Modern Communication - A Rant

Did you ever feel like the ability to communicate with people in modern society has become increasingly frustrating and difficult? I thought it was because I was getting old. That doesn't explain how words and phrases have seemingly become arbitrarily redefined to where I can't communicate effectively any longer.

In order to explain what I mean, I need to provide an example.

Email Lists

This evening I was trying to find services that would be able to provide an email list for a book club I am part of. Let me first explain, for those who are confused about this concept, what I mean by "email list." What I want to happen is that there is a single email address, such as mybookclub@example.com, where people in the club could send email to that address and that email message would be relayed (or forwarded, broadcast, or whatever term makes sense to you) to the actual email addresses of the people subscribed to that list. This allows the list to be managed centrally so nobody is accidentally left out of a discussion, and it is much more straightforward when a message needs to be sent to everyone. It's been something we've been doing on the Internet for years.

Well, it seems that no search engine (DuckDuckGo or Google) had any clue what I was talking about. Any time I tried to find a service that would do this, it would keep giving me search results for "email marketing tools." I even put in the search terms, "NO MARKETING" and it would give me the same results anyway. Nearly all of the available services I found referenced "email marketing" or "bulk emailing" at least once in the description of their service offering.

At what point did "group emails" become another term for "email marketing?" Are we all so concerned with monetizing and otherwise constructing our personal brand that any form of contacting a group of people becomes marketing? Maybe I am out-of-touch.

Words Have Meaning

This is the problem: Words have meaning.

How did rideshare become another word for taxi? If you deconstruct the term "rideshare" into its individual words "ride" and "share", it would imply that there was a sharing of a ride happening. Maybe that is how arranging for a ride online happened originally -- someone was going somewhere, and they had room in their car for someone else who was going to the same place. If that person contributed a few bucks for the cost of fuel and auto maintenance, we could share a ride, and the world would be a better place I suppose.

That isn't what it is now, though, is it?

If you arrange for a ride with a so-called rideshare service such as Uber or Lyft, you use an online service to request a pick-up at a location from an available driver. They arrive to come and get you in their vehicle, drive you to the location you chose, and drop you off at that location for a fee. That is what a taxi does. Using a web browser or a "mobile app" to initiate the transaction does not make it a rideshare unless you decide to arbitrarily define this term. It makes no sense.

Internet Security Researchers

I run a server that provides the pages for my web site and handles incoming and outgoing email. For the folks less technical, this means that the web pages come directly from a server that I (mostly) manage when you access my web site, and the email sent to me or received from me is processed through a server system that I manage (rather than using Google and its Gmail service, for example). You may be wondering why I do this, and it mostly is concerned with my ability to control these systems in the specific way I want, and to gain a higher level of privacy. Part of this is a hobby, as I find pleasure in having a deeper understanding of the processes that make things work. Some people may comment that I do this due to masochistic tendencies, but that is not the actual/intended reason.

One of the unpleasant side-effects of running your own server on the Internet is dealing with random intrusions from various sources. If you manage your server correctly, these are generally an inconvenience that causes little to no harm. It can be a serious issue if the intrusion is successful (ie. some malicious person or organization just broke-into my server). Over the past few years, the number of these intrusions have increased dramatically. You probably have received a letter from some company at some point that your personal information was leaked in a "data breach" due to a server being accessed in a malicious manner. This is the among the worst case scenarios in this kind of situation.

Most Internet providers have a provision in their terms-of-service that indicate that they prohibit customers from using their services for unauthorized or improper access to others' computer systems or servers. In other words, they expect customers to act in a civilized manner. If you're running a server and notice someone trying to access your system in a malicious way, it stands to reason that reporting this behavior to the service provider would be the right thing to do.

I recently reported a case of repeated malicious behavior against my mail server to the perpetrator's service provider. They didn't gain access to my system, but the behavior filled my server's log files (audit records of system use) making it more difficult to locate issues that needed attention. To my surprise, the service provider responded that the group was an "Internet Security Researcher" and that their activity was not meant to be malicious.

So once more, let's break this down to its fundamental principles and activities:

I am running a server on the Internet to provide services for specific purposes.
A group decides to start accessing my mail server repeatedly, over and over, not to send mail, but to see if it would fail or they could gain unauthorized access to it. These create log entries for each access.
I did not give this group permission to do this.
I reported this behavior to the service provider, since it is malicious behavior, and violates the provider's terms-of-service.
The service provider contacted their customer, who said they weren't doing anything wrong because they were "Internet Security Researchers" and their activities "were not meant to be malicious."
The service provider thought this excuse was acceptible.

So, that means, if I want to mess with someone else's server on the Internet without their permission, all I need to do is say that I am an Internet Security Researcher and I am off-the-hook? Wow, what a concept! No wonder we're seeing more and more data breaches lately.

Now, I understand that there is room for legitimate Internet Security Research and that it is possible there are instances where a researcher may need to access a server in a way that could appear malicious in order to gain information to support their research. However, in this case, there is nothing on the group's web site to indicate the nature of the research, the question they are trying to answer, or the permission they gained from service providers to access customers' servers in support of such research. Further, legitimate research would not require accessing the same server over and over again with the same pattern of activity. That's because this is not Internet Security Research. It's not research at all, as research is understood in any kind of scientific context. This is just a group of people who want to hack on someone else's server, to see if they can gain unauthorized access to it, find if it has any vulnerabilities, or disrupt its operation, for their own purposes.

So now we have a redefinition of "Internet Security Researcher" as well. I suppose when that term doesn't work, they'll call themselves "ethical hackers." To perform actual research in an ethical manner would involve getting prior permission from the operator of a server so that a collaborative process could take place. At the end of the study, the research would uncover issues and provide answers and best practices that could be used by the server's operator (and others) to better protect against security incidents. What these individuals are doing is not ethical behavior or valid research.

I would like to say that this is an isolated situation. To date, I have identified over fifteen different organizations, some of these large networking companies, that perform these same kind of activities with the same excuses. None of the groups mitigate the effects they have on the Internet as a whole or the servers being accessed by sharing the data they collect. Once again, that's because this is not actual research.

Now What?

Modern society has been given a gift of incredible communication ability and capability to share information in the form of a world-wide interconnected data network and complex computing systems and applications. In spite of this, we have chosen to obfuscate communication. It isn't clear whether this is because we don't want to take responsibility for our actions or intentions, because we have lost the ability to effectively communicate due to misuse of the tools, or both. With artificial intelligence (more properly called LLMs or Large Language Models) standing-in where actual human communication should probably be taking place, this situation is likely to get worse. Perhaps worse than the loss of our ability to effectively communicate is using these tools as a substitute for critical thinking and gaining a deeper understanding of the world around us.

I understand that things evolve, and one of those things is language. Every generation has their own slang that confounds the previous generation. Different disciplines have their own vernacular that is created to more precisely identify and give meaning to things within that discipline. It is, however, concerning when the language of a people is twisted in a way that intentionally creates confusion and/or absolves people of responsibility for their behavior. Maybe this has always been the case, and I am just getting older and more rigid. I don't know. I do know that I don't like the direction the world is headed, and this is my way of communicating that concern.

Gil Kloepfer, Jr., https://www.kloepfer.org/sendmemail.html