Using access to technology to change time or events is not a new kind of idea.  Stephen King wrote a short story called Word Processor of the Gods in which a man, using his word processor changes the course of his life (and murders his wife in the process, of course.)  This particular narrative took the form of a story he wrote in which he detailed the events in the story as he wanted reality to happen. 

I’ve been thinking about technology and its power lately, the power it has to change people’s lives, and the power some, with more intimate access, have to totally screw up their own day with a few keystrokes.

Having worked on a variety of Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS-based computers over the last 25 odd years – although boring to many and understandably so – I have found, for me, this work spans a fairly wide emotional spectrum;  from the utter thrill of solving a particular bit of nasty code to the sheer terror of knowing something horrible has just happened and for the next few days every moment will be dedicated to trying to return things to normal.  Worse still is the feeling of not knowing when the end will come.      

Let me give you an example.

My first job was with MCI, monitoring their entire U.S. network (sometimes alone, late at night.)  Through a successive series of job changes within the company, I found myself working on the MCI.com website, developing various applications that would provide real-time stock quotes or allow people to send text pages (no SMS back then;  just those deck-of-cards pagers that sent and received short text messages or just numbers.)   No big deal now, but 15 years ago this was cutting-edge stuff.

One evening we were working on a fairly sizable revamp of the site and getting it ready for release.   There were about 10 of us working it out on the 19^th floor of a large black building on 18^th Street in downtown Denver.  Everything was moving along nicely when my boss asked me to cleanup some old files and directories in the root of the site.   One of these directories was a particularly pesky one that wouldn’t let me delete it.  No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t go away.  I was fairly new to Unix then so didn’t know all my options.   So I called a colleague back in D.C. who was working in concert with us at headquarters.   He suggested I use a special command that would remove it, guaranteed:

rm -rf    

Now, this fairly innocuous-looking set of characters actually has wide-ranging ramifications.   First, in order to use it and have it work as intended you had to be “root” which is another way of saying, you had to be god on the system.  So you do “sudo” which means super user and then you type rm –rf followed by the directory or file you wanted to delete.  The “rm” is remove, the “r” after the dash is recursive so everything underneath the directory you are deleting also goes away and the “f” means force which says don’t ask me if I’m sure…I’m sure.

And this last is where the trouble begins.   Because say you had a directory called “source” and you wanted to get rid of it, and say Dave a few cubes over is working on code that’s intended for the site and that code just happens to be in that directory called “source”.  When your buddy back in D.C. says to become root, gives you the password, makes you god and then tells you to rm –rf ./source it’s going to go away…forever.

Then, just as you hit enter, you hear Dave a few cubes over say “where did all my files go?”

We got out of there at six AM the next morning.

I had another incident several years later where I unintentionally deleted a database of 800,000 email addresses that were part of a mailing list for a very popular celebrity (of sorts) at the time. That one cost me $1200 to fix (for a tool to recover the database) and I’m sure a few years of my life.

I’m better at it now. I make backups, have fail safes, and I actually know what I’m doing to a very high degree when I become god on the system. It’s better for my health and professional life that way.

So, that’s the dark and squishy end of the spectrum of emotion I’ve run up against during my tenure in the technical world.  But there is fun as well.  Back during the same time as my disastrous foray into running commands as a god on a system, we also wrote a text messaging system that would send texts to pagers that could receive text (yes, this was the dinosaur days of the internet.)  It was right there on the home page of the site because no one was really concerned with cyberstalking or bad actors back then. Nobody had figured that out yet. Or at least not to the degree that it was dangerous. It would come, and it came quickly, but at that moment, everyone was innocent and naive.

In this system we wrote, a user would enter the recipient’s pager number, then a message, and clicked “Go.”  Because we were “on the inside” we could watch the messages scroll by on the back end.  It was a lot of fun to follow the text pages that were being sent through the site (they weren’t really text messages back then…this was still in the era of paging, remember … distant relatives of the text message, but not even close to what they are today.)   The information we were watching included the recipient number, the message, some other data. It was all there. Stuff that would likely cause the average OpSec person today to just freeze solid with the ramifications of it. And some of those message could be interesting. 

For example, the following series of messages is real.  The identifiers are made up but the content is what came across the wire; back then they trusted “the machine” … the fools.

(spelling and grammatical errors theirs):

IXO: 2614195    Hey Joey baby, do you prefer to eat wet PANCAKES or a nice FUZZY fruit for breakfast?......

IXO: 2077434    I need you baby!! I want you baby!! Call me when you get this message!! Love,Forehead

See what I mean?   Most times they were just kinda weird like these.   I try not to read too much into that first one.

Now this was not idle entertainment.   We were actually debugging the system and improving latency between clicking go and the message actually getting to the recipient. Part of that was sending information out to a log file so we could watch how the system was performing. Then, to watch it in real time, we did something called “tail” the logs. This would allow us to catch errors or see patterns of anomalies that needed to be corrected.  At any point we could inject debuggin messages into the system for the same reason.   We had total access and could make the website of a very large, very powerful corporation do anything we wanted.  But with great power comes great … nah, fuck that, let’s watch for a bit and see what people are saying to each other.

There were the mundane ones

IXO: 1222894    Hi sweetie! I love you and am thinking of you! I can't wait to see you!

IXO: 1040515    I love Bunchies!!! Yoy better not be fooling around with some y or I'll cry. Ha, it rhymes. XXOOXX

IXO: 3021571    hi honey! hope things are going well..i know u missnr already but when he gets back he'll benew & improved after his surgery!! =) ididn't know but jesse has a game today soi will be back later tonite..i love u! .  

The slightly salacious ones

IXO: 3026864    Todd, Now I know that you will show your appreation accordingly.P.S.  I am having an oral fixation fit.

And the downright raunchy ones

IXO: 3026864    I'm going to rip your clothes off and lick your body from point A to point B, and get you so bothered that the next time i touch you that will be it!

IXO: 1648989    OH BABY! YOU ARE SO FINE! BRING THAT HOTHAIRY ASS OVER HERE YOU SILLY SAVAGE!6969696969696969696969696969696969696969

And once, I came upon a message that was less than fun and a little too private.   At least for me:

IXO: 1563825    I can still smell you....your skin, your lotion......our passion....I'm beside myself with both joy and fear, knowing we love each other soooo much, but have other crosses to bear!! I could never stop loving you!! Ever..

What was going on there?   What had I stumbled upon?  You could read whatever you wanted into it but it seemed clear someone was doing something they probably shouldn’t and someone else was going to get hurt.   Probably they all were…whomever “they all” was.

For a time as the internet “grew up”, it came to pass that it would be unheard of to send such messages unless you knew it was private.  Putting your thoughts and feelings out there for everyone to see was not something people did unless you were sure only those you wanted to see could.  Because the internet, ever after it exploded in use and everyone was on it, was a private place, a private connection, where true feelings can be shared with a single person or just a few people.   Right?

Um, no.  Not any more.

Now, depending on where a message is put, everyone can see the message, sometimes the people posting the message want as many people as possible to see it, even if it’s a private thought, and a lot of people don’t have any qualms about letting the world know how they feel.  I guess we’ve come full circle. And that is very weird.

Carlisle, 2025