Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for August 06, 2017

Messages can be recovered sometimes by examining the ink ribbon

Just don’t let anyone steal the ribbon!!

A Millennial was recently in a friends Jeep Wrangler. It’s the base real off road model, thus it doesn’t have all the power options you tend to find on most cars. Well, the young lady was fidgeting around, so the Jeep’s owner finally asked her what was wrong. The young lady then asked her how do you roll down the windows? She was looking for the button, when the vehicle had actual ‘roll down’ windows….

I still have the old “portable” mechanical Smith Corona that got me through college. Not a bad machine, but I prefer computers. And it’s still “hackable” if somebody can get to the hard copy. For that matter, if I just want to type a document, I could always disconnect my computer from the Internet, print it out, and not save the file.

I do miss the Selectric typewriters. A joy to type on. Wireless and hacker proof. I have had thoughts of couriers carrying ciphered vinyl discs or ever better cylinders so that they would not be broken if they could even be read. Wiley put into drawings what I have been thinking of for some years. Historians see a big gap in knowledge in our Age of the Electron. if we should ever lose it, many things will be locked away from us and there is just a blank area over our time.

Back in Stalin’s day all typewriters were registered and had individually traceable type. A well placed microphone recording might be able to be used to reconstruct the message ftom the sound of the keystrokes.

Will wonders never cease? Did she scrap the transporter app? Or will it continue next week?

Type writers were indeed hackable, spies were able to listen to the sound of keystrokes and decipher the letters….

dRUMPf would have trouble typing up anything on this contraption. tiny hands, you see……plus, he’d have to hit the keys more than 140 times to type up something more cogent and less vomit inducing.

Ah, the old ways are the best …

Wondering: if voting precincts were not connected to the internet, and if each booth had a its own disk on which votes were recorded, and if disks were hand delivered to a non-internet computer and compiled to a master disk and that master disk taken to the central office for totaling the vote, would that prevent hacking?

Next up: carbon paper!

Seriously, if I was in charge of a sensitive Government department, written communication would only be on interoffice memo. It’s not a weird conspiracy: Other nations, Russia in particular, are using very sophisticated hacking techniques to create chaos and undermine the Western world for the sake of increasing their own power.

I hate to break it to you Jeffrey, but old Irv (in “Shoe”, the mechanic) came up with the same thing donkeys-years ago (albeit not for the government — he termed it a “word processor with all the glitches removed”)!

I earned my Bachelor’s degree with a typewriter, my Master’s degree with MS Dos… Word Perfect, and my second graduate degree with Microsoft Office and the internet research capabilities (i.e. not in the bowels of university libraries in dusty professional journals.)

The thought of portability reminded me of the scene in Saving Private Ryan where Jeremy Davies (the translator) is packing his typewriter for the mission when Tom Hanks suggests an alternative by holding up a pencil.

@jensolo02 And your point is what. . . because computers have safely replaced and improved some processes, they effectively improve ALL? There are many proofs to the contrary and the voting process is only one.

I still have mine

I can do better than Jeffery. Just give me two cans and some string. ;-)

We need to start with a simple, basic premise. The internet as we know it today was never designed to be secure. It was designed to be a method of open communication to share ideas among computer engineers and scientists. Attempts to make it a secure system are fruitless. You can make it more secure with various encryption methodologies, but 100% security is not an achievable goal. An analogy if you desire… the automobile was designed for one purpose — ground transportation. You can add as many wings and propellers as you wish, but the car is not going to be an efficient airplane. The current designs and prototypes for flying cars are compromises between both modes of transportation.

People are the weak link, it’s not the technology

Um, Russia went back to typewriters years ago… Other countries are considering following suit…

Cute. Never even saw it coming.

Goes around; comes around.

We even have to see this freak in the Sunday strip? All week wasn’t enough??

Actually, the weakest links in security are the people, not the devices. See Edward Snowden.

Of course, you might argue that if all those secrets were only on paper, then Snowden would not have been able to carry out much … unless he used a small camera. But then consider the amount of time required to photograph so many classified documents…

In any case, documents do not reproduce themselves. People reproduce them.

How things change! Does anyone still know shorthand? The army might be able to use it for a super-secret code, now!

Try two Dixie Cups® and some string.

Is Wiley on vacation? this story line is rerun from April 2013.

That trick never worked.

Does this mean we’ve reached the other end of the Technological Mobius Strip?

The carriage return lever should be on the right, not the left!