Samizdata

Long time readers may have noticed that I vanish from time to time. A week or two here; three months there and with rarely an explanation. Perhaps I owe you one and in particular to those who have been tossing the occasional virtual egg because I’ve not updated a certain graph.

I make my living as a freelance consultant, mostly on Linux based systems with which I have worked for nearly a decade. I do security checking, networking, administration, systems programming in whatever language people want. I sometimes do user applications. I design, purchase, and build racks of servers from components for special projects. I write system documentation and specifications. I do engineering design and analysis for complex systems and products. I take on pretty much anything ‘high end’ that has enough money and a long enough time line to soak up the learning curve. I rarely do the same thing twice.

When times are really bad, I have been known to pull out the Martin guitar and ring the local bar-owners and booking agents.

Sometimes, like this last spring, I spend months on the road. Other times, like the last two weeks, I telework. In either case “Have Laptop, Will Travel” is an appropriate motto for me. Perhaps a few of you know the original version of that line… but I’m not allowed to have one of those in the UK!

When work comes I have bills paid and my head down; when there are bad times… tuna and spaghetti do become boring. The other side of that tuppence is that I have loads of time to blog when I have no money; and barely time to read what others have written on my own blog when I’ve a contract on.

The last two weeks I’ve had a job on. The booking came quite in the nick of time, but I’ll not go into the gory details of life on the edge. Consequently I’ve not been much heard from lately, and for the last week not at all.

What I do for a living is a very stark example of why borders are dead. These last two weeks I have been part of a subcontractor crew on a JP Morgan business conference in Boston. We did live webcasts of the financial reports of CEO’s and CFO’s of a large number of JP Morgan ‘associated’ companies – Google’s CEO was among them – to fulfill SEC public disclosure requirements.

I sat here in my flat in Newtonabbey, on the outskirts of Belfast and worked with a team in the US. On the days of the setup and run, the crew was spread out over three locations in Manhattan, the hotel in Boston… and my flat in Northern Ireland.

Physical location has little meaning when you meet and work in cyberspace. Borders are a joke: they have been erased by the scouring terrabytes of global connectivity. I can be and work anywhere I want on this planet, any time I wish and noone can stop or question me.

True… no one in advanced societies is trying at present but even if they did they would have a very low chance of success. An attempt to control such international working would be an economic disaster in any case. If some State tried and succeeded the result would be a brain drain of massive proportions: “Would the last computer scientist over the border please turn off the data pipe?”

That is the deadly threat people like me hold over the State. I have distributed employment. I live where I like, not where I must. I am mobile. Screw with ‘me’ and you lose ‘me’. I use scare quotes because I am just one data point, one representative of a rapidly growing class of people whose day to day life is in cyberspace.

We are the future and we are killing the entire concept on which the State is based.

After a worrying hiatus lasting no less than eight days, Natalie Solent is back blogging:

Whew. I’m sorry that a combination of circumstances has kept me away from the computer for several days. Would you like to hear about the pump on our boiler, our header tank and the partial collapse of our garage roof? No, thought not.

Oh but we would, we would. Natalie doesn’t have comments, but if she did they would already be piling up: tell us, tell us, what happened with the pump, what’s a header tank and what went wrong with it?, etc. When did the misfortunes of others suddenly become an unfit subject for public entertainment? It sounds like terrific stuff, and Natalie should itemise every horror she endured.

I still smile to myself about the day when I first blundered into this my-misery-equals-other-people’s-happiness thing. I had a job in the building trade as a sort of very junior sub-lieutenant, and on a particularly gruesome day matters culminated in me being chased back into my sordid, dirty and leaky little caravan in the pouring rain by a big Irishman waving a trowel. He had built a slightly crooked wall during all that rain, and I had helpfully explained this to him, in between keeping up with the cricket scores in the bloody caravan. Plus there had been all kinds of confusions over some tunnelling that had been going on, and there was a hell of a muddle with the concrete, and I did some laying out of foundations for some houses that still worries me when I think about it. It had not been a good day. Basically I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and I just wanted to go home and sleep.

But just to put the tin lid on my day of misery, I had to go to some damned party that same evening. (This was before I had discovered that the thing to do about parties you don’t want to got to is not go.) Misery. All the people there would presumably have had brilliant days and would be yacking away about how well they’d done, and all I’d have to talk about would be my insane bloody job in the insane bloody building trade, and insane Irish people with trowels and concrete-related fuck-ups and hideously misplaced suburban houses.

I entered the party, dreading it, and immediately the questions started. Who are you? What do you do? How was your day? I had just about had it at that moment, and I thought to hell with this, they’ve asked, now they’re going to be told. And of course within about a minute I was the life and soul of the party. I soon got the joke of it all myself and started exaggerating and inventing, using fuck-ups from other days, and fuck-ups I’d only heard about from other building trade idiots, and combining different fuck-ups into the same fuck-up. All those posh stockbrokers and lawyers who had spent their entire day achieving only the exact results they wanted never got a look-in.

So tell us Natalie. The collapse of the garage roof sounds especially entertaining, even if it was, alas, only partial.

I must be the last person in the blogosphere to have spotted this. Some guy seems to have been fired by Microsoft for posting a photo of a bunch of Macintosh G5 computers being delivered to some nameless warehouse in Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters.

It seems a tad capricious… unless of course there is more to this than meets the eye. Much as I dislike Microsoft, we have only one side of the story here so I feel no great need to follow the herd in leaping to this bloke’s defence.

For me the interesting thing is the way a personal problem of less than earth shaking import can flash around the world and get the blogosphere clucking… I guess it was a slow week for interesting world events to write about and anyway, who can resist the chance to bash the Evil Micro$oft?

There was a grain of seriousness to my second option for dealing with spammers. We can’t actually shoot spammers – however pleasant that might be – but we can expose them. The Blogosphere is a huge intelligence collection and dissemination service. There are agents (bloggers) everywhere. There are highly proficient engineers and scientists amongst us. How long could the whereabouts of a spammer remain secret with the the entire Blogosphere out to get them?

With personal contact details in hand there are simple, legal means of retaliation. We could make their life hell and do so without violating the libertarian ethos.

Small expressions of annoyance have little import if taken singly… but what happens when 10,000 people ring the spammer at home and say: “Please stop”? Or 10 people a day ring the doorbell and say the same? Or 100,000 each send one email to the home email address of the spammer? Or 1,000,000 bring a class action suit against the spammer for one pound each plus court costs?

It is not as if this hasn’t happened before. James Taranto (Opinion Journal) recently published the phone numbers of people and organizations involved in telephone soliciting. He caused them no end of grief. Six years ago the fax phone number for the London Metropolitan Police was published after they threatened a brutal and heavy handed censorship of internet news groups. They ran out of fax paper rather quickly and more importantly, ISP’s were neither raided nor shut down. (I will admit to a personal interest in the event as I was the Tech Director of the first ISP in Northern Ireland at the time).

Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming this would wipe out spam. It raises the cost of doing business. That is enough because it means less spam.