A Theory, But No Worries

Hi, my Baby,

I was gonna watch a Bob Steele movie just now, and I had it playing but I was too distracted, so I figured I'd better write. I've still got the movie playing in the background, lol. It looks like it was filmed in Chatsworth.

Well, I kind of don't know where to start, just because my thoughts are jumbled up. With the Johan thing, when I wrote about it, I started by saying that the blog might jump around from topic to topic, that it might not be as concise as I'd like. In that case, probably because my thoughts on the subject were more focused, the blog was pretty coherent after all, and linear from one thought to the next. This one may not be that way. In fact, this subject may once again take a couple or even a few blogs until I say everything I wanna say, and that is because I don't yet know, entirely, what I want to say.

I don't know what I wanna say, because I don't know exactly what to think, and I don't know what to think because I don't know the entirety of the situation. I only know what my intuition is telling me, based on available evidence and possible hints.

So, please bear with me, because this blog (and any others that follow on the same subject) probably really will jump around from thought to thought, just because they aren't all in order.

I will preface by telling a little anecdote, and it is a little frank because it mentions the subject of drug use. I haven't used any drug, not even pot, in seventeen years, but for a while I did. Anyway, this preface is the kind of thing I used to write on Myspace : very frank, when I was mostly writing about my life.

A little anecdote : back in the years when we were using speed, which was from 1993 to 1997, my friend Dave used to sometimes get very paranoid. In California, we have an oil company called Union Oil. Their gas stations were called "76 Stations", and were known for their logo, a big orange ball with "76" written on it. At every station was a giant-sized version of that ball, high up on a pole. A big, spherical orange plastic ball with "76" painted on it.

Dave was terrified of that 76 ball. When he was high, and we were driving somewhere, he'd make sure to request that we bypass any route that led past a 76 station. If he was driving he automatically gave them a wide berth.

Dave claimed there was "equipment" inside those big plastic 76 balls. Equipment like cameras that could see everything you were doing. He also thought they held mind-reading equipment. Really weird stuff, I know. At home, when we all lived on Burton Street, Dave also insisted that we not watch "Home Improvement", because he swore that one of the characters, played by Richard Karn, could literally see out of the television set, and into the living room of the viewer. Dave said that Karn was a "narc" who would "turn you in because he can see what you're doing". Meaning doing drugs, or whatever. Dave took the "whatever" part pretty far, because for him it extended to his thoughts. He thought "narcs" like Richard Karn in the TV set, and the "equipment" in the 76 ball could read a person's thoughts, and if you were thinking anything that "They" didn't approve of, you were in deep trouble. Richard Karn would report you.

I used to alternately laugh Dave off and humor him, because you could not talk him out of these certainties. Surveillance was everywhere, even inside your head.

Speed does a lot of things, and one of them is to make some users very paranoid. But ironically, as it turns out, ol' Dave wasn't completely off the mark. He may have gone way overboard in his assessment of the big orange 76 ball, which is probably hollow on the inside, and to this day I don't know why he had it in for Richard Karn, of all people, but maybe Dave had a glimpse of the future, into the coming Internet age, an age when people with the right computer skills, and perhaps some software, can indeed look into a person's home, through the camera lens on their laptop. It sounds like something only the NSA would be capable of, but I have done some Googling and I see that ordinary citizens, with the right knowledge and skills, can do it, too. In England, there have been sting operations to catch such people, and people have been caught in America, too. It is quite illegal to engage in such an act, and it may even be a Federal offense. I do not know for sure. But I do know that ol' Mr. Davey wasn't entirely off the beam, about the technical capabilities of surveillance.

That's the end of the anecdote.

Today, I got the feeling, with your posts, that you were trying to tell me something. After the whole Johan/Lillian double fiasco, with all it's misconceptions and misunderstandings, I was left with the feeling that perhaps someone had hacked my Facebook, which I have already discussed in a previous blog. I couldn't shake the feeling, so I did some Googling, and I discovered that a person with enough skills can indeed not only hack someone's FB, but even go so far as to attach themselves remotely to another person's laptop camera. I thought such hacking was the stuff of backroom superwizards, guys like Snowden or the Wikileaks guy. I thought it was a one-in-a-million thing, but apparently it is more common than that. Apparently, anyone - given the right knowledge and perhaps software - can do it.

I did some more Googling, to see how I might determine if I had been hacked. From all the so-called "tell-tale" signs that were listed, I came to the conclusion that I probably had not been severely hacked, to the point where my computer was comandeered. Nevertheless, I did two things last night, to make things more difficult for any potential hacker. First, I put a small piece of a Post-It note over the lens on the camera. The second thing I did was to change my Facebook password. I don't know if those two measures could stop a determined hacker, but I am pretty sure no one can reverse-view through my camera now.

Now, before I go any further, it is very important to state that I am not implying that anyone has hacked into my laptop to that extent, so that they could use the camera.

I am not suggesting that at all. But once you feel you've been hacked, even just on Facebook, it's an enormous invasion of privacy. You feel completely exposed and vulnerable, and so you want to take no chances.

Now, as you know, I know next to nothing about the technical aspects of computers. I also have no patience for reading through a lot of computerspeak technical lingo. I also have a Chromebook instead of Windows, and so I did not take every last precaution and security measure that was listed in the Google search. A lot of those systems, I don't think I even have. I think a lot of it was written for Windows security. With Chromebook, I think the Google system is supposed to do all of it for you. But anyway, the bottom line is that I don't know an anti-virus from a firewall from any of that stuff. Remember that I used library computers for 15 of the 16 years I've been on the Internet. I never thought about getting hacked, or at least I never thought (or had to think) about someone getting inside my computer system. That's because I used library computers until a year ago.

On my Google search, besides the extreme of latching on to someone's laptop camera, I discovered that there were other things hackers can do. They can look at a person's browsing history, they can use "cookies" or "phishing" e-mails to latch on to some code or another, that will ultimately, with the right steps followed, lead them inside another person's computer. It doesn't even have to be another computer in the same house, running off of the same system. It can be a computer at a remote location. A skilled person in Texas, say, could get inside the computer of a person in Nevada. I suppose it could be done across international boundaries, too.

Now, when I say "anybody" could do it, that is probably not literally true, or it would be happening all over the place with great frequency. Mostly, when we think of that level of surveillance, we think of the capabilities of an organisation like the NSA or FBI. But from what I have read, a person with sophistication and the right skill set could probably do it, given the right circumstances. And it might take less skill to hack a person's Facebook, rather than to get all the way inside their computer.

I don't know that my Facebook was hacked. I don't know if my computer was hacked, or latched onto. But I took the only precautions I could think of, and that I had the patience for : I changed my FB password and I put a piece of paper over my Chromebook lens.

This afternoon, you made two posts, my girl. One post had to do with "extinct" penguins. The comment from the poster was "if only they were still around, haha". I thought at first it might be an "ordinary" post between you and Stephane, some in-joke that he would get. But then I thought of the current circumstances, and I know you know how my brain works, how I interpret things. And so I thought, "if only they were still around".........but they aren't because they're "extinct".

You posted that this afternoon without any prompting, so I thought that maybe it had to do with the precautions I took last night. Maybe a person tried today to look at my Facebook, or at something else, but could not, because I changed the password. So maybe now, in your words, they were no longer "around". Instead, they were "extinct".

But then I thought, wait a minute, all I did was change my password. If someone hacked my Facebook (which would have been how the Lillian thing was discovered), how in the world could they have hacked it using my original password? No one could have known that, it was too obscure.

And then I thought, well, maybe you don't have to simply guess at a person's password. Maybe there is a way to "latch on" to some code or another, and get into their FB that way.

This is all the technical stuff that I don't have time or patience for, but I am sure if a person knows what they are doing, there is more than one way to discover a person's password, or get into their Facebook using another method.

Now, Elizabeth, here is where things get a little delicate, and that is why I am gonna make another disclaimer here to assure you, and anybody else, that I am not mad about any of this. Unnerved? Somewhat, yes. But mad, or even upset? No. And that's the truth. I'm not mad at anybody, if indeed I was hacked. The evidence sure seems to indicate that something has happened, but I will tell you something:

In my life, I have been through an experience that was so overwhelming that pretty much nothing can faze me anymore. One month from now will be the 25th anniversary of something I call "What Happened In Northridge". You may even have read about some of it back on Myspace, when all my old blogs were still up. One day, if you are still with me (and I hope you are!), I will tell you all about it, but even then it will be hard to understand. But for now, you can trust me when I say that it was so weird and so overwhelming, and finally, such a truly big deal, that I am kind of hard to shock nowdays. :)

So that is why I say that, if something has happened here, like a Facebook intrusion or even something more extensive than that, please don't worry about it. I know that ordinarily, perhaps, a person who was the victim of something like that might be expected to have a fit, but I am not going to. Everything is okay, but there is still some explaining to do, and I will have to do it in another blog. I am gonna go for my walk now, and I will write more when I get back. No worries.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)