From Laughter to Danger

We may not all remember the time when an elected United States Government Representative stood in the Senate and without a touch of irony proclaimed the internet to be “a series of tubes”.

We snickered at that. I was about a year out of high school at that point.

I was one of the first 1000 users of Reddit and in the first round of users when Facebook became accessible nationwide exclusively to users with .edu email addresses. I, and many others in my generation, felt superior to that dinosaur on C-SPAN because I had grown up with computers and dial-up internet service. We never thought, back then, that we would have any real trouble because of congressional ignorance about technology. Surely, someone with working eyes and a social life would intercede to set the record straight on official channels.

It does not appear to have ever happened.

Right now, the most digitally-adept members of our government only have the savvy required to manipulate public opinion through the use of social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, Parler, Gab, and probably a few others I feel better not knowing about. And these people have their sights on reforming the internet. What they’re actually going to do is ruin it because they have an ignorant misconception of what the internet is.

That’s truly scary.

There is a lot of talk right now (January 2021) about censorship, social media, and the internet. The majority of the loudest voices clearly demonstrate their ignorance to those of us who are experts.

Shortly after the seditious riot that ransacked the nation’s capitol building, Donald Trump was silenced across all American social media platforms. Many vendors pitched in too. This move sparked a fervent debate across the world about freedom of speech, censorship, monopolies, and more.

It appears that those choosing to label the move by Twitter and Facebook as a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution have no idea what the internet is. Nor do they appear aware of the reality of America’s Freedom of Speech guarantee.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT THE INTERNET.

Social media platforms have for years aimed to make it so their products stand between humans and the internet. Facebook notoriously aimed to ensure many Africans could only have access to Facebook. Twitter has recently denounced Uganda’s effort to block social media sites from their country in the run up to their election. The problem with this statement isn’t that they’re mad about their own service being blocked. It’s the fact that they imply that blocking Twitter is equivalent to shutting down the internet. I could not take issue reasonably with a statement that left that part out.

But Twitter didn’t leave that out. They went full force into an effort to further portray their own website as “The Internet.”

Losing access to a social media site is NOT censorship. It is NOT a violation of the First Amendment. Full stop.

You are free to buy your own domain (they’re dirt cheap) and host your own website or app from your own home. It is not something that is extremely difficult to do. It does not cost much money. Anyone with a steady job can throw down $15 a year and spend a few hours setting it up. Any middle class American can easily afford $100 a year to host their website on a reputable cloud company’s servers in any country on Earth.

On that website that you made and you own, you can say whatever you want whenever you want. If the United States Government blocks your domain, then you have a legitimate argument against censorship and the violation of your rights assuming that site is an expression of your own thoughts and speech. You could not make this argument if your site demanded an insurrection, violence, or the blatant violation of US law.

This is not complicated, unlike a lot of what is happening in the world.

The EFF has put out the only statement I’ve seen that cites the legal right of website owners to do whatever they want with their sites.

Bad Faith Reporting

Reporters like Glenn Greenwald gained international acclaim when the NSA Leaks perpetrated by Edward Snowden became public. They reported on high-level hacking and surveillance technology and did their best to explain their function to a world of casual and business computer users. Greenwald, et al. came off as friendly guides to a world of ultra-sophisticated and advanced technology few of us ever needed to know about intimately.

Unfortunately, these same reporters have failed to help the population at large understand the internet as it really is: a network of information exchanges. Instead, they have espoused, either through ignorance or bad faith (which is worse?), that Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and Apple are the internet and that they are unstoppable monopolies that must be taken down in order to preserve personal freedom and liberty. The aforementioned platforms haven’t helped (why would they?) by constantly taking public stances of preserving public interest while legally stating that they’re just harmless companies in the courtroom.

Glenn Greenwald is guilty of not only bad-faith reporting, but outright lies in the above-linked article titled How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler.

I will address the situation with Parler later. Right now, let’s look at Greenwald’s article.

He lambastes Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon as monopolies on the web. They’re not. There are alternatives to each on the internet. You just have to dig. Just because they’re the only sites many people ever visit does not mean they are the internet. I don’t personally like any of them nor do I use them for any services. The fact that this site is even viewable proves they’re not monopolies.

Greenwald also mentions that Parler is innocent in the Capitol riot event because all the planning was done on Facebook and Twitter. He further claims that no known Parler users entered the Capitol. This is provably false.

I used to hold Glenn Greenwald in very high regard. His work in exposing PRISM was a landmark and a legacy accomplishment for journalism. For that, I regarded him as a globally elite journalist whom I should keep tabs on. That changed in 2020.

His numerous appearances on Tucker Carlson’s entertainment news show in the last few years have looked pretty bad. His unhinged ranting about how Russia never would lift a finger to harm the United States in any way rushes past reasonable objectivity and appears suspiciously asymptotic to what we would expect from Soviet propaganda.

I cheered his criticism of the Democrats in the United States Government. But then it started to feel like he was purposefully omitting crucial perspectives from the narrative. It became clear that he had an agenda when he raised such a ruckus and rage-quit The Intercept. He alleged censorship. The editors at The Intercept claimed he was flouting standard fact-checking.

Now he presumes to speak to me about the nature of the internet. He might think that by implying that these feckless mega-corporations milking their users for coin are actually The Internet that we will all suddenly jump onboard with Parler and their users, stand up against censorship, and fight for free speech.

Greenwald appears sycophantic and his stance on the matter seems divorced from reality. Just like the official statement from Twitter about Uganda’s choice to block social media in the aim to protect their elections.

Furthermore, Greenwald has no true authority to write, speak, or imply anything about the structure, architecture, or landscape of The Internet. He is a former lawyer turned investigative journalist. He helped Edward Snowden inform the world about PRISM. He doesn’t have experience in technology beyond what any first world consumer has. He has not demonstrated any wherewithal to use technology in a productive manner outside of imposing his own reality-tunnel on others. One seemingly small, but rather glaring proof of this fact is that he published his writing on Substack.

If he had any ability with internet technologies, Greenwald would be publishing from a domain that he owned outright. But he doesn’t. Substack is a service just like Facebook or Twitter that monetizes the behavior of its visitors. Either he pays them to publish his words or they pay him to use their platform so they can raise their visibility on the back of his name.

Parler

Let’s turn to Parler.

If you have not already heard about how Parler was taken offline then you have succeeded in staying unplugged from the American News Hurricane.

Ignorant politicians, journalists, and civilians have been in a huff over this move because they claim this is monopolized censorship. It’s not.

The reason Parler went offline is gross incompetence and nothing more. The matter of Parler’s content is not something I care about.

Let’s list out all the ways Parler was technically terrible.

1. Clearly, no true infrastructure engineers on staff
2. Incompetent back end programming
3. Amateur security practices
4. Chose to buy hosting from a provider that struck an exclusive deal with their direct competitor.

The first point of bad infrastructure engineering is apparent to any professional Network Engineer, DevOps Professional, Cloud Architect, or whatever. If you have a service that must stay up, then you make it globally redundant with seamless failover and load-balancing. If one of your hosting providers decides to give you the boot, you shouldn’t have any service interruption unless you foolishly placed all assets in the same data center. This is basic Operations Infrastructure Engineering.

The second and third are proven by the fact that anyone in the world, without authentication, could pull all data from Parler’s API. This just hurts to think about. This is the sort of thing you’re supposed to figure out before you even tell someone you have an app. The inability to secure their data allowed for hackers to pull down every bit of data and back it up without technically breaking any laws or Terms of Service. Parler looks like a dumpster fire built through a series of cheap Fiverr contracts. Or maybe they thought they could get ahead of everyone else by complying with the GOP’s desire to eliminate secure encryption and data security.

What’s worse about that is Parler marketed itself to be private and secure. Instead it served them all up to their political adversaries on a silver platter.

The final point of incompetence lies in their choice to place all their eggs in the Amazon Web Services basket. Especially when they knew that AWS had signed an exclusive deal to provide federated infrastructure to Twitter so that company could grow their footprint beyond their own datacenters.

It’s expensive to run a datacenter for your own needs. But Parler had billionaire investors. They could have easily paid for the infrastructure to ensure their service never went down. Not only that, they could have easily purchased backup hosting with another vendor. This goes back to the false narrative that Amazon is a web hosting monopoly. Just because their commercials proclaim they run the internet does not mean they run the internet. America has hundreds, if not thousands, of capable competitors. Or, if you’re a billionaire, just spend a couple $100k on some servers and call it a day.

This Is Not All Fine, Though

I’ve pointed out why Parler sucked from a technical standpoint, why social media sites banning users isn’t a crime, and how a false narrative about the nature of the internet is being pushed by journalists and social media companies.

But there is still a problematic issue to all of this. This isn’t something I’ve yet seen reported and that is concerning.

The United States Government was silenced on the internet by private companies. Love or hate Donald Trump, he is (for now anyway) the President of the United States of America. Legally, his voice is the official stance of the American Government. That voice was forcibly removed from every social media platform at once. That’s a significant event. The chief voice of the United States Government has been banned from online public spaces without any repercussion.

We need to carefully consider what this means for the future. This precedent feels like it could dawn a new age of communication from the US Government to the rest of the world. Could we possibly encounter serious problems in the future when Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon can insert themselves between us and our leaders voice?

Sure, Donald Trump is not silenced completely. He has the Emergency Broadcast System. He can hold a press conference and all TV news outlets will air it live. But who watches TV anymore? I don’t. My television gets video from a web server fed into it from a Raspberry Pi. I would go to YouTube or the PBS website to see a live presidential address. This doesn’t seem like a big deal when it’s Donald Trump for obvious reasons. But this could be a big deal in a national emergency. It could be helpful to have our nation’s leader live tweet that a dangerous event is about to unfold. That would get out to us all well before a television broadcast could be configured and executed.

The atomic bomb is about the only instance I can think of where Americans wielded unprecedented power and then decided to never use it again. Will Donald Trump’s removal from social media follow that same path? Or will Twitter ban a future President when s/he decides to sanction the company? That certainly wouldn’t be illegal, assuming the laws then are as they are now. But would it be a good thing to do?

There are a lot of unanswered questions about social media, the internet, legality, and morality. We’ve only just dipped our toes into the digital age and we haven’t figured any of it out. Based on the way we have legislated, and amorally exploited internet users in such a short time since its access became publicly ubiquitous, it is hard to imagine a world where we figure out how to use it as the utility it appears to be instead of an avenue of unfettered consumption and human exploitation.

Social Media has been prominent in the American news cycle for a few years now. Most of the reporting has been pretty negative. And for good reason.

Those who know me probably got tired of my constant railing against Facebook years ago. I can’t help but feel a little guilty about the bad taste all that ranting inspired in the people around me.

A lot of my rhetoric on the subject had an air of pretentious elitism that painted social media users as thoughtless drones who were too stupid to consider much outside of their own instant gratification. While, at the time, I did want to drive that perspective home into peoples’ minds, I did not give much consideration back then to the possibility of people identifying personally with that idea. Looking back, it is common sense that if a person uses a thing like Facebook, and someone comes along and says, “Facebook is stupid and all the people who use it are idiots,” that person is probably going to be offended on some level. She or he might ask, “Does this guy think I’m an idiot because I have a Facebook account?”

That is not a productive way to convince people that social media companies don’t have the best interests of individuals or their communities at heart. To put it mildly.

This mistake in perspective and angle of attack brought consequences on a scale I did not fully consider at the time. When social media platforms are so deeply embedded into social clusters as the primary mode of sharing and communication, leaving them behind silently will make you invisible to those you weren’t close with before those platforms took hold. If your account doesn’t appear in the feed, then you don’t exist.

Pair that with a toxic oratory habit and the people that still use those platforms are less likely to associate with you in the real world. That is not rocket science. It is just what happens when you talk like a jerk.

At one point in the last few years I did create an Instagram account. I did not use it a lot but it was a great way to share photos with friends and also connect with other adventurers and artists around the world through our documented adventures. I was okay with that app being on my phone for the most part. I’m generally very disciplined and rarely ever scrolled the feed. I only saw the images that appeared at the top of the feed when I opened the app to share one of my own.

I started to become disatisfied with the platform when I went to post a picture and found that the app had updated to move the share button elsewhere in the UI and placed a different action-button in its place. That wasn’t an accident. This made it a requirement that I pay more attention inside the app. That is something I never want to do: give my attention to a social media application on my device. But I adapted and continued sharing.

The breaking point for me with Instagram is their new Terms of Service. In short, agreeing to these terms give Facebook/Instagram the consent to use the microphone and camera(s) on any device the app is installed on at any given time. Even when the app is not running. Another non-starter for me is that all the content users post now belongs to Facebook/Instagram and can be used for profit by the platform without the consent of the users.

I shared some pictures and videos that I worked hard to make, adjust, and render. I’m not okay with a multi-billion dollar corporation using my content to make more money while also restricting me from getting any of it.

The third huge problem with those new terms is the part where users agree to make Instagram exempt from any and all liability. That means I can’t bring a lawsuit against them for any reason.

These terms, and many others, are mandatory in order to use the service. So I uninstalled the app from my phone.

But I still want to be able to contribute to an online record of self-expression in a convenient way and I didn’t have a way to do that after deleting Instagram. One option is to simply contribute more often to this blog. But that’s not convenient. I would have to pull images from whatever device, compress them for the web, move them to my webserver, and then create a post page for them as well. That can’t be done from my phone, and I’m not keen on setting a routine of sitting down every day at my computer to do this.

So I made my own version of Twitter/Instagram

Enter Notes.

This idea was partly inspired by Nadia Eghbal. She has her own notes page which appears to be a feed of the notes she takes daily. I don’t know what technology she uses to post those to her website. Perhaps she made her own custom app to get the job done. Or maybe she created automation that posts them from her note-taking app of choice. There are many possibilities. But she still uses Twitter and generally reaches a large audience. In fact, I only still have a Twitter account to follow people like Nadia. But I rarely tweet and when I do, no one sees it.

So, I figured that if I’m going to be posting things and no one is going to be seeing them, then I might as well host it myself where the content and my behavior can’t be monetized by some mega corporation.

Let’s get technical

I have come a long way with Node Js in the last year and a half. Several years ago I only used it to automate build tasks for webpages. Tasks like image optimization, stylesheet compilation, and file minification were made instantaneous with Node libraries like Gulp.

But I stopped doing a lot of static website development since then. For my job I have had to get creative to solve problems of all kinds. The more I looked at some of those problems and thought how best to solve them, the more I found that Node Js could settle them most swiftly and easily.

I learned how to use Express.js to create dynamic web apps. I learned how to make API’s in Node Js without having to install 3rd party libraries and code. I made a chatbot to allow people to accomplish many business tasks from their team-messaging platform.

I am far from expert but I have certainly gained a lot of understanding and skill with Node over the last two years.

Another platform I have come to know well in that time is Telnyx. Using their API, I have setup pipelines to allow people to interact with various services through SMS and MMS. I already have my own VOIP server running at home with Telnyx providing SIP service to it. But that VOIP system doesn’t do text messaging.

I have already setup a service with my phone number from Telnyx that allows me to send SMS to that number in order to automate tasks on my home network. So I thought I could automate posting things to my own personal feed through that same pipeline.

So I did.

Notes runs on Node Js and dynamically updates with the latest posts. Posts are created by sending text and/or images to my Telnyx phone number. If I send a message with a certain keyword, then my SMS API at home relays that information to my Notes API. The Notes API then organizes and inserts the data into a database.

So far, I have support for images but I have not tried to work in Videos yet. I’m not sure if I will or not but it could be fun.

Right now the design is very basic but I’m still hashing that out.

I don’t expect to get much traffic. As I don’t expect much to arrive here. But, it’ll be a spot where I can throw images and thoughts up at a moment’s notice. It can act as a sort of archive I guess.

The first iteration of the site was pure black and had some fancy javascript that swapped links on hover and displayed images here and there.

I had a better idea one day and re-designed it to put it in its current form.

I think it’s the most beautiful website I’ve ever built up until now. It is simple. It is easy to look at. It meets the aesthetic requirements of greater accessibility and sports user-friendly color pallette for desktop users and mobile users alike.

I don’t update it anymore and have allowed the domain to expire but the entire thing can still be found here.

Deoxyribo…what?

The Deoxyribonuclieic Hyperdimension, or better known as deoxy.org, was a legendary part of the internet. It was one of the first websites available for people to read materials and ideas that were very hard to find at the local library.

Inside are bits from all kinds of great writers, artists, philosophers, and more.

It even had some pretty awesome I-Ching tools.

Over a year ago, the website went dark. If you try to visit the original domain deoxy.org, nothing will happen. A blank page will perpetually not serve up anything.

Luckily, I had backed up as much of the site as I could shortly before it went down.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the backend database. Because of this, the forums don’t work (or show anything) and a few interactive items don’t work either.

Fortunately, all of the writings are intact and you can reach them with no problem.

A few others have since done the same thing I did, one notable domain is reoxy.org. That’s what shows up on top of Google searches. I’m pretty sure we’re serving up the exact same thing from my backup that was published online a couple years ago.

I’ve also discovered a few other places online where the site has been mirrored, sans backend database.

It’s a pretty cool site. If you have any curiosity about eastern mysticism, consciousness expansion, altered states, or other less-square ideas, this site is for you.

Plague Technologies was my first 100% self-hosted, created from scratch, website.

I used it to advertise to potential clients and find work when I was a young freelancer. You will see plenty wrong with the site but it serves as a sign post of how far I have come. From sitting in my bedroom plugging away at all hours before and after work to learn more, get better, and engage the community to a professional foothold in the industry.

I work in IT now but my web development experience has greatly helped me to deliver better infrastructure and support because I had plenty of opportunity to understand how it all works instead of just turning it on and telling a developer to have at it.

I’ve been working more on the ops side of things rather than the dev side for a little more than a year now. Because of this focus, I haven’t done anything notable in the web development side of things. As for my career outlook, it doesn’t appear that I’m going to become an elite developer this year. I just don’t have the time to put into web development like I did back in 2016 and 2017.

At the very least, I want to maintain my skill level and keep an eye on the industry to provide the best possible website solution for the few clients I have kept on since beginnning work in IT in 2017.

When I built TedWilliams.co initially, I used React for the first time to generate a static site that was super simple on the surface but rather complicated in its generation.

I really enjoyed automating a lot of the styling ont he backend. When building from scratch, it can become cumbersome to make a website work on all devices and render consistently on top of that.

The website that resulted ended up the most widely comptatible webpage I had ever made. It rendered flawlessly on every device. It had a mobile-first design and a gradient I thought was wicked (and is present in the left nav pane of this website).

I felt, for the first time, the power of React and even though I had been using NodeJS for task automation for sometime, I really hadn’t opened up the throttle until I took a shot with React.

This brought me to an attempt to revive the Sans Wishes blog. I endeavored to use the current design on top of some kind of custom-built static site generator. With my new employment in late 2017, I let this project fall off. I didn’t really get close to finishing it. The few paths of progress ended with a horribly disfigured website and I scrapped them all.

This Holiday season, I’ve found plenty of spare time to consider my fleet of domains and websites.

I decided tedwilliams.co needed to have more updates than just showing my latest Tweets, which are sparse. I also decided that running a blog-style web presence may not be such a bad thing.

In my search for NodeJS-based statis site generators, I found Hexo. Hexo is perfect for me. It is highly customizable (I started with a template) and works great with VSCode as my chosen Text Editor/IDE.

You can generate static-site files and deploy (given some configuration) to your server very easily from the terminal. You can write your blog posts in Markdown inside your favorite text editor. Easy peasy.

Hexo even has the ability to watch for file changes inside the source directory and auto-generate updated code when you make changes. This is useful for seeing design tweaks render quickly.

I highly recommend Hexo for anyone looking for a quick and easy, lightweight blog site. You can add in functionality as needed but then you might as well go find something geared more for whatever your goal is or build it yourself.

This website will probably continue to evolve in alittle bits. I’m not entirely happy with the styling but it works for now.

I will continue to make more frequent updates than I did before. I plan on writing about a wide spectrum of things: IT Operations, Large-Scale Networking, Human Computer Interaction and the relation to human psychology, Digital Privacy, Geopolitics, and more. I have completely stopped using social media platforms even though I still have accounts on a few services. We can have a discussion on that at another time.