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25.4.11

Hackers and the Prodigal Son

HACKERS
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Ok Alaska Joe. I'm back :-) [It was nice to know you missed me!]

My absence had nothing to do with politicians suddenly starting to behave. It was a personal issue. Just about the time of my last post I was rather viciously attacked by a hacker. He had pulled my email out of the ether (or more likely out of his own membership list ... he has several sites on the 'Net and I was, no: I AM, a member. I'll have to drop by one of these days. But by luck of the draw as far as I know, he pulled my email address, hacked the machine and stole the most recent couple months of email. That was critical professional correspondence (that was mixed in with the jokes and the anecdotes people used to send me before I stopped emailing them back). Then a message popped up on my computer telling me I should go here. (Only that time it was a live link to where I'm fairly sure was one of his sites and I think I know which one. He had to grab something there apparently because when we left it was like an antelope on speed. We shot and boomeranged around the 'Net so fast it would ... well, in fact it did, make my head spin! And then we ended back up on his site anyway (I don't think he realized that I realized that I knew where we were even with the dizzying trip to disorient me). We went from the site to what "felt" like an empty field with a very minimal Paypal station at one end and the company that the Hacker used to sell me "verbal books"! Just try to convince someone you didn't receive the product when the Paypal receipt ways "oral ebooks" or whatever! :-D He said he'd sell it to me for $70 and I could go home.

It was worth vastly more than that in many ways, so I said ok. But then instead of getting the product (I didn't really figure this guy was going to read me a book :-) ... I got another bill for $70. We continued this game, he raised it to bigger chunks than $70. When we got to $1,350 I quit. I couldn't possibly afford that ... but there was irreplaceable professional communications in there that I simply HAD to protect. But through a process of scribbling in margins I connected with the "night watchman" who was handling the process for the hacker ... as soon as he realized he asked me if this was one of those ["insert name of hacker here if he ever touches this blog"] deals. I said yes and he made an unremembered comment in disgust. They seemed like an ok outfit if one good person can be extrapolated that far, and he assured me they'd retain all the materials, etc. The next day I found little cracks in Paypal's armor ... it used to be a lot harder to get them to step into the middle of any such disagreement. But I finally got through and they opened an investigation and I got back my money and my emails! And I'd like to think I helped make the Paypal system a little easier to be willing to investigate in a case like that.

Unfortunately. The hacker was furious. And he attacked with major firepower. He is an excellent programmer and if I understand correctly, a "big name" in the hacker world as well. Plus in the little entreprenurial corner of the 'Net he is quite well known ... right on the periphery of the big time players. A guru wannabee. Claims to be an Internet millionaire. And he had some very effective "inventions" that truly may be game changers. Right when I.D. theft and the less enticing parts of Internet shopping are starting to overtake that initial enthusiasm is not when we need a reputation of being full of crooks and hackers. It is the frontier ... that little section of the 'Net ... and I'm a believer in humanity's need for a frontier. Scammers and spammers and Soapy Smith flim-flammers I can handle fine. But this man is a flat out crook. He claims to be a sociopath and accepts "sadistic sociopath" without any suggestion otherwise.

The kind of guy who would build a fire on the back of a turtle and get a huge rush out of watching the turtle bake in his own shell.

He is still here. A year and a half later and he was here virtually any time that I was. And I live on them. He killed off several ... I think we decided 5, but some of them required multiple trips to the shop. I have three hard drives that we had to pull out along the way in case the F.B.I. would like to take them into the clean room and see what all the hacker deleted and destroyed.

He has (despite every possible thing that anyone can think of to do to mine to prevent remote access ... he has it working. My desktop is his desktop. I just sat back last night and watched him move the cursor around and open and close files (and I think delete another batch but I'm not yet certain). Then I found out that he had a group of hackers wandering through all my computers where all of the family's dirty laundry is stored. Then I figured out that they were using my machine(s) for some sort of file sharing ... probably music. Probably the feds will finally show up ... and they'll arrest me for having an illegal music sharing station! :-) But I'm guessing 20 people had access to the depths of my soul (I keep it hidden in my hard drive). And I couldn't service clients with him there. Plus destroyed my time and billing programs. We had and office LAN which he destroyed and replaced with their own which they had the gall to call "Jailbirds R Us". There have been lots of much worse ramifications ... he's gotten his revenge for me messing up his (well -oiled process, I wasn't a unique case! I just have enough mouth to do something about it). Of course that turned out poorly as I lost not 2 months of emails, but 5 YEARS of "can't lose" emails. When he first showed up I tried to back up the system quickly before I had any idea he was "always on" (they have alarms of some sort that alerts them when a victim logs on ... or so I have hypothesized ... and I think I got agreement on that from him). So he wiped out my backup too. Then he destroyed access to the entire company data base (small company, but cranks lots of critical paper) and has probably averaged four of us over that time (not counting staffs). No only were the archive files critical, but all of our current "live" files were destroyed as well (actually I think they are still "there" somewhere. The hacker just destroyed any way to access them.)

So I dropped my blog, I dropped other stuff I was doing on the 'Net. I'm going to have to mend fences with all those friends I used to have but figured they'd never be friends again if the hacker got them ... I was highly contagious!

He ran my out of business. 22 years of a successful professional business and he destroyed it. He cost me nearly TWO (2) YEARS of income. Long story with lots of side paths, but essentially, he wouldn't let me get any work done and would make everything I did do take forever. I can work 4 hours on writing a report ... that he can destroy in 4 seconds. And he did that a lot. I did a lot of my work in the libraries. But he made everything take so long I couldn't charge for it ... I was just hoping that when I finally did get a project finished and to a client that I hadn't ruined a wonderful 20 year relationship because my stuff didn't get to him until three weeks after he absolutely had to have it. It was tough. But I have a small packet that proves much of the stuff I say, and I have lots more (screen shots, etc.) whenever they want it. I had to close it down. I couldn't afford to run it (and it was harder work than ever before because of the hacker).

I've been in touch with the "local" F.B.I. (~120 miles away) and the national folks (the hacker and I are on opposite sides of the country ... local law enforcement won't, probably can't, do anything.) But I hadn't seen much sign of him for awhile (although stuff was done that I was just sure I didn't do!) until last night when he decided to put on a show. My but I hope the federal men were watching! :-)

I do think it is safe now. Or I wouldn't be back here. Besides, I'd be Blogger would be about as good a co-plaintiff as one could have if he really did infect them.

So ... that's why I haven't been on for a year and a half or so. But now, I'm unemployed and broke ... so I can go back to blogging!


PRODIGALS AND SONS AND THINGS
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Which brings me to the "other" part of this post. Here we've got two brothers; a good brother who stayed at home to help his mother and father run the modest little farm and never got a chance to "go out and see the world".

But the BAD brother ... the one who took his half of the inheritance and squandered it while traveling and adventuring. He got to see the world! He had the opportunity to do a lot of things that kids that age seem to need to do to get it out of their system. Things that it will be too late to do when one is older. The older brother was ticked off and I was always on his side. Every bit of "fairness" in me screams that the wrong kid got the feast and the calf.

But I got to thinking about it one day. I remember that was Jesus himself who spun that parable. And he was trying pretty hard to convince people that "fair" didn't mean "an eye for an eye". He was trying to bring humanity an entirely new paradigm. In the driest description I can think of ... Jesus was attempting to replace justice with love. It took me a lot of years before I understood why Jesus would sound like an idiot who rewarded bad behavior. It was a dangerous thing to say considering that he was someone who has been looked up to more and used as an example than any other person before or since.

People followed his actions, he set the example that countless people have tried to follow; to "be like Jesus" and to make all decisions the way Jesus would make them. But he probably knew it wasn't really dangerous ... because people wouldn't understand and those few that did wouldn't do anything about it. And those very few that understood and tried to do something about it, would fail miserably.

Upon contemplation, I can see how devoted Christians would have a hard time imagining Jesus being furious with the return of someone very important to him, but that he had expected never to see again. So there must be some other message he is trying to convey.

As I kept getting older (it keeps happening too! :-) I had my own kids and thought about how I would react if my son, the younger of my two kids ...

[All who guessed without even being asked .... you are correct ... the prodigal son that Jesus made famous was the younger son!]

... took his "college savings" out of the bank and disappeared and years had passed and I had no idea whether he was even alive or dead ... and then, as I was knocking on old age's door I see him walking down the road towards home ...

I get it. I understand what Jesus was trying to do. Justice. Equality. Even fairness. Those we think of as the goals. The things to strive toward. The things to do to be a "good person' and even a "good Christian".

And they are wrong.

At least if they purport or wish to "follow Jesus". Nor are they inherently wrong. They might coincidentally be right. But stopped clocks are a couple times a day also. He was much more radical than trying to bring about a fair, just world.

Justice, equality, fairness ... that is what he was trying to get us to understand was not the goal. All those preachers who stand up and talk about how we have to strive for equality, and fairness ... and ultimately this will create "justice" ... which is the "god" of this "missed the boat" Christianity. Plato took Aristotle's hierarchy of good and evil and all the schools in the neighborhood where the Christians were hiding in those days were Platonic schools ... and we ended up with Plato's philosophical world view of simply moving "the Good" to the top of the pyramid and we suddenly have a hierarchical model of good and evil. The Socratic and pre-Platonic Greeks fought this "binding of god into a hierachy (because in Plato's system the hierarchy is what is really God). It was a giant philosophical debate and it set the path of Western history. But the "God is Everywhere" philosophy lost to one where God is a structure that "the Good" is the highest point on the structure. We went from a philosophy that said that a chair that you can sit in is far more perfect than one that exists only in some heaven of ideas. Plato (and picked up by the Christians) thought people were originally defective ... Original Sin. The early Greeks that that was nuts. A new-born infant is absolutely without sin! (Just a good thing they can't throw rocks :-) But Plato won and the Christian kids were taught Platonic philosophy and Christianity caught a couple of great historical breaks and became the dominant Western religion and that is why we are a Platonically based society today still guided primarily by Mosaic law.

Today's Christians pushing democracy and fairness and equality and, ultimately, Justice ... are teaching Mosaic law. The law of symmetry. Of the need for the karmic balance of Yin and Yang. Justice. An eye for an eye.

Jesus came to bring a sword. He was so radical he made the '60s protesters look like Sunday School teachers. He wanted to turn society upside down and shake it like it was a money changers' table in a temple.

We can't dispense justice. Our court systems have proven that even when they really try. Only a perfect, "sinless", person can stone a prostitute ... which was another example of Jesus saying "You will never know all the details and won't even come close to knowing enough of them to know which decision is just ... whatever the decision. If we had only "sinless" people ... we wouldn't have the problem. But we don't and we won't so we do.

"Only your father in heaven can judge people." Come on folks, get this through your heads! I would guess Jesus was often very frustrated :-)

Fairness. Such a positive goal. And it might be. It might be that if you took everything that happened to all the players in a situation starting at least with their birth and understood everything that had happened to each of them since ... then in a dispute between them one might possibly come close on getting "fair" right. Of course the punishment has to exactly match the net wrong that the badder guy did ...

I see why Jesus said that really ... if it needed to be done, only a god could do it.

No. I think what the Barefoot Prophet was trying to tell us was that we have to think beyond the concepts of fairness and justice. They may be important ... or at least nice ... but they may just be totally irrelevant. I'm not advanced enough to understand all he was trying to tell us by any means. In the Stygian darkness with my white tipped cane the best I can do was to think I see that he came to throw out the law of Moses. The Law of Moses was an earth changing event of its own and in its own time. Essentially, the Law of Moses replaced the Law of Might Makes Right. It was a giant evolutionary step from the Law of Power. A step that had guided us for Millenia and had served its purpose wonderfully .... for the incremental step it needed to be.

But my white tipped cane says that Jesus was just trying to get it through our "symmetry rules all" heads that Love trumps Justice. And if he isn't coming back until we are able to understand that ... he's not coming back for awhile.

It trumps fairness too. After thinking a lot about it recently (I have an 18 year old youngest son :-) ... I know!

And this is what I know: my son had done so many bad things and wasted so much of my money and left his brother to do the work of two ... and that I'm getting older and my days are even more precious ...

I know that when I see my son walking down the road to the house after not having even heard of him for years and believing that I would die without ever seeing him again ...

I will run out to greet him joyfully, yelling at anyone handy to kill the fatted calf as I go.