet. Only the best for the dookie district. I leased an ISDN line from the phone company with two bearer (B) channels of 64kbps apiece for a total of 128 kilobits-per-second. That’s about 1000X faster than my old Avatex 1200hc, but about 1000X slower than fiber connection I have today in Santa Rosa.

All the dookie district had at the time was handful of dial-up modems for a few top shelf geek engineers. But this was early days for the internet - no video, no streaming - web pages were text (hopefully formatted) and pictures - so the ISDN connection was a huge improvement - whiz bang fast and always on.

Even back then, the Internet could be a dangerous place so next I needed to setup a Firewall. The firewall would sit between the unmanaged internet outside the dookie district and our internal computer network. It would check every network packet coming in or out and make sure they were non-malicious web traffic.

Firewall appliances weren’t a thing yet and budget was tight, so I cobbled together a PC that I put down in the basement where my new telephone line came in. I installed some open-source software on it. Linux was the operating system and on top of that I installed a software package called the Firewall Toolkit¹. I hired a security expert to help me set it up.

My guy was the original man-in-black. He drove a Toyota Corolla - all black with tinted windows. Glenn dressed head to toe in black, squeezing his chubby countenance into a long sleeved button down black shirt, black pants, black shoes. Considerable polyester was involved and his outfit degraded from top to bottom - the shoes were black but sneakers. Glenn would get remarkably sweaty when we were down in the basement, but he was a wizard at the keyboard. When we ran into problems, Glenn would scan through man pages (on-demand searchable document or manual pages) like a man possessed. A few hours of setup and we had a working firewall.

monkey #1

Finally, I had to get all the engineers internet network addresses on our side of the firewall. These are called IP addresses. I didn’t yet have a way to dynamically assign IP addresses, so I went cubicle to cubicle and manually configured each workstation. You couldn’t have two devices with the same address so I kept a list of addresses to make sure I didn’t re-use any. An internet address at the dookie district looked like this: 172.16.1.100, 172.16.1.101, etc. My inventory file was a table with two columns: IP addresses in numerical order and the user it was assigned to.

All hail Andrew geek king of the dookie district! We got email, we got web sites, we got file transfers - huzzah! The engineers were ecstatic. I pinned a little graphic speedometer app on my desktop so I could see how much of our 128kbps we were using in real time. Internet energy thrummed though the dookie district, life was good.

One morning a few weeks later I turned on my computer to find an odd email at the top of my inbox. It was from the firewall. It was actually from a Linux utility called cron² which manages scheduled tasks. The firewall logged all ongoing internet activity into a file and each morning at midnight it created a new file for the day. Cron was letting me know when it created the new firewall log file at 12AM, the old one was still open and active, so some records might have been lost.

Who could be using the firewall at midnight?

The log file was a simple text file - each line listed a dookie district IP address followed by a timestamp and the unique web address it was accessing. The IP addresses were as listed above in the format 172.16.1.101 and the web address was a string of text that looked something like this: https://wirepine.neocities.org/wirepineneocitiessmall.png.

Web addresses are hyperlinks or pointers to a discrete thing somewhere on the internet. The example above is from the wirepine neocities page I threw up as part of my tech retrospective Lost and Found. It’s the logo on the site. You can tell from the address that it’s a picture called ‘wirepineneocitiessmall.png’ and it lives on a site called neocities.org. The .png at the end of the file name tells me it’s a picture.

I had never looked at this log file. I might never have even known it existed but for Cron and of course whatever triggered the alert at midnight.

That morning, I went looking for the log file. Firewall toolkit logs included the date in the name of the file so once I found the right folder I could see at the top todays file that was actively logging new internet activity and yesterday’s file that was now closed. I noticed right away that the files were larger than I would expect for a simple text file.

I opened yesterday’s log file.

I stared at the screen.

Page Down, another. Page Down, another. I hit the Page Down key ever faster until I got to the bottom of the file.

There were over 50 pages of entries. The first 20 pages were normal dookie district business during normal working hours. The last 30 pages were all from a single IP address starting at around 11 at night.

It was all porn. While the log files didn’t read like a book - they were rich with detail and easy enough to figure out what was going on. There was fetish porn. There was Disney porn (I didn’t know that was a thing). There was Disney fetish porn.

I was not equipped to deal with this.

I had no idea what to do. I had to do something.

I pulled up my IP address inventory. What idiot was surfing porn on dookie district computers at midnight? Kevin. Kevin Aspen.³ Kevin had a cube on the first floor off in a dark corner. Full of too much stuff. I remember it had been unpleasant pulling his computer from the dust and debris under his desk to put the new network card in it. When I went back down to configure his IP address we had an awkward conversation. He was odd and standoffish; but the same could be said for most of the civil engineers that ran the place.

Did I confront Kevin? No. I was afraid to do that and also how could I do it privately? Today I would have done it straight off, but I was a kid. He was older and big and smelled a little weird.

I printed off all 50 pages of the log file. I had a printer in my office. I wrote a note telling Kevin to stop, not ok. I stuffed it in a manilla interoffice mail envelope:

From: Andrew, IT 3rd Floor, To: Kevin, Plant Engineering 1st Floor.

Kevin didn’t stop. What was he thinking? I’ll never know. That I’d continue to ignore it? That he could refute the log files? Maybe he just had to get his Disney fix.

I kept getting cron emails at midnight and I kept finding the daily log full of porn sites.

So, I went to my boss Debbie across the hall. She ran the accounting department - everything tech was new and scary to her. Her eyes got big when I showed her the log file. She took me straight to HR at the other end of the hall. Connie ran HR. She always seemed on edge and this set her off. Debbie, Connie and I marched back down the hall to our director Paul. This took all of 10 minutes.

Paul had the corner office next to mine. Older, tall and railroad thin, impeccable grey moustache, suit and tie from his personal shopper at Nordstroms. He was smart and aggressive - he led the districts annual bargaining agreements with the union. Paul lived for conflict and there isn’t much conflict in the world of dookie. Flush it and forget it.

monkey #2

This was a gift for Paul. There is always room to make up drama at work, but this - this was a gift. Paul immediately turned it into a five alarm fire dispatching Connie to drive the full investigation and disciplinary process.

I was relieved - it was out of my hands. I felt bad getting Kevin in trouble, but I had given him such an easy out. The next day Paul stuck his head in my office and asked me to come into his. We sat side-by-side going through the addresses in the log file looking at Disney fetish porn together. This was uncomfortable. Once he got the hang of it, I left him with a stack of log files and closed the door behind me. Kevin created a lot of digital rope to hang himself.

That brings us back to the beginning of todays story. I ended up being the expert testifying in the disciplinary process in said grey room with a tight lipped Kevin sitting across the table from me. Kevin ultimately got the boot - there was no way out. Kevin’s wife worked in the sheriff’s department, so I did worry he was going to go postal and come after me with gun but no. I’ve no idea what became of Kevin.

Maybe he got a job at Disney?

I saw a show called Avenue Q in Las Vegas. It’s a musical parody of Sesame Street that had a long run on Broadway. The breakout song/scene was today’s original title: The internet is for porn. A nice lady and her puppet sing, extolling the wonders of the internet but at every ‘The internet is …’ chorus a grumpy grouch like puppet sticks his head out and yells ‘for porn!’

‘Why do you think the net was born? Porn Porn Porn!’

Porn has ever been a staple of the internet; it’s the tech corollary to “the worlds oldest profession.” A guy on my team told me he picked up a big new customer in Canada called MindGeek. Turns out yep they are an ‘Adult entertainment conglomerate.’ This is fun - they were bought by private equity firm called ‘Ethical Capital Partners⁴. MindGeek went on record stating they were one of the top five users of internet bandwidth in the world. It’s a big business.

It’s a business that’s changing with a new wave of scrutiny and regulations to protect kids from online content including the recent TikTok ban. The supreme court’s gotten involved and we’ll be watching these changes unfold for awhile. Virtual Reality is another interesting space to watch here.

But what about AI? I heard the craziest theory the other day from Scott Galloway⁵. Attack of the AI girlfriends.

monkey #3

Scott’s premise is AI won’t take us down terminator style aka Skynet but rather through a sophisticated network of AI girlfriends preying on lonely men. The attack will be orchestrated by an adversary - Russia and China are ever at the top of the list - and will target the 2 million in our armed forces and civilians stationed at ports and other critical infrastructure. The evil AI girlfriend army will subtly over time befriend and build relationships and trust with these men, leading them down a road to radicalization where their influence will be extended to overlook a dangerous package coming into the port or flipping a switch not meant to be flipped on that nuclear sub. Even at .01% success that’s a couple of thousand people.

Sounds absolutely ridiculous but also maybe? Ever seen the movie Her or the new(er) Blade Runner?

What do you think?

best, Andrew

---

Check out last weeks article!

1. The Firewall Toolkit aka FWTK has evolved and been incorporated into most commercial Linux distributions as a utility called firewalld.

2. Cron is short for the Greek god of time Chronos.

3. Name changed to protect the guilty.

4. ECP talks up their philosophy on their website. One rooted in searching out projects that require ‘principled ethical leadership.’

5. Scott does a tech podcast with Kara Swisher called Pivot.