For years, Curmie has been saying, “Technology is a wonderful thing… when it works.” When it doesn’t work, of course, whatever the reason, our collective reliance on trustworthy internet and all the other devices and services that have become part of our daily lives becomes rather a problem. When the power goes out, we almost ignore the fact that our homes are, depending on the circumstances, freezing or stifling: we’ve got no internet, no TV, and no way to charge our Kindles!
Usually, the root of the problem is an accident—a power line severed in a storm, or at worst a dumb mistake by some technician somewhere. There are minor frustrations born of stupidity, of course. A couple nights ago was the 30th anniversary of the passing of Curmie’s Mom, who was, among other things, a huge Agatha Christie fan. So Curmie and Beloved Spouse decided to stream an episode of one of the Christie series in commemoration. But where to find one?
Our first thought was PBS. We have Passport (i.e., we’re PBS members), so we have access to a lot of stuff that appeared on Masterpiece or Mystery. And lo and behold! There were 30-second teases for several Miss Marple episodes… no episodes, mind you, we’d have to go somewhere else to see them! (Seriously, the PBS website is an absolute disaster.)
Sometimes, however, the breakdowns are both more significant and of a more sinister nature. A few months ago, Curmie got a message from his online broker. (Question: what the hell kind of commie pinko weirdo has an online broker? Answer: the kind whose Social Security payments are barely a third of what his salary was.) They wanted to make sure that some activity in my account—setting up a bill payment plan, for example—was in fact my doing. It wasn’t. So now I have not only a password, but also a duo security token. It’s rather a pain in the ass, but it sure beats the alternative.
Skip ahead to a couple of weeks ago, when Curmie’s university was the victim of a ransomware attack. The IT folks shut down everything, and I do mean everything, including, for example, copy machines that require a code. Most stuff is back a fortnight after the fact, but the university website is still down, and email is accessible only through ethernet connections on campus. About 12 days’ worth of incoming emails have apparently vanished into the ether, like ethics when you get appointed to SCOTUS. (Meow.)
Such attacks were damned near ubiquitous. Curmie won’t bother to include all the links, but among the victims were Johns Hopkins University, the University of Georgia system, the Louisiana DMV, the BBC, British Airways, Ernst & Young, the California Public Employees Retirement System, and the US Department of Energy. And those are just the ones that have made headlines. Experts suggest that the number of victims probably runs into the hundreds.
The Russian-based Cl0p ransomware syndicate exploited a vulnerability in the widely used MOVEIt software program, which was designed to allow large data files to be securely transmitted. Yeah, about that “securely” part… Progress Software, the corporation that makes MOVEIt, discovered the weakness and developed a patch, but too late.
Note: there are sometimes advantages to not finishing a post on the day you start it, because now Curmie can tell you that it turns out that Curmie’s university was hit by a different international ransomware syndicate, Rhysida, so the administration’s claim that this event was unrelated to what we were reading about with respect to C10p is actually accurate. Who knew, right? No one is saying how Rhysida got into the system, but the university does use MOVEIt, so…
Anyway, the tactics employed by C10p and Rhysida are a little different, so we’ll see how this all shakes out, both locally and internationally. Whatever it is, though, folks should consider themselves lucky if things don’t go from bad to worse.
And we move on to a couple of days ago, when Curmie got a notification that some of his information was showing up on the dark web. The internet security company Curmie uses said, among other things, to change the password for my personal email. So I attempted to do so. Oh, but the fact that I’m signed into my account isn’t good enough: I have to prove I’m me, and the only option to do that is to access my work email for a “code.” I can’t do that, of course, because of the ransomware incident just described.
Oh, wait! There’s another option. I can use my cell phone… and wait 30 days. You can’t have both an alternate email and a phone number as backups, you see, because… well, because. (To be fair, Curmie understands at least part of the rationale… sort of… but that doesn’t make it less of a pain in the ass.)
Anyway, my office email came back up, but at this point only by actually being in the office; off-campus accessibility is not yet a thing, at least for Curmie. So I could get a code. Except—you know what’s coming, Gentle Reader, don’t you?—it didn’t work. So now I have a presumably compromised email which I’m stuck with, at least for the present. Thanks, Big Tech!
But wait! That’s not all! Last night, Curmie wanted to check something on the blog. He found that about 90% of the posts since April of 2021 no longer have images. There’s just an empty space with a cutline. Weird, yes? It gets worse. Curmie isn’t a fan of Chrome, but it has been what works the best from his house, so that’s what he used. On a whim, he tried again with Firefox, which is what he uses at the office. All those images: they’re right there.
What makes this particularly ironic is that Chrome and Blogger are both Google products. They don’t want to work with each other, but other companies’ stuff is fine. This makes sense to someone, perhaps. I do not wish to meet this person. Of course, there’s no way to contact Google, or Microsoft, or Facebook, or whoever else and suggest that they make their product(s) actually work.
Curmie understands that even his insignificant miniscule elite readership would disappear were it not for technology. But it’s sometimes tempting to think that perhaps the Luddites had it right.
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