Not very long ago I had yet more conversations with Verizon about our Verizon land line, which has been out of service since mid-May. Verizon gave us a revised estimated restoration of service date extending another six weeks into the future. That makes it more than an entire half year now in all, with us having to suspect that, as before, the date could be pushed back even further before everything concludes.
Verizon offered to give us a device that would use a cellular signal to supply service to the line. In that case, they would start charging us again for the full price of a land line, notwithstanding the lower voice quality we would get, and that, on our own, we could install the equivalent connection via cell signal for a fraction of that price. We declined Verizon’s seemingly kind offer.
It is almost as if Verizon is trying to convince us that we don’t want to have a land line. . For one thing land lines are now so much more expensive than digital signal options.
Once upon a time, (and it was up until very recently) it was the land lines that never went out, that worked faithfully and dependably when electricity went out, whenever cell phones didn't, when there were internet or cable outages. Land line problems, which pretty much never occurred, were always resolved within mere hours if they did occur, as if people's lives depended on it, as they often did. . . Now, it’s as if Verizon wants to convince us that land lines are the least dependable and desirable options.
I don’t know if you have noticed, but if you want to call Verizon about repairing your land line its very hard to find the number to do so: It’s like they hide the number. We also now get a separate bill for the land line from your cell phone. If you call the easy-to-find number to call about cell phones, they will tell you have the wrong number to call about land lines. However, on the other hand, if you call about your land line on the correct number using your cell phone (it’s about the only way to call if your land line isn’t working), a robot will ask if you are calling about fixing the cell number you are calling from.
About the only way it doesn’t feel that the phone company is pushing cell phones over land lines is that they haven’t devoted the resources– band-width etc.– or used the technology (and it is available) to make the voice quality better. Guess they just don’t want to give up that little bit of profit.
Just the other day, I was reading about good old-fashioned land lines in Tim Shorrock’s book “Spies for Hire,” so I was remembering that at page 199 Mr. Shorrock was saying that in the 1990's the NSA’s historical dominance in surveillance technology was beginning to fade and that it was having difficulty keeping up “with the millions of calls it was monitoring every day.”
He wrote:
And in the course of a few years, the world switched from using telephone lines and calls beamed by radar to using fiber-optic lines, cell phones, and wireless technology. The NSA's eavesdropping skills, in contrast, were in the old telephony infrastructure and electronic signals; the fiber-optic lines increasingly used around the world were almost impossible to monitor from above the ground.But as we all know now from the Snowden revelations, things pretty much flipped around after that: The NSA got the technology it needs to collect vast quantities of information and data electronically transmitted over the newer infrastructure and have that automatically transcribed, indexed and searchable. They can even unleash artificial intelligence on it. “Total Information Awareness,” it’s an intelligence agency catchphrase, it’s the name of a program and it’s even an acronym: “TIA.” So these days it’s really become the reverse, the NSA, must by contrast to those nostalgic old days, feel relatively deaf with the old copper wire technologies.
"Wiretapping was physically relatively easy" prior to the 1990s, says Peter Swire, the Ohio State law professor. “If I touch my copper wires to your copper wire, I can listen in. That's the old-fashioned wire-tap.” But that doesn't work with fiber optics. “If I touch my glass to your piece of glass, it doesn't do anything to conduct.” As fiber optics increasingly became the system of choice for communications, intelligence analysts began to say the NSA was “going deaf.”
When our Verizon land line went out, our intercom for people coming into the building to visit our apartment went out as well. In all likelihood, that’s because our intercom used the phone line to for us to hear people at our front door and operate the front door lock to let them in. That’s the way it's been for a number of years, since we went with a new state-of-the-art system in 1996. When we moved into our building before that, there was a system with push button squawk boxes that had its own designated speaker lines and power source. We also discovered during a renovation of our 1883 building, once the tallest in Brooklyn, that once upon a time they did it the real old-fashioned way: The walls were filled with courses of hollow tin tubes, one for each apartment in the building, that went all the way up to the top floors.
Our 1996 system was always supposed to work with or without a telephone company involved, but because the technology is now different (and Verizon is reportedly difficult and obstructionist, if not an outright saboteur) we are going to have to get a new system for the building. The new systems these days all work through our cell phones. Whoever comes to your front door to visit winds up, by pressing the front door bell, calling you through your cell phone. Interesting.
Another way I am feeling constrained by technology right now is that I am having problems with Apple. Yes, I guess that means what I am telling you is that I am having trouble with my cell phone too. Actually, what I am having problems with is losing my “memos,” the notes, I store on my phone for information and reference. . . .
. . . To be fair, the problem also involves AOL. (BTW: Let’s mention, for those of you who don’t know, the AOL email service recently merged with the Yahoo email service, so AOL and Yahoo are no longer competitors or alternatives to each other; they are just two different faces for identically operating services– When AOL changed its terms of service recently, Yahoo made exactly the same changes at exactly the same time, with exactly the same message to users asking us if we `consented’ to their new terms.)
What happened with my Apple cell phone is that an update for the operating system came through. After my phone loaded it, my AOL email no longer worked properly; I was receiving emails, but I could not any longer send emails from AOL, my main email account. When I tried I got a message about not being ablet to find the server. (I know other AOL subscribers, so I know I was not the only one who this happened to.) I intuited that the solution was to simply delete my AOL account from my phone and reinstall it. (In fact that is what Apple Support told other users to do as well.) I even did some preliminary research just to reconfirm that, as should have been the case, I would not lose anything this way: Advisory sites told me I wouldn’t lose anything because the information was all securely on a server that would put it right back on my phone.
I deleted and reinstalled my AOL account on my phone. My AOL email worked perfectly; I received emails and I could send them again. Then a few days later, I noted that all my memos were gone from my phone. Why?: Because my memos were stored as AOL memos and my phone was apparently now pointing to a different server for memos than it had before.
What were these “memos” of mine that were missing? Oh, just a few things I’d been collecting over the decades: Family anecdotes and reminiscences involving ancestors or histories that had been emailed to me; a list of about a hundred classic films I had compiled by genre for my daughters as suggested viewing as they grew up; things to remember like my eye glass prescription or for filling out medical forms, how many micrograms I am (or my mother is) taking for certain prescriptions; a list of all the mayors of NYC, and another of the president’s of the United States; the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights and other amendments; key facts about global warming/climate change I’d collected over time; a time line I’d put together with major events in the formation and geo-history of the earth and the evolution of different species, including mankind on earth; what everyone in my family wants if I am picking up dinner at Chipolte . . . . I could go on, but you get the idea: a collection of the things you want to collect and have on hand for easy reference.
In the very distant past, I would have kept a lot of these things in my pocket in a small notebook, perhaps a few inserted pages therein, or in my pocket calendars. Remember pocket calendars?; Remember when everybody had one? . .
. . . At a later time, I was carrying these notes in my Palm Pilot, the last one of these I owned being a Palm V. That’s what replaced my calendar too. The Palm was nice because it not only kept all these notes available to me in my pocket, it also “synced” to make them available on my computers and, vice versa, moved what I wanted from my computer to put in my pocket in the Palm. My computers were safely under my control.
There were nice things about those days: My Palm also played music and when I wanted it to be able to hold more information or music I could insert tiny memory cards that could be upgraded and were always getting cheaper, going from inexpensive to costing still less, at the same time they were becoming exponentially more capacious. My iPhone now has tons of memory, but only because I was careful to pay extra for a lot of it upfront: I can now never upgrade.
When I started carrying a phone with me (and the Palm Pilots came in phone versions too in the fashion of what everyone was referring to back then as “convergence”), I never ran out of battery, because I carried two extra batteries in my pocket (they were cheap and small) to swap out whenever needed. You can’t do that with an iPhone.
When I gave up my Palm Pilot to start using an iPhone as my new phone (and for my calendar and address book), I would have lost my collection of memos, except that, obviously, I was not the only one who didn’t want to lose data like that: There was an iPhone app that would efficiently transfer the notes with all these things I wanted to remember, and it would keep them where I could open and, by hitting the app’s little button, I could search through them. It was a fine solution for a while. . .
There came a day when my iPhone 4s operating system needed to be `upgraded.’ I didn’t want to upgrade: I had been holding back from doing so and skipped quite a few iterations of 'upgrade'. But Twitter and some other things on my iPhone that had been working fine, suddenly weren’t working any longer. At the Apple Genius desk they told me I had to upgrade the operating system to make Twitter work again. I ‘upgraded’ and doing so caused my handy memo app to stop working. That’s when I “moved” my memos, this time to the iPhone `notes’ app (in the AOL category) by laboriously copying them there. To do so, I had to restore my 4s iPhone to its previous state to temporarily get back the previously handy app that wouldn’t work with the upgrade.
In the end, upgrading my 4s iPhone to the new operating system (IOS) to use Twitter was not such a good idea in certain other ways. It turns out that the new IOS had a buggy relationship with 4s iPhones. It caused the phone to think the internal antenna was overheating and shut it down, thus turning off the phone’s wifi access to the internet, while it also wrecked the phone’s battery life. (The same thing had happened to my wife's phone when upgraded.) On the internet (particularly YouTube videos) I found lots of advice and videos telling me that there was strange fix to the problem: Heating the phone up to a high heat with a hair dryer and then freezing it to reset its calibrations. At the Apple Genius Bar they told me this was very ill-advised; that it would break the phone and that I needed to buy a new one, advice to which I succumbed. Nevertheless, trying the hair dryer fix on the device that was then no longer my phone, it did indeed, absolutely fix it (and it has stayed fixed), so the device is now a very nice music player.
Was Apple just trying to sell me, like other 4s owners, a new phone?
Apple Support hasn’t been able to fix my most recent lost memo problem yet. They tell me they are still trying. Let me explain that I haven’t exactly lost my memos completely. My memos are still on my iPad, and because I did not upgrade my iPad to the new operating system like I did my phone they are not lost to me there. But I can’t upgrade my iPad to the new operating system although my iPad persists in electronic notifications telling me that I should want to. Apple Support tells me if I upgrade I will lose my memos from that device too.
There is a workaround: I could “move” all the memos still on my iPad from the AOL category (thus the AOL server) to the iCloud memo category (which get saved by Apple on the iCloud server). Do you remember when Apple was working to convince you to store all your music on their iCloud server? This is sort of the same thing, except that it means that Apple gets all your memos as well any of your music that you might have entrusted to their cloud. It wasn’t exactly consoling to learn that, as I was considering this, the iCloud server went down for a while. People I knew couldn't use their iCloud accounts to send emails. It’s interesting to speculate whether the system was overtaxed with people moving data onto their cloud for the same reason that I was considering doing so just at that moment.
I could also go to look at some of my older notes and memos in the desktop program that went with my old Palm that operates on my faithful old and steady XP operating system computer. I could do that, but Microsoft has abandoned support for the XP operating system and doesn't want me using it any longer. Browsers are not working well with it anymore. The abandonment was a major reason I had to buy and migrate to a new computer.
I must confess that, while it was working on my phone, it was nice to have my memos and notes about things “in the cloud,” since I could make a note or put in an update on my iPad and it would show up on my iPhone or vice versa. Maybe it’s less private, but having things in the cloud can feel reassuring and easy— until those things disappear.
It has been suggested that the ability to stream all sorts of excellent films from the cloud makes it seem “less important to purchase and own pricey Criterion Blu-rays or to leave the house to see a digital restoration at the American Cinematheque,” when you can conveniently rely on the cloud, but now some cinephiles are declaring that they will “clutch” their “Blu-Rays and DVDs tighter” since Filmstruck, the classic film streaming service from Criterion and Turner Classic movies, announced that it is shutting down after just two years of operation. It was just announced this October, but the “lights go out” at the company on November 29th.
That shutdown may very well be attributable to the different decisions and views about profit engendered by AT&T’s monopolistic takeover of Time Warner. There are fewer and fewer companies owning things and delivering such things as news and content. This shifts the thinking of those decision makers about what we may be delivered as consumers as that number dwindles steadily downward.
Would it be better and more secure to buy your streaming rights from Amazon, and if you buy a film from Amazon, do you really own it forever? Might you then find yourself rooting for Amazon’s continued existence?
I know that I am complaining about some of the technology that we have, but sometimes it amazes me, and I complain about the technology that we don’t get— Once upon a time, not that long ago it seems, I carried a small pocket radio with me at all times. It’s the way I quickly knew that radio stations were down on 9/11, because I tuned in for news on it that morning as I was arriving at work. Since that time, radio technology has been improved. Something called HD radio, or “High Definition” radio has been invented and deployed. It’s radio that provides an ultra-clear listening experience, without the static. It even allows extra stations and programming to be broadcast with extra spectrum needing to be assigned to it. You could be listening to it now and you could easily be carrying a tiny inexpensive HD radio in you pocket. In fact, taking up no space, they can be built into MP3 music players. That’s what Microsoft did in 2009 when it designed its new Zune music player.
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| Palm Pilots and Microsoft's Internet capable 2009 HD radio and MP3 Music player, mysteriously withdrawn from the market- Try finding pocket HD radios now: It's hard! |
I remember periodically going in and asking the salesmen at J&R (remember the J&R, the now vanished cornucopia electronics store?) why they didn’t have other combination music players/HD radios. I remember the shrug of the salesmen as they responded that people were supposed to be listening to their music and radio stations over the internet now. But sometimes you are not close to the internet or a cell phone signal that could connect you. And there is a difference: When you listen to terrestrial broadcast radio no one can monitor you and collect your data.
Is it just that almost everyone automatically carries a phone now so they don’t think about what else could be available? It would be a cinch for our slim little phones with built in cell antenna and built in wifi antennae to also have HD radio capacity that way the 2009 Zunes (which also accessed the internet) did. It would be a cinch also for them to load apps that would (like Tivos or DVRs for radio) and record programs time shifting them for later listening. Maybe that’s solving a problem that podcasting also readily solves, but it would give the user more control and there might not be the same kind of monitoring and data collection.
Getting back to my disappearing memos— People warn that what is in the digital realm can’t be expected to be forgotten, that your college antics in Facebook posts could follow you around for life. All right, fair enough, but the potential evanescence of the digital can also be frightening. HBO recently aired a new film version of “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s very famous novel about a future where the government has banned books and burns them. I found the remake quite inferior to François Truffaut’s 1966 poetic film with its brooding Bernard Herrmann score. Nevertheless the film briefly introduced a brilliant notion that it hardly explained and didn’t elaborate upon at all: That the book-loving enemies of the government were subject to being punished by having their identities digitally `erased.’
That seems potentially terrifying. And maybe it was more and more terrifying because the film didn't make clear what was being erased. As more and more of our identities and the record of who we are is entrusted to a few big companies that may or may not keep what we give them, it seems there is a huge proportion of who we are documented to be and how we might remember about our selves, friends and families, that might disappear when those companies vanish or if we fail to migrate to their next idea for the digital playgrounds they want us to be playing in.
I am convinced that many families have stopped keeping scrap books, expecting Facebook and/or other web and social media platforms to make it all available for them in perpetuity. Want an example of the way things can disappear?: An entire major social media connection service set up by Google to compete with Facebook, Google’s Google+, is going to be shut down. (I don't whether that means that all my Google+ posts will vanish. Yoko Ono's?) Fairly widely used, Google+ is pretty closely modeled on Facebook; it's more or less the same thing. It presently hasn’t gotten to nearly the same scale as Facebook, which is probably why the shutting down of such a similar site doesn’t cause us to image that Facebook, which didn’t exist in 2003, might one day not exist again.
The timing of the shutting down of Google+ as well as the reasons given for it are suspicious, something I’ll have to get into in a later article. Facebook isn’t down, but just recently in a huge censorship binge (right in time for the midterm elections) Facebook expanding upon previous censorship endeavors is taking down hundreds of pages (apparently coordinating its censorship with Twitter in doing so). Many trying to do good work (although it may have been considered dangerous or irksome to government officials or the corptocracy) have lost year's worth of work they expected to keep along with connections to online communities they had been building, all of which will have to be subject another later National Notice article.
Mainly, I just wanted to ask in this article: Are you feeling constrained by your digital “liberation”? Because I am.
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