danielrozenberg

[danielrozenberg]

Crayola’s www.purple and its relationship to an obscure part of internet history

I’ve seen multiple people share this image of Crayola’s Techno Brite box set, any everyone made fun of the awkwardly named www​.purple colour

What most people don’t know (and admittedly I only learned about it recently, despite my relative elder status on the internet) is that the www​.purple crayon is a reference to the former purple.com (link leads to a snapshot of the website on the Wayback Machine; the current website is owned by a mattress company)

I just happen to know the creator and former owner of the purple domain, Jeff Abrahamson. I sent him the above image along with the question of whether the crayon was named after his website, his website after the crayon, or no relation. I expected a yes/no/dunno reply, instead I got a valuable lesson into the history of an obscure but meaningful corner of the internet.

I quote his response below with minor editing for style and brevity, and footnotes added with the hopes of making this more accessible to non-techie folks.

Hey, that's great! I didn't know about that. They were definitely named after the website. Some day I should write up this story.

When I left MIT in 1988 (!), I was concerned about email access and being able to communicate with my friends. In those days, even universities didn't make email and network access totally easy for students, it was something a bit special, researchy. At MIT it was normal, but arriving at UPenn for grad school it was definitely not. So before moving I organised to peer with two uucp nodes¹. DIY mail, no internet. But it was pre-web, so you were missing telnet and ftp mostly.

That worked for a while, then I dropped it briefly when I left grad school, then in 1994 I set it up again with one of the peers that was still available. He proposed that the domain name system³ was at this point available outside of academia and research institutions, so maybe I should set up a name. It was still uucp, but we could alias it so that mail gateway'd to the uucp connection.

I'd recently purchased a Victorian house in Philadelphia. The house, and the neighbourhood, were largely in a state of persistent decay. The house hadn't been painted in decades. So I hired a painter to paint the house, and I choose lavender with purple trim.

So when reflecting on a domain name, I looked out the window and decided purple.com would be fun. This was about six months before the Great Internet Land Rush, so common words were largely available. Had I known, I would have registered more. The idea of squatting a name hadn't yet become a thing.

My friend at Villa Nova University, who was my uucp peer, offered to host the server for purple, so we did that. He needed a test index page, so he just set the background to purple and put up a single sentence about how truckloads of purple were on their way. It stuck.

And I did all my own stuff behind that, leaving the index page mostly as it was. Which led to quite a lot of reputation points for most useless site and so forth.

An aside, when I first registered purple it was still free to register domain names. Jon Postel administered IANA⁵ by hand with some others, and I understood they were all volunteers. It was about at that time that people started getting interested in the DNS, and the delay to register a new domain name or to get an IP address went from a friendly hours-to-days turn-around to weeks.

There had been discussion about how to make the registration system more robust. I think it was Johnson & Johnson that registered 10,000 names of comment ailments, which shocked quite a lot of people and led to a renewed urgency to change. It was modestly controversial to privatise it, but clearly was the right decision in even modest retrospect. That was the decision that led to the creation of domain registrars⁶: making private and distributed what Jon and a few others had been doing in their spare time.

I'm not easily finding sources for this part of the story. I didn't know Jon, but the internet world was smaller in those days, and so I was only one or two hops away from many of the characters we now consider The Greats. So I heard stories is all.

Hmm, maybe I should go to work now. Thanks for the crayons. That made my day.

Jeff’s new domain is now ISoldPurple.com.

¹ a Unix program that was used as a precursor to contemporary email ² telnet and ftp are early internet protocols, used to facilitate communication between different computers on the network — much in the same way that http is such a protocol ³ Domain Name System is the thing that converts domain names, such as “tumblr.com”, into IP addresses (e.g., 66.6.33.159) that your computer and the network can understand ⁵ Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the organization tasked with assigning ranges of IP addresses to other organization, such as countries or corporations ⁶ Private companies that sell domain names, authorized by IANA to do so

[danielrozenberg]

Belarus: “It is settled then. Our national flag will be a large red strip above a smaller green strip” Belorussian grandma: “Red and green, you say?” Belarus: *cautious* “Yes?” Belorussian grandma: “That sounds like a Christmas sweater!” Belarus: “Belorussian grandma no” Belorussian grandma: “Belorussian grandma yes!���

[danielrozenberg]

Hey Dave   Which I am calling you     Though I'm happy to call you something else       Happy in the sense of willing     if you prefer   because sally     From across       3 doors down         Down meaning east     the hall       Though she'll be moving         Different building, not different city           Ha ha!       shortly   said you prefer it wanna get coffee?

Source

[danielrozenberg]

Aphantasia

If you ask most people to imagine an apple, they will visually see that apple. It will have a stem, they could see the colour and blemishes on its skin, and they could rotate it or cut it in half. This isn’t a metaphor. Most people really see an apple that isn’t there.

If this seems obvious to you, then congratulations! You have a normal, healthy imagination. If you’re reading the above and still thinking that when people talk about their “mind’s eye” they talk about a metaphoric device inside their head, oh boy do I have some news for you.

I have a condition called aphantasia, meaning I just don’t have a “mind’s eye.” When I imagine an apple, I don’t see an apple. I think about the apple in the most abstract sense, in the same way I would think about the quadratic formula, Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the social justice agenda. When I close my eyes and try to imagine my mother’s face, I see black. I know that she has curly hair and that she wears glasses with a thick purple frame, and I could tell that she’s different from other women with curly hair and purple glasses, but I don’t see her.

I’ve been aware of aphantasia for a while now, ever since I read about it in Blake Ross’s facebook post over a year ago. Despite finding some similarities between his experiences and mine, he blames aphantasia for his difficulties solving spatial puzzles, navigating around, or confusing the faces of friends — all things that I’m not bad at. Because he discusses his experiences with aphantasia in the same breath as those other experiences, I dismissed the idea that I might have the same condition.

I was at work about a month ago when I encountered another post on social media discussing aphantasia, and the realization dawned on me as I was reading it. I’ve was on the verge of shaking and crying the entire following week.

As with many people who discover that they have aphantasia, this realization is not so much about what my brain is incapable of doing, as it is about discovering what other people’s brains are capable of doing. Imagine being in your 30′s and reading clickbait-sounding headlines such as “Asensuspondus: Some People Can’t Feel The Weight of Objects Without Picking Them Up” or “The Weird Brain Condition That Makes Some People Unable to Sense the Emotions of Others In Their Mind.” You’d be pretty damned confused, wouldn’t you?

Like Blake Ross, I rushed to my contact list to talk about it with my closest friends. I was surprised to find that almost half of them share the same experience (one person already knew, two were just as surprised as I was.) I wanted to know what it’s like to have a different venue for imagination. I deluged my friends with questions: where do you see the imagery you imagine? Is it embedded in real space? Layered on top of it? Does it cover what you see with your real eyes? Do you ever get confused between what you really see and what’s in your imagination? Do you control it completely or does imagery sometimes appear when your brain is idle? How detailed are those images? Does it require mental energy? How often do you utilize visual imagination to help you get things done at work or in school? Do you see things when you think about abstract concepts? Do you see the letters and numbers of an equation when you try to solve it?

A few friends didn’t ask questions about my experiences at first, which made me feel lonely. I asked them a few days later why, they all had legitimate reasons: e.g, one friend just didn’t understand what I’m missing, maybe he thought I was exaggerating; another friend felt uncomfortable asking questions because he was really curious to know how I jerk off and he wasn’t sure how I would feel about that, after he realized how tough it is for me to handle the realization at the time.

Overall this experience made me feel a lot of things.

It confused me: how could I have not known about this until now? How come this seemingly basic human ability is never represented in movies? How many artists and authors are like me, and just never knew that their experiences are different?

It made me understand things that just seemed odd to me in the past: I understand why my parents told me to count sheep so I can fall asleep; I understand why I never bothered having an imaginary friend; I understand why my therapist kept asking me to tell her what I see when I think about the things I’ve told her about. I understand why I get bored with certain types of art.

It made me feel trapped in my own head: others are free to conjure up worlds; to imagine the faces of loved ones and the descriptions in a book. I’m limited to my internal voice. It never shuts up. Maybe it’s compensating.

It made me feel alone: as we grow up, we learn to accept that every person in the world experiences their own existence differently. But beyond that, I always thought that we all share a basic cognitive experiences, and if we listen to each other we can imagine what it’s like to be each other. What I cannot imagine, though, is the ability to imagine what a visual imagination feels like, because I would need a visual imagination to do so.

And that’s humbling and scary.

[danielrozenberg]

If you want a tour de force of problematic trends in the media

… then you should watch Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes:

It’s a show aimed at kids so naturally the female dancers wear sexualized skirts that barely cover any part of their legs

I counted 3 people of colour in a cast of at least 80

In The Nutcracker scene there are 3 anthropomorphized panda bears dancing and looking like Chinese characters from an early Disney cartoon

In a scene where they sing multiple Christmas songs in quick succession they also sing “Feliz Navidad” except that they skip the Spanish part and go directly to the English chorus

There is a character of a 14 years old kid written by what I can only assume is a 60 year old grouchy old man that thinks all kids are spoiled and stupid

Said kid donates money to the Salvation Army, an anti LGBTQ organization that has a long list of unethical and criminal behaviours

[danielrozenberg]

There's this chain of electronics stores in Israel with the slogan "Pay and Take" (שלם וקח) and I never thought about how weird this slogan is until my last visit. Like, yeah? Of course? I'll take the thing I paid for? Why is that a thing you have to specify? Yes I would like to take home the thing I have just now purchased at your store with money? What is the alternative that you are proposing? Why is the best slogan you came up with is an admission that you understand and accept a basic concept of commerce?

[danielrozenberg]

When a company’s customer service is so bad it’s easier to get a complete stranger on the internet to help you instead

A couple of weeks ago I tried to sign up to Venmo. The sign-up failed because “your phone number is already used by another Venmo account”. This happened to me with other services in the past, since phone numbers get recycled often in the US. I contacted Venmo’s customer service, it took them over a day to get back to me, and they asked for a screenshot of my phone’s system settings page to prove that I really do own that phone number (this is a *terrible* way to prove ownership of a phone number because it takes 5 minutes to fake this screenshot using Photoshop, but whatever.)

I complied, and after waiting for over a week with no response from Venmo’s customer service, I figured I’ll take matters into my own hands. I went to Venmo’s website, plugged in my phone number, and clicked the “forgot my password” button. I got a text message with a link to reset the password, I used it, and managed to log in to the other person’s account.

My intention was to change the account’s phone number to (888) 221-1161 (Venmo’s customer support number) and then sign up to the service with my now-freed number.

I only managed to glance the account owner’s name, Gonçalo, before the website logged me out of the account. Gonçalo must have received an email that someone reset his account’s password and he quickly reset it back! Clearly I wasn’t going to “fight” him to sign in to the account, I’m a good citizen of the Internet 😇

A quick search on the Internet revealed that there aren’t a lot of Gonçalos with the same last name online, and only one Twitter account with that name. I took a chance and tweeted:

He replied a few hours later. The absurdity of having to have had this conversation with him was just too good not to share (with his permission, of course)

Lucky for me, Gonçalo is tech savvy enough to both understand the problem I was encountering (which must be so confusing if you don’t know anything about computers and software), and to be able and willing to help. It was a much better customer support experience than Venmo’s customer support! 😝

[danielrozenberg]

Five years ago I set myself a goal: to #run a #10k. I started training and gradually increased my distance and pace. It was during this gradual training that I visited #NewYork in 2011. I arrived on a Friday night and was waiting for my friend to arrive in the afternoon of the next day. While waiting for him I decided that I'm finally ready to take on the big challenge and set out to circle #CentralPark, which just happens to be 10k. I could barely make it to 8k before giving up. Later that same year I finally managed to run a 10k back home, and I've been doing that almost every two weeks since. Still, that failure in Central Park one midsummer afternoon kept bugging me. I don't even know why — running around a park is not recently an incredible #achievement for the human race. Lots of people do it on a daily basis! Still, I really wanted to check that #experience off my #bucketlist. I'm incredibly #thrilled to having #accomplished that today! #🏃 (Yeah #yeah yeah, all the #hashtags 😛) (at Central Park)

[danielrozenberg]

A lost mid series episode of How I Met Your Mother

In which Barney admits to Ted that he was lying about everything he does to women, and that he made up increasingly disturbing stories of abuse over time to see how much Ted would be willing to accept until he speaks up. Except Ted never does. Barney then rage quits the friend group, realizing his so-called friends are the embodiment of rape culture. Barney of course returns in the next episode because he realizes that despite them being horrible people, he doesn't have any other friends. He continues faking his abusive lifestyle because he's too afraid that if they see the real Barney their friendship will be in jeopardy.

[danielrozenberg]

In American English they don't say “hello” they say “where are you originally from” which roughly translates to “I can't recognize the origin of your accent and I simply must know using which never-not-outdated stereotypes I must blindly judge you” and I think that's b̶e̶a̶u̶t̶i̶f̶u̶l̶ horrifying.

[danielrozenberg]

There's a bloodmobile outside asking me and other YouTube employees to donate blood. I will not be giving blood today because:

It is 2016 and the FDA still believes that gay blood is cursed

If the US wants to keep insisting that healthcare remain for-profit they're more than welcome to pay me for my blood

[danielrozenberg]

Genie: “What is your first wish?”

Me: “Make it impossible for Americans to ask someone ‘where are you from’ based on the fact that they have a non-native English speaker's accent within the first five minutes of meeting them”

Genie: “It is done! What is your second wish?”

Me: “… Nah, I'm good”

[danielrozenberg]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Rozenberg (@danielrozenberg)

Deconstruction of Iron Man (at Château Rozenberg)

[danielrozenberg]

If Buddha and Nietzsche were confronted, could either produce any argument that ought to appeal to the impartial listener? I am not thinking of political arguments. We can imagine them appearing before the Almighty, as in the first chapter of the Book of Job, and offering advice as to the sort of world He would create. What could either say?

Buddha would open the argument by speaking of lepers, outcast and miserable; the poor, toiling with aching limbs and barely kept alive by scanty nourishment; the wounded in battle, dying in slow agony; the orphans, ill-treated by cruel guardians; and even the most successful haunted by the thought of failure and death. From all this load of sorrow, he would say, a way of salvation must be found, and salvation can only come through love.

Nietzsche, whom only Omnipotence could restrain from interrupting, would burst out when his turn came: “Good heavens, man, you must learn to be of tougher fibre. Why go about snivelling because trivial people suffer? Or, for that matter, because great men suffer? Trivial people suffer trivially, great men suffer greatly, and great sufferings are not to be regretted, because they are noble. Your ideal is a purely negative one, absence of suffering, which can be completely secured by non-existence. I, on the other hand, have positive ideals: I admire Alcibiades, and the Emperor Frederick II, and Napoleon. For the sake of such men, any misery is worth while. I appeal to You, Lord, as the greatest of creative artists, do not let Your artistic impulses be curbed by the degenerate fear-ridden maunderings of this wretched psychopath.”

Buddha, who in the courts of Heaven has learnt all history since his death, and has mastered science with delight in the knowledge and sorrow at the use to which men have put it, replies with calm urbanity: “You are mistaken, Professor Nietzsche, in thinking my ideal a purely negative one. True, it includes a negative element, the absence of suffering; but it has in addition quiet as much that is positive as it to be found in your doctrine. Though I have no special admiration for Alcibiades and Napoleon, I, too, have my heroes: my successor Jesus, because he told men to love their enemies; the men who discovered how to master the forces of nature and secure food with less labour; the medical men who have shown how to diminish disease; the poets and artists and musicians who have caught glimpses of the Divine beatitude. Love and knowledge and delight in beauty are not negations; they are enough to fill the lives of the greatest men that have ever lived.”

“All the same,” Nietzsche replies, “your world would be insipid. You should study Heraclitus, whose works survive complete in the celestial library. Your love is compassion, which is elicited by pain; your truth, if you are honest, is unpleasant, and only to be known through suffering; and as to beauty, what is more beautiful than the tiger, who owes his splendour to his fierceness? No, if the Lord should decide for your world, I fear we would all die of boredom.”

“You might,” Buddha replies, “because you love pain, and your love of life is a sham. But those who really love life would be happy as no one can be happy in the world as it is.”

An imagined confrontation between Buddha and Nietzsche in Bertrand Russell’s 1946 book The History of Modern Philosophy.

[danielrozenberg]

Story time

A while back, I think it was 1999, an internet friend of mine from Germany asked me to send her a CD full of Israeli music (the internet was too slow to send this kind of stuff online) so she gave me her mailing address, I went to the post office, put the CD in an envelope, paid for the shipping, and a couple of weeks later she messaged me on ICQ that the CD arrived.

I remember thinking “oh wow, this is magic! I can go to a place, give them a thing, and that thing will show up halfway across the world!”

At no point did I stop to think that the internet was the magic thing. For me, the POST OFFICE was the magic thing and the internet was the normal thing.

[danielrozenberg]

So I asked on Twitter if anyone can help me translate something to Klingon, not expecting any serious replies. Awesomeness ensued.

Klingon SJ Warrior’s profile says: “I teach Klingon, fly airplanes, and stay strong. I don’t have to be from the same planet as someone to behave honourably towards them.”

(See original tweet for accessible version)

[danielrozenberg]

Why I care about the right to privacy, even when I post half naked selfies on Instagram

When I first moved to Canada I felt, for the first time in my life, completely anonymous.

I’m a dual Canadian-Israeli citizen. I grew up in Israel until my 28′s birthday when I decided to move to Vancouver. I landed at YVR airport late in the evening, had an awkward chat with the border officer (who weirdly didn’t really know how to digest this whole dual citizenship thing), had my luggage inspected for… what exactly? (even the security officer didn’t know what she was looking for, and her interrogation felt more like personal curiosity about my situation than actual probing into my life). Then I took a taxi to the airbnb rental I arranged in advance, met the host, went in, and suddenly realized: I’m nobody.

Until I get a bank account, a cell phone, an Internet connection, and convert my driver’s licence, the so-called “man” would have no real idea where I live, who my friends are, and what I do all day.

I could get an under-the-table job and get paid cash, I could get a prepaid cellphone plan that’s not tied to any piece of ID, I could mooch off a neighbour’s Internet connection (with or without prior arrangement) and use TOR to anonymize myself, I could keep driving with my foreign licence.

Of course, doing all of these is a major inconvenience. It’s much easier to open a bank account and get a credit card, it’s much easier to use that credit card to get an unrestricted cellphone plan and an Internet connection, it’s much easier to drive using a local driver’s licence. Intelligence organizations such as CSIS, NSA, and Shin Bet know that. They know that even if I did want to stay anonymous to them I would probably slip once or twice and that would give them their much coveted linkability.

Linkability means that an intelligence agency can link your data from one source to the next, and create an entire map of your life. They can tell who you talk to, what you talk about, where you’ve been, what you like to eat, where you shop for clothes, what sports you like to do, what kind of porn you watch, how much time you spend on the can, who you have sex with.

The next day, I opened a bank account and got a credit card. I got a cellphone plan. Within a few weeks I converted my driver’s license. I got a job and signed a lease with my real name and got an Internet connection. But for a very short time, I felt like I’m not being watched.

I’m not a dangerous criminal. That doesn’t mean I’m a saint. I occasionally do terrible crimes such as jaywalking. Crimes that are only considered so in the most technical sense. Society is impartial to these acts, they’re a non-issue. With the advent of laws such as C-51, or the US’s Patriot Act, these minor lapses, these “everybody does it”, nonviolent, not-unethical breaches, can be used against you when someone in the government (the police, the provincial or federal government, the ministry of fishing) starts to consider you an inconvenience.

Did you help organize, or even just participated in a protest against an oil company that’s lobbying millions for the current ruling party? You can expect two police officers to show up at your door to take you under custody for torrenting a movie 3 years ago. Did you donate money to the wrong party? You’ll get a massive fine for all the times you jaywalked, all conveniently stored in servers that collect all the security camera footage in the city.

Linkability is inevitable in today’s world, and it’s not going to disappear. That doesn’t mean it should be easy to abuse. C-51 gives a carte blanche to CSIS to act without transparency or accountability, it means they can selectively choose to harass otherwise lawful people by exploiting minor transgressions of the law that nobody in society cares about, or my blackmailing you with the information that they have on you, and information they have.

I don’t want to live like a hermit, I want to keep doing stuff without thinking twice whether it’s gonna be a stain on my “permanent recond”. I want to send naked pics to my boyfriend, and I don’t want it to potentially one day be used against me. This is why I care.