December 3: It was on this date in 1992 that the first SMS (Short Message Service) was sent by Neil Papworth, a 22-year old engineer. It was sent from a bar in Milan to a cell phone owned by the then-director of Vodaphone Richard Jarvis. Papworth used a computer since phones of the day were not able to send text messages. CBC News (quoting SKY News) reports that 151 billion SMS and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) were sent in 2012 alone. Since that year, traffic has generally declined. “When you send someone a text message you often lose a lot of the context that you might get when you are speaking face to face,” social media expert Toby Beresford told CBC News. “And that’s a real challenge for us in the new era.” Who knew ?
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A friend e-mailed to say that this site had disappeared and been replaced by a page from Bluehost, my provider. I had my computer cleaned last week, and told the tech that the one thing I was really concerned about was losing the site and all of the work that it represents, and apparently that had happened. I stumbled around the Bluehost site for a while in a fruitless attempt to understand what had happened and how to fix it. Most of these computer-based sites are written by people and for people with a level of computer literacy. I frequently find them baffling, and in this case, I finally logged in to their chat room seeking a fix.
I was connected with Smithla, who was likely in south Asia, and we set about fixing the problem. I provided login and password identification for the account that I had miraculously managed to keep at hand during the 3 years the site has been up. After a few moments, there was a response that the connection seemed to be pointing to the wrong IP. At this point, we could have been speaking Swahili. In any event, a further moment and the site was back, fixed remotely by a stranger likely half-way around the world manipulating a system completely foreign to me, and, I suspect, most people.
At risk of sounding like a latter-day Luddite, I am often alarmed by the many ways we put our trust in technology, and specifically the Internet. Where would we be without it ? I use it to access e-mail, do research, follow the news and do virtually all of my banking and investing. It’s all there and I seldom keep a paper copy of transactions because I have been told to think of the Internet as “secure”.
Thing is: The Internet was established to share information; it is inherently an open network that anyone can access and use for their own purposes. This is all fine if you are a Pollyanna and believe that bad people will not do bad things to us through the Internet. Yet who among us has not had e-mail hacked, or worse ? What’s going to happen when “terrorists” seize all or part of the on-line monetary system and all of our on-line records vanish ? This seems to me to be only a matter of time. My only hope is that there are enough Smithlas in south Asia to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.