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The Strange Creatures of Cyberland:
Recently I have had occasion to think about the internet and the
people behind it. This came about when we at Wesoomi realized
that our domain registration was running out. Of course, renewing
that registration was imperative. First of all we want to keep
the website on line. But additionally, we have a great deal invested
in the Wesoomi name and logo. In fact, Wesoomi Publishing is a
registered trademark.
As long as we had to renew our registration, we decided to go with a different registrar. That may seem confusing, so I'll try to clarify it. The internet is huge and it does need some controlling structure to make it work. In the beginning, this organization was structured by The United States Government. At the top of the structure is a private nonprofit outfit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In essence, these people manage the assignment and maintenance of Domain names and addresses.
To get a scope of the magnitude of the task, let us realize that there are over 22 million dot com domains already assigned. That is just dot com domains. Add to that ,gov, org, .net and all of the separate sovereign nation ID's and you get an idea. To get back to where I began, to handle this ICANN has assigned the registration process to several private companies. Two of these are Network Solutions and Register.com. For a fee, these companies will register a domain name with ICANN and keep track of all the details.
Great in theory. The problem came when we tried to switch registrars,
Network Solutions had been charging us $35.00 per year. Register.com
offered to do it for $20.00. Not much money either way, but a
penny saved as they say. Our first attempt
to switch was blocked by Network Solutions even though we did
everything according to their requirements. They simply denied
that they had received our confirmation. Of course, we cannot
prove that they did. We just know that we sent it and it was not
returned as being undeliverable.
After that, the Wesoomi domain name just kind of went into limbo. When we tried again to switch registrars we got an error saying that wesoomi.com was in the process of being transferred. That was very frustrating because we knew it was not true. Thank God that nothing happened to our actual web site at that time. It was just the registration process which was screwed up.
To shorten the story we finally did get it all straightened out, but only through dogged persistence and a mass of email messages to just about everyone we could think of. That brings up another pet frustration of mine. To me it would be unthinkable to receive a complaint or query and simply ignore it. Yet, that is exactly what happened with several of our complaints. Two outfits who did that to us are Network Solutions and Earthlink. If it were not a very difficult and scary thing to do, we would probably switch ISP's because of this arrogant behavior. As it is, we will wait for a while.
The problem with the internet, when something does go wrong, is you really don't know who's doing it to you. There are no faces out there. Everyone is behind a cyber wall. Someone is hiding behind that wall and you don't know who. Someone is doing it to you. You don't know if it's ICANN, Network Solutions, Register.com, or just a true accident.
It's very easy to get paranoid. You don't know if there is intent or just incompetence and it really doesn't matter. The result for the victim is the same as if there was intent. In fact, as tools for thwarting commerce and the human community, stupidity and laziness are far superior to dishonesty. Albeit, laziness is just a special form of dishonest.
After thinking about all of this, I have surmised that the creatures behind the internet are not real humans. They are some other kind of special pseudo life form. Here is my take on the situation.
The creatures who live in Cyberland play a strange game called Dot-Com. It's a very complicated form of addictive gambling. It's usually played amongst the Cyber-creatures. One interesting thing about this game is that the rules are variable. However, the rules never favor real people. The rules are always adjusted to favor the Cyber-creatures. When real people get caught up in the game, they invariably lose.
Most Cyber-creatures seldom interfere directly with the real world. They do sometimes con real people into playing Dot-Com. When that happens the real people always lose. Their money just disappears into Cyberland and is never recovered. The Cyber-creatures make off with it. It becomes just another gambling loss.
Large fortunes have been lost playing the Dot-Com game to the extent that the name should be changed to Dot-Con. The Cyber-creatures always win the game. That's the way it's set up. Other than the conning of fools, the Cyber-creatures are not a threat to real people or to the real world. Normally, they do not pay attention to real people at all.
Cyberland is very obscure and murky to humans. It is really a place for games, adventuring, and strange religious cults. These creatures do have a god. His name is CyberDeus. Once a real person enters Cyberland completely, they are transformed by CybeDeus. They can never return.
Real people can adventure in Cyberland so long as they remember the real world and stay firmly anchored in reality. If they let go for just a second, they are lost. They become Cyber-creatures. They are forever lost to the real world. There are many such creatures out there who were once real people. Now they are hidden behind the Cyberwalls, floating around out there.
These, once human Cyber-creatures tend to pop up here and there but the cannot remain temporal. They may continue in the real world and appear as though they were real, but they tend to go Cyber at the slightest provocation. Some of them are quite evil. They are called hackers and are seen as glamorous by the creatures of Cyberland. They can be a menace to the real people who get too involved in the Cyberworld adventuring.
The most evil ones lurk just inside the Cyberwall, waiting
for unwary real people to venture into Cyberland. They have been
known to wreak enormous damage to the real people who venture
into their domain. When these creatures come into the real world,
most of them inhabit basement corners, garages, and attics. It's
difficult to catch them. They are very illusive. They tend to
fade away in strong light. They disappear and reincorporate, disguised
as real people. There is no way to get back at the Cyber-creatures
because the Cyberworld itself is fluid and flexible. Trying to
attack them is like hitting at an untethered balloon. Their whole
world just slides away.
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