Broken Hive Mind

Chapter I — Why You Have A Responsibility To Learn About Your Computer

So why am I writing this chapter? Well, it has to do with shovels…not directly, but it does. Just bear with me for a second and I’ll explain. You see, very few people in the developed world would think of trying to dig a small hole with anything but a metal shovel. We all basically know how to use this tool, but most of us could not forge a new one if we had to. Still, that’s okay because we understand it’s basic operation. It is a tool, an important one, and it rarely comes with an instruction manual. The people that make shovles are allowed to assume that people understand how to use shovels. This is a totally fair and reasonable assumption.

Computers are the most versatile tools that we have created. They can help us waste time, by playing gory video games for example, to amazing things like plotting our course to Jupiter or helping us design our first moon colony. Their help in the field of medicine has allowed us to get closer to curing cancers and they will almost definitely help us actually get there. They are the single most important tool that we have created in the latter half of the last century. Used correctly, they can help us to create a utopia, or they can help us enslave each other. It is all up to how we use them, and that starts with everyone understanding their basic operation so they are no more apprehenive of using a computer than a shovel. It also means that we all have a responsibility to train ourselves to that level with few exceptions, or those that understand computers will be able to control us.

Many years ago I took my first computer class in middle school. I learned how to type on an old Tandy computer. Sure, better computers were available at the time, but it’s not like all of our schools have money for that stuff, since we have to let our governments and state universities waste it on crap they don’t need instead. Still, this lack of newer computers ended up being a good thing actually, not that I agree with schools being underfunded, but it limited what stupid, unnecessary crap we could be made to learn on a computer (for example, learning MS Office instead of programming). Instead we learned valuable skills like how to type and eventually even how to write a BASIC program, partially because we couldn’t afford the software that our schools are unnecessarily buying and then cramming down kids’ throats. A perfect example of this is how schools use Windows and MS Office predominantly, even though GNU/Linux and Open Office would meet their needs and run better on the old machines they usually get to use through donations, etc. Of course when I say school here, I mean public, primary education institutions. Colleges just charge kids an obscene amount to go there and make sure that their Presidents and Deans get crap that is just expensive and mostly useless like MacBook Airs and, oh yes, big screen televisions to unnecessarily use as monitors, but more on this later.

I was only in eigth grade, but learning this little bit of BASIC, and therefore programming, still puts me way above the knowledge level of most computer users. I wrote a program that created a picture of a brown hamster with a blinking nose on a white background, and it worked on monochrome monitors too, by the way. This taught me many things. First, the computers didn’t even have hard drives, so we had to write out code, draw the images we intended to make on graph paper that represented the pixels we were going to color in, and bring that to class with us every week. To accomplish this I had to learn how a display worked beyond how to hook a cable up and press the power button, what resolution actually was, and how computers actually interpret code. I also found out how memory worked, and I found out that although computers may be self-aware some day, most of the stuff we have really can’t do anything on its own, even if it wanted to. There is always some human hand behind even the most advanced AI’s out there. Sure, this shattered my belief in the computer uprising I was hoping for, but as I got older, and watched more and more people give control of their lives over to technology without even trying to understand the basic way that it worked, I realized that I may yet live to battle deadly robot enemies with a chainsaw. In fact maybe they will team up with zombies and I can have the EMP in one hand for the robots and the katana blade in the other for the zombies, or maybe I’ll get really lucky and somehow the robots will learn how to merge with the zombies and I’ll be expected to run them over with an M1-Abrams tank. Although I’m not really into the machines of war, I think even pacifists have to admit that a tank that can survive a nuclear blast is pretty freaking sweet.

Sorry, back to the point. I continued with my studies of computers as a hobby, and took some more programming when I went to college. I reinforced the idea that computers only do what you tell them to do, but by now most of my college buddies had machines with Windows 98 or OS9 on them. The Apple guys especially had never seen the command line, and had no idea what it was for. They thought that if they had to do that stuff, the computer must just be bad. In theory, someone should just be able to build a computer that “just works” like, you know, Apple does, expect that it doesn’t. Remember the Genius bar? You know the place that you go to get told to go to hell because Apple has a policy against really helping you out? Sadly this story is pretty true industry wide. Simple stuff you can be helped with… more complex stuff maybe, but probably not. This is partially because the people you are dealing with probably are not computer experts, at least from the theoretical standpoint, but are really just advanced users. Still, the larger point here is that all operating systems have a very powerful command line interface running in the background. When you click on an icon, for example, it runs a set of commands in the background. These commands can also be typed in at the command line. So you see, icons are a way of actually complicating a simple task like typing in a command at the command line. Sure they also act as place holders, help you organize where your programs are, and limit the amount of commands you have to know, if any, but this basic principal needs to be understood.

Once you really start to customize any system, or put any data on it that is yours, there is no way that the techs can know exactly what is important to you or not. Sure, you can tell them, and they can guess that your “My Documents” folder is probably important, for example, but if you understood even the most basic things about computers, you’d have your critical data backed up and would almost never have to demand that your organization spend thousands of dollars trying to recover your data from a bad hard drive, for example. This is important for many reasons, but one of them is common sense. Even if you are very organized and your critical data is in one place, if your drive is really toast you may end up with corrupt data. If your organization requires encryption and you simply forget your password, and things are not set up properly, you probably won’t be able to get a lot of your data back. Also, this data should not be backed up to loose storage, like hard drives, if it is really critical and can simply be lifted. It always cracked me up how some of the Universities I worked for would provide very little storage space on their servers for users to back up to, and even then it was not usually done in an automated manner. They would give you a little share on some old server somewhere, just to say they gave you something, forcing many users to demand external hard drives or just to not worry about it at all and then cost the organization tons of money for recovery. In one instance a depatment was doing some very important historical recovery. The supporting IT department, a state department, of course, washed their hands of any responsibility to this mostly senior citizen run department other than giving them a computer. They then suggested a network backup drive that was very expensive but had some internal redundancy and washed their hands of any other responsibility. So here’s the issue, there was so much data that they were almost exclusively using the network storage device to save to. Sure it had 3 discs in it that acted as one for redundancy (aka RAID 5), but it was still a single point of failure if anything went wrong with the network storage unit. Low and behold, it did and a tech was paid $15 an hour to use 60% of the universities network capacity to try and recover the data for over 24 hours. This could have all been avoided if one of their very expensive union employees had used one of the 15 thousand dollar servers they have in storage to backup the users data using an automated script, or just simply gave them an inexpensive tape drive. Compared to the cost of the computer and network storage array they gave them, a tape drive or external HDD as a secondary backup would have been peanuts and cost as much or less than the recovery, plus there would have been no issues with data corruption caused by trying to recover the data from failed drives, etc. So users are expected to know what they’re doing by the people they pay to know. What I mean is that, policy wise, when shit hits the fan, you’ll find out that your department has no real responsibility to your data anyway.

Hell, the CIO of the place I’m talking about actually cut off an employee midsentence when they were explaining the pros and cons of encryption because he was late for his 2 hour walk around campus. He, of course, asked the employee about encryption, but decided that the head of an IT department can’t listen to any explanation that is more than 2 sentences long about it. He also only usually works a 6 hour day. The point is the guys at the top of these departments often know way less than their student techs. They say they’re needed because they’re “people” people, but do you really need someone who knows nothing about IT running an IT department? Isn’t that a recipe for disaster? To pay them more and give them benefits above the lower level techs that have no rights seems to suggest that your retention of qualified people will be low as well, but that is the modern University IT model…not everywhere, but in the majority of places. All other issues aside, this should motivate you to want to know more and/or hire some new administrative staff even if it means taking on your corrupt state government and union, but more on this later.

The main issue here is control. You may say, “What do I care? At my University they let me be an administrator on my own machine.” (please see the post on brokenhivemind.com about some of the many reasons why you shouldn’t be one.) This makes you think, among other things, that you have control of your work machine and if there is a problem, that is what you pay tech guys to fix, right? Well this is also where you shoot yourself in the foot. So let me make this point again. You see, most IT departments are run by people that have almost no clue as to how computers work, and I will be writing a whole chapter about this with supporting information. The point here is that since they are in control, they usually create policies that limit their responsibility to you and especially your data. Anything they do is basically a best attempt, putting the responsibility, when you’re paddling up shit creek, solely on you. Still, this situation is avoidable if you understand just some basic things about computers.

So here’s a list of things you should know.

1. Being an administrator on your work computer really only makes you a threat to your fellow users and does not protect your privacy.

– Your organization owns your computer and the network devices that go to it. They are allowed to monitor you and can do this just as effectively if you are an administrator or not. Also, in most cases if someone removes your hard drive, they can find a way to get your data off of it. Instead of demanding a new computer you don’t need every 3 years, ask for one every four and a case that you can lock instead. Once someone has physical access or your computer is on 24/7 on a network, it’s game over. If someone really wants your data, especially someone “legit”, like your boss, they can get it.

2. You don’t need a computer every 3 to 4 years. It may seem like you do because your computer gets “slow” as you use it, but this is mostly due to spyware and other infections which you wouldn’t be getting as many of if you weren’t an administrator. Also, some operating systems are more prone to problems with this than others. Operating systems that are prone to infection, like Windows, have forced institutions to look to solutions like “clean access” which, like any service, is only as effective as the people providing it. Sure it helps, but if you know enough not to open that infected e-mail in the first place, your need for security software is greatly reduced. Plus in the end, a computer is a machine. If you have total access to it, and tell it to do something like infect itself, it will.

3.  Problem research is often easy. Most solutions can be found by performing a google search. Sure, some of them require administrator rights, and since you’re no longer an admin you’d have to contact your IT department for help if they do, but in general, almost all of the answers you need can be found by performing a quick search on your favorite search engine.

4.  Don’t go to sites you shouldn’t go to at work. This reduces spyware infections, and since you’re probably being monitored anyway, you should probably not be doing this unless you work in the adult industry. Whether I believe this is a violation of your rights or not, it’s not like we are gaining rights as citizens or workers these days, so if you don’t like this then fight against it through legal channels.

5.  Academic freedom is often misinterpreted. You don’t have a right to look at whatever you want. Sure, universities are in many ways the last monarchy system that we have left, and many corrupt bosses will look the other way when their IT techs service your machine when they find inappropriate material, but academic freedom does not give researchers, professors, etc. the right to research anything they want on their computers. Of course the head of at least one IT department I worked for did not understand this, or said that they didn’t, but that doesn’t mean that if the State checks out what you’re doing at work they won’t can you for it because you can protect yourself with academic freedom.

So again the issue is control. Perceived control and actual control. You want to be able to tell the difference here. Many of us complain about how when we call a call center we don’t get the answers we want, the people know less than you even do, or they are just plain rude. I’m going to skip the complaints about speaking to India since you should be impressed that most Indians speak English much better than Americans speak other foreign languages if they speak one at all. Basically it’s not possible to know everything. Plus, call center personnel are usually entry level and underpaid, usually being the key word here. In the Connecticut State University union mafia employment system, many of the techs are overpaid and get amazing benefits, and still do not keep up on their skills, they actually think they’re underpaid, etc., but more on that later.

When you call in, they go through a basic checklist. This is why they ask you if it’s plugged in for example. Many calls are solved this way. If the problem persists, and the tech is not lazy or they don’t have someone else to bump it to and they’re not lazy, they see if they know the solution off of the top of their head. If they don’t they give you a “canned response.” If that isn’t appropriate, and this determination is really up to them, then they might do a search for solutions if they don’t just have another department to bounce you to or an excuse to use. So you see, calling a call center is usually just a waste of time. In fact if we could get people to just use search engines a bit we would hardly need call centers at all. Call centers resolve over 90% of calls on average (this varies based on the call center) because most of the solutions to your problems are simple.

The other side of this is that the more you know, the better overall experience you’ll have. Sure, many of you say that you don’t want to know anything about computers, and then quickly demand to be administrators on your work machines even though this level of access should be kept for people that at least mostly know what they’re doing since, in effect, it gives the user access to the whole system. If you are more than one year from retirement, this issue is not something you can ignore. Computers will simply become more complex, but the basic way they work will stay the same. The basic skills needed to troubleshoot systems will stay the same. Also, you will not have the time to wait for your overworked, or possibly incompetent, IT center to respond every time you have a problem. Also, if you’re at a university, and you’re not a tenured professor or better, they will not respond if the king (aka president or dean) is having an issue. They probably should if your problem is effecting students, for example, but universities are politically loaded places and at the most corrupt ones, the asses of the presidents, deans, etc. are kissed well before more important work is done. The deans and presidents probably wouldn’t approve of this, but they are simply unaware since ass kissing takes up so much of their time.

Bosses will expect you to know more as time goes on too. Learning more will make your experience less frustrating, will help you get and keep a job, and will eliminate many jobs for people that, for example, spend your tax money on watching You Tube all day. Really, this will come up again in a later chapter but at one place I worked, right before the State announced that it was 8 billion dollars in debt, the organization I worked for spent thousands of dollars on a flat screen TV to display a white background with the total number of calls that were open. This place liked to throw parties and play X-Box on it too. The call center, which had a similar TV they claimed they needed for training, watched popular sporting events on theirs. They spent their down time and your tax money goofing off, and if they were found to be incompetent, they demanded training, because they obviously didn’t have the time to educate themselves and their union kept them from really being truly reviewed or fired… I want people to have jobs, but is this the kind of thing we want to pay for and support especially when the alternative is less frustrating and better overall? The alternative being that we get rid of these unnecessary, paid hand-holding jobs and all become more competent? We are encouraging this level of job and support by not addressing simple problems ourselves and that is, amongst other things, expensive and wasteful. Pen and Teller would probably say that it’s Bullshit.