Month: April 2004

Continuing the previous note on the firewall configuration slavery; I have been thinking about the increasing complexity of our surroundings. Working with our Morphome project in the Lab have made me pay more attention to the amount of work we do just in order to maintain the machinery that surrounds us. Current information technology is obviously complex and still sometimes unrealiable to the point of being ridiculous, but think also the other technological components of your living environment: how much of your time do you spend taking care of your house, car, bicycle, or clothing? How much of that work you actually want to, or enjoy doing? To put this other way around, what would be the “heart of our humanity” without our constant service to technology, supposedly at our service?

I finally took it over to make my system even slightly better in terms of security, and installed a router with firewall capabilities. Nothing goes as planned, not with IT, at least. Practically whole weekend was ruined, as I was installing, rebooting, reconfiguring in an endless loop. This time the error conditions had a sort of surreal beauty with them: system seemed to work or not work with random sites and services, simply at whim. Phoned my ISP service number, and just after half an hour of queuing (oh, perhaps 45 mins), and with no help, I return home and reboot, just to find everything miraculously working again. Reading the router system logs, the lullaby of electronic times?

Wow. — More than 3000 emails later, I realize just how dependent we have become on the ICT infrastructure. Not in the prophesised positive symbiotic sense, but rather on the more ambiguous sense of cyborg existence in a world filled with spam. Few days without the net connection means two weeks of race against the new waves of binary rubbish heaping on top of the old ones. Nevertheless: great holiday, great to be back.