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elfsI'm going to tell a story about how I almost destroyed my mother's iPhone, the miracle of its recovery, and how I scared the utter bugfucking bejesus out my mother's best friend.
On Friday, Mom went in for abdominal surgery, and she healed so well they let us go Monday afternoon. For reasons that I won't go into, Mom and I rushed back to the hospital Tuesday morning. It wasn't, quite, an emergency room run, we were headed somewhere else, but the lead-up to it was a bit panicked. The hospital is about half an hour away from her home. I drove her car.
Along a stretch of relatively empty freeway state road paralleling a chunk of the Everglades National Park, near to a Highway Patrol station, we heard a loud thump on the roof of the car. Both of us were startled, but neither knew what it was. I was too worried to stop and find out.
Crisis averted, we went back home. Mom went to bed. The next day, when she awoke, we couldn't find her phone. We looked in all the bags and all the luggage. I'm not familiar with the iPhone ecosystem, so I searched for "How to find an iPhone." It led me straight to iCloud and a map, and when I saw the location I gasped out loud: it was lying next to an empty stretch of freeway with the Everglades National Park on the north side and a Highway Patrol station to the south.
That thump had been her phone. Not only that, but the finder feature was indicating it was still powered on.
Fortunately, Mom's best friend was over and able to watch over her, so I grabbed the car and drove out to find it. The finder feature was absurdly accurate, even on my Android phone, like "Park here, walk around the back of the car, and look to your right" accurate. I looked down and it was right there in the grass. The screen looked slightly cracked and, having baked in the Florida sun at 100℉ that day, was too hot to pick up with bare hands.
Back in the car, it started to cool back down and came on. I stopped by a shopping mall on the way home and had the screen looked at; it was only the screen protector, and with that replaced ($30 USD), the iPhone was completely undamaged.
It had no case, it had fallen five feet while travelling at 60 miles per hour, bounced off concrete, jumped over a knee-high steel barrier to land in the grass, spent all night and half the next day out in the open, and it was indistiguishable from new.
When I brought it back to my Mom's, I described how well the feature worked. "That's amazing!" her friend said.
I told her, "It's creepy. With the right credentials, any phone in the world can lead you to any other phone. You, especially, should be terrified."
"Why me?"
I paused for a moment. "Have you ever had a friend who had to leave their husband because he hit her?" She stopped for a second, then nodded. "Then I want you to imagine that, in the middle of the night, she flees. Like any normal human being, she takes her phone with her, but maybe she leaves her desktop behind." I gestured to the beautiful iMac my Mom has had for a few years. "While she's gone, he logs into her iPhone account. If he doesn't have the password, he pulls up her email account and asks Apple to reset it. That changes her password, but she won't notice until her phone goes completely dead and has to be recharged; if she's a normal person, she plugs the phone in every night and she never notices that he has complete control of her phone. Maybe she's hiding in a hotel. He can now find her, to the accuracy of knowing what room she's in, any time he wants to."
The woman looked at me, shocked. "That's horrible!"
"And it's happened," I told her. "Often."
"Why is this possible?"
I looked at her, grinned and said, "Because in 1982, He Man came out." She looked at me, stunned. "You're older than me, you remember Atari and all that stuff, right? The year after He Man came out, he was so popular people stopped buying Ataris and Apples. Marketers tried to figure out how to stimulate the home computer market, and surveys showed that parents bought computers for boys slightly more often than for girls. And that was the market segment they'd lost.
"So they doubled down and stopped marketing computers to girls altogether, and instead promoted computers not as game machines, but as the educational leg up your boy needed to succeed in the adult world. And they didn't advertise in Ebony. They advertised in People and Better Homes and Gardens. Magazines for white people.
"When those boys got to college, they had a leg up. They were able to fast-forward the classes, and girls couldn't. The marketers had created the artificial notion that boys were just better at computers than girls, although we know now that half the best programmers in history were women."
"Really?"
"Grace Hopper invented the first programming language. Margaret Heafield wrote the software that got Apollo to the moon, and was one of the two women who wrote the first programs for weather prediction. Mary Kelly was a flippin' nun when she wrote BASIC. Anyway...
I took a deep breath. "The point is, the programmers through the 90s were all white guys who never had a threat model. Women worry what guys might do all the time: that's a threat model. Black people worry that white people might call the cops all the time: that's a threat model. Gay people worry they might be outed in a dangerous place all the time: that's a threat model. But the ordinary white guys who built the commercial internet had no threat models at all. They never asked themselves, 'How can what I just created be used for evil?'"
I paused for a moment and said, "And that's why He-Man is partially responsible for why the Internet is such a shitty place right now."
They both stared at me, horrified. My Mom said, "[Insert obligatory objections to the infantilization of my name here], isn't anyone doing something about this?"
I sighed and said, "We're trying, Mom. But it's a whole industry and it makes so much money and it has for twenty years, it's a huge fight and it's gonna take another twenty to undo it. But we're trying."
Almost destroying the phone
On Friday, Mom went in for abdominal surgery, and she healed so well they let us go Monday afternoon. For reasons that I won't go into, Mom and I rushed back to the hospital Tuesday morning. It wasn't, quite, an emergency room run, we were headed somewhere else, but the lead-up to it was a bit panicked. The hospital is about half an hour away from her home. I drove her car.
Along a stretch of relatively empty freeway state road paralleling a chunk of the Everglades National Park, near to a Highway Patrol station, we heard a loud thump on the roof of the car. Both of us were startled, but neither knew what it was. I was too worried to stop and find out.
Crisis averted, we went back home. Mom went to bed. The next day, when she awoke, we couldn't find her phone. We looked in all the bags and all the luggage. I'm not familiar with the iPhone ecosystem, so I searched for "How to find an iPhone." It led me straight to iCloud and a map, and when I saw the location I gasped out loud: it was lying next to an empty stretch of freeway with the Everglades National Park on the north side and a Highway Patrol station to the south.
That thump had been her phone. Not only that, but the finder feature was indicating it was still powered on.
Fortunately, Mom's best friend was over and able to watch over her, so I grabbed the car and drove out to find it. The finder feature was absurdly accurate, even on my Android phone, like "Park here, walk around the back of the car, and look to your right" accurate. I looked down and it was right there in the grass. The screen looked slightly cracked and, having baked in the Florida sun at 100℉ that day, was too hot to pick up with bare hands.
Back in the car, it started to cool back down and came on. I stopped by a shopping mall on the way home and had the screen looked at; it was only the screen protector, and with that replaced ($30 USD), the iPhone was completely undamaged.
It had no case, it had fallen five feet while travelling at 60 miles per hour, bounced off concrete, jumped over a knee-high steel barrier to land in the grass, spent all night and half the next day out in the open, and it was indistiguishable from new.
Scaring the friend
When I brought it back to my Mom's, I described how well the feature worked. "That's amazing!" her friend said.
I told her, "It's creepy. With the right credentials, any phone in the world can lead you to any other phone. You, especially, should be terrified."
"Why me?"
I paused for a moment. "Have you ever had a friend who had to leave their husband because he hit her?" She stopped for a second, then nodded. "Then I want you to imagine that, in the middle of the night, she flees. Like any normal human being, she takes her phone with her, but maybe she leaves her desktop behind." I gestured to the beautiful iMac my Mom has had for a few years. "While she's gone, he logs into her iPhone account. If he doesn't have the password, he pulls up her email account and asks Apple to reset it. That changes her password, but she won't notice until her phone goes completely dead and has to be recharged; if she's a normal person, she plugs the phone in every night and she never notices that he has complete control of her phone. Maybe she's hiding in a hotel. He can now find her, to the accuracy of knowing what room she's in, any time he wants to."
The woman looked at me, shocked. "That's horrible!"
"And it's happened," I told her. "Often."
"Why is this possible?"
I'm afraid I ranted.
I looked at her, grinned and said, "Because in 1982, He Man came out." She looked at me, stunned. "You're older than me, you remember Atari and all that stuff, right? The year after He Man came out, he was so popular people stopped buying Ataris and Apples. Marketers tried to figure out how to stimulate the home computer market, and surveys showed that parents bought computers for boys slightly more often than for girls. And that was the market segment they'd lost.
"So they doubled down and stopped marketing computers to girls altogether, and instead promoted computers not as game machines, but as the educational leg up your boy needed to succeed in the adult world. And they didn't advertise in Ebony. They advertised in People and Better Homes and Gardens. Magazines for white people.
"When those boys got to college, they had a leg up. They were able to fast-forward the classes, and girls couldn't. The marketers had created the artificial notion that boys were just better at computers than girls, although we know now that half the best programmers in history were women."
"Really?"
"Grace Hopper invented the first programming language. Margaret Heafield wrote the software that got Apollo to the moon, and was one of the two women who wrote the first programs for weather prediction. Mary Kelly was a flippin' nun when she wrote BASIC. Anyway...
The programmers who build the Internet through the 90s were all white guys who never had a threat model. Women worry what guys might do all the time: that's a threat model. Black people worry that white people might call the cops all the time: that's a threat model. Gay people worry they might be outed in a dangerous place all the time: that's a threat model. But the ordinary white guys who built the commercial internet had no threat models at all. They never asked themselves, "How can what I just created be used for evil?"
I took a deep breath. "The point is, the programmers through the 90s were all white guys who never had a threat model. Women worry what guys might do all the time: that's a threat model. Black people worry that white people might call the cops all the time: that's a threat model. Gay people worry they might be outed in a dangerous place all the time: that's a threat model. But the ordinary white guys who built the commercial internet had no threat models at all. They never asked themselves, 'How can what I just created be used for evil?'"
I paused for a moment and said, "And that's why He-Man is partially responsible for why the Internet is such a shitty place right now."
They both stared at me, horrified. My Mom said, "[Insert obligatory objections to the infantilization of my name here], isn't anyone doing something about this?"
I sighed and said, "We're trying, Mom. But it's a whole industry and it makes so much money and it has for twenty years, it's a huge fight and it's gonna take another twenty to undo it. But we're trying."
