CRTs: Should They Go Down the Tube?
Yes. Not immediately. But sooner or later. CRTs are harder on the eye than the better flat screens will eventually be, and although scientists haven’t proved that CRTs are a radiation threat, the small possibility remains.
These bulky antiques, however, have been to the computer establishment what gas guzzlers were to Detroit. The CRT isn’t the most promising kind of computer screen—just the most entrenched.[[47]]
Admittedly, CRTs have improved to the point where some pocket-sized TVs can use them. But in compactness and low-power consumption, CRTs will never rival the flat-screen displays.
“People will begin using flat-screen portables as regular desktops,” a New York researcher correctly says.[[48]] Flat-screen computers may not be as viewable now as the best CRT displays, but this may quickly change. What’s more, flat-screen machines don’t hog desks as the Kaypro II-style portables can. After all, the flat screens are essentially—flat. They don’t need hefty transformers, moreover, and don’t burn out like old vacuum tubes. CRTs are vacuum tubes. Low voltage is still another plus of most flat screens. Not that CRTs are normally a shock hazard, but you’ll presumably feel safer if you didn’t sit near a 20,000-volt gizmo flinging electrons around inside some glass.
Also, as David LaGrande, an official with the Communications Workers of America notes, flat screens may “eliminate the radiation danger, reduce the risks for pregnant women.” And unless you spray a flat display with radioactive material, it just won’t give you cancer.
Again, no one’s proved that CRTs will turn people’s bodies into tumor farms. But why gamble? Your caution won’t hurt labor relations.
Flat screens, also, don’t flicker tiresomely as many CRTs do, and someday they may boast more fully formed images than those from the CRTs. So you might make fewer errors reading material from the screen.
The word “might” is important. Many liquid-crystal displays—LCDs, like the wristwatch kind—showed much cruder images in 1984 than did typical CRTs. The broken-up letters might bother you just like those from the cheap dot-matrix printers.
Also, some LCDs offered horrid contrast between the screen background and your typing.
That was as of late 1984. Even cheap LCDs in the future could do away with the breakup and contrast problems. Already the Japanese are selling color TVs with LCDs.
Perfected, LCDs could make computerized offices brighter and cheerier. They don’t glow. Rather, they reflect light, just like paper, so you needn’t darken the office. In fact, light helps.[[49]]
And if LCDs don’t fully pan out? There’s yet another choice—electropheretic screens, which may offer decent contrast and even beat CRTs’ sharpness. Here’s the theory. A magnetic charge pushes tiny particles to the surface of the screens, and patterns of particles form images.
These gizmos will tax your battery less than some other flat-screen displays do. And listen to this: when you turn an electropheretic off, it remembers. The images on your screen don’t vanish.
Now, combine that wrinkle with memory chips that use next to no power and can be running all the time. And what do you have? A computer that will automatically shut off without harm if you didn’t tap a key after a certain stretch of time. Just like a calculator. So—battery makers, beware!
There are still other alternatives to CRTs. One is the electroluminescent screen—used on the Grid Compass portable—which glows and is sharper than the LCD. Electroluminescents in 1984, however, were far too expensive for the average computer buyer; the Grid was selling for $4,250, and much of that was the cost of the display. A second failing of electroluminescent screens[screens] is that they’re electricity hungry. You can’t operate them with miniature batteries.
Another LCD alternative is the plasma panel, which glows with a gas mixture consisting mainly of neon. Plasmas don’t flicker. The characters are sharp; the contrast, excellent. But backup circuitry has been expensive; and even small plasmas, with the accompanying electronics, cost several thousand dollars in 1984—a far cry from a $150 CRT monitor.
To sum up, the main advantages of flat screens are their lightness, low power consumption in most cases, safety, lack of flicker, and very likely a better view in the long run. As of late 1984 the trade-offs (at least in the case of LCDs) were:
▪ The broken-up, somewhat fuzzy letters and the low contrast between them and the background.
▪ The need to have the display at just the right angle from you to get the sharpest picture. This could get in the way if you were moving the LCD to reduce glare.
▪ The comparatively slow speed with which letters or numbers appeared on an LCD after you’ve typed.
▪ The general lack of full-sized 24-line screens with 80 columns. The Data General portable debuted with 24 lines and a screen measuring 11 inches diagonally—a welcome exception, even if the quality of the characters still wasn’t good enough for heavy use.
Since many flat screens were on portables, there were other ergonomic problems not related to the display technology per se. In late 1984, most flat-screen portables lacked detachable keyboards. But the limitations of LCDs were the main problems.
A reporter friend, banging out stories for his paper at times in the field, told me he’s survived the 40-column, 8-line screen of the Radio Shack Model 100 very well. But I’m not surprised. He’s also brooked that clunky Select software, which gets in the way of corrections and insertions. Gene, you see, apparently knows what he’s going to write—he needn’t watch the screen as much. I wish I were as decisive. At any rate, what was right for Gene wouldn’t necessarily be right for a clerk who’ll be at the keyboard seven or eight hours a day.
No matter what hardware and software you end up with, don’t lose sight of three goals, among others:
1. Getting the most work out of your people
2. Keeping them happy
3. Guarding your electronic files
Sometimes, alas, the easiest-to-use computers may be the ones most vulnerable to computer crime and loss of important information—the subjects of the next chapter.
Backups:
◼ [IX], Window Shopping, page [343].
◼ [X], Of Mice and Men—and Touch Pads, Touch Screens Etc., page [346].
10
Jewels that Blip
The words have a nasty metallic ring, as if to suggest helmeted policemen with black jackets and billy clubs. Watch out: the “data security” troopers are at the front door.
But a small business on the East Coast nowadays wishes it had enjoyed more “data security.”
A fire melted its computer disks into plastic globs. The firm just missed bankruptcy after losing several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of information—everything from accounts receivable to tax records. Scrambling to recover, salesmen leaned on customers for copies of old bills.
Arson? Maybe. A disgruntled worker may have short-circuited some tangled wiring. Proof never came.
Either way, however, the incident was a powerful argument for “data security”—the right kind.
It’s nothing more than trying to make sure that your computer and its information are safe. This isn’t to advocate overkill. Don’t overprotect nonsecrets or facts that you can easily duplicate; for instance, instead of buying costly fireproof cabinets, you might simply keep backup disks at another location—perhaps a more secure approach, anyway.
Why, however, do I say “trying” to make your computer and its information “safe”? An ex-hacker, Ian (“Captain Zap”) Murphy, now a computer security consultant, wisely observes: “You’re safe from average crooks—they don’t envision a nice, mild-mannered human being working at anything more than a souped-up typewriter. But you can never, never be able to 100 percent secure a computer system. Even the most trusted user could say, ‘F— the damn payroll,’ and destroy your records.”
But in the best of all worlds, your electronic files are safe, accurate, and if need be, tamperproof and confidential. The equipment is sound. And so are you and others working with it. You’ve shown good judgment. You’re ideally safe not only from crooks but also your own blunders. You know you often can’t keep paper copies of all your electronic jewels, your treasured business files, at least not without giving up the conveniences of computerization. You have faith, then, that your green screen, at your command, will display the right blips. I’m stretching the meaning of the word “blips” to emphasize the transitory nature of what you see on the screen. Without your stashing it away on a disk or otherwise—and without your making an electronic backup—it may be lost forever.
The unlucky owner of the East Coast company will never see his blips again because he violated a major precept of data security. He stored his original disks and his copies in the same room—the one with the fire.
“The remark at all times in cases like this is ‘Why didn’t the dealer tell me?‘” says Harold Joseph Highland, a top computer crime consultant and author of Protect Your Microcomputer System (John Wiley & Sons, 1984).
A store can only sell you a computer, not common sense. Nor can this chapter impart it to you. It can, however, pound away at the elements of data security—people, policies, hardware, and software. They go together, these four. And so do the criminal and noncriminal parts of data security. If you’ve lost control of your computer files and don’t know what’s normal, you’ll hardly notice the abnormal. You’ll never thwart a computerized embezzler, for instance, with a gun. You will with good software. Buy it and errors in your electronic files may leap out at you. May. Remember Canyes’s Law of Computing: “Sooner or later you’ll feel like killing yourself.”
In other places I’ve written about good software and other mundane ways to make yourself less suicidal. And here, too, you’ll read of everyday calamities like coffee spilled on floppy disks. But this is also the fun chapter, the one with the stories about errant whiz kids and a computer crook who supposedly stole $8 million and got away with it.
Each of their sins met Harold Joseph Highland’s definition of a computer-related crime. They were “committed using a computer as a tool.”
“In other words,” explains Highland, who has taught computer science at the State University of New York, “you use the computer to get to financial records. Or to get to software if you’re illegally copying software.”
Estimates of the size of the threat have ranged from the double-digit millions up to over $5 billion a year. This uncertainty has sparked a feud between the icebergers and some computer makers.
Highland is an iceberger. He says that reported computer-related crimes are “just the tip of the iceberg,” that the annual loot is at least $750 million and more likely reaches the billions. Another expert wrote a crime article livened up with a drawing of the Titanic. Meanwhile, the Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association pooh-poohs all but the more conservative estimates. “Computer crime is not now, never has been, and never will be out of control,” an association official once said, “unless security is completely ignored. And that is not going to happen.”
“If that’s your opinion, sir,” counters Captain Zap, the computer felon now working as a security consultant, “why are fourteen-year-olds getting on defense networks? And what about adult criminals doing their thing on banks?”
Also, how about computer crimes against small business?
“No one’s going to find out why Joe Blow goes out of business,” says Ken Churbuck, a New Hampshire lawyer and former computer engineer, who believes that electronic crime may be the downfall of many more small businessmen than supposed. “You think Joe Blow can afford an investigation? You think anyone else wants to autopsy the corpse?”
Large business or small, however, don’t swear off computers and buy quill pens for your accountants. You may or may not get robbed electronically, but you’ll very possibly lose money if you cheat yourself of the benefits of computerization.
Although computer crooks may be difficult quarry at times, at least you can console yourself that they’re normally not geniuses.
Consider a story from Highland. The law caught up with one crook—presumably more knowledgeable about computers than banks—after he asked a teller to cash seven identically dated checks made out to him. The embezzler had simply learned how to take advantage of a feature in the check-printing program. It allowed checks to be reprinted in the event of mistakes; only his stupidity offset this programming error.
“You don’t have to be knowledgeable,” Highland says. “You can be an absolute idiot and try a computer-related crime.”
Some of the victims, alas, show their own streaks of naïveté. One small business lost thousands of dollars to a bookkeeper who funneled it to relatives’ firms via phony invoices. Such crimes happen with or without computers. But the company begged for trouble here by retaining an accountant old-fashioned enough to have felt at home alongside Scrooge and Cratchitt. Computers baffled him but not the embezzler, who knew of this vulnerability.
Executives at big corporations needn’t be smug about such grass-roots examples.
Many large companies, for instance, have reduced the crooks’ risks in computerized crime by auditing samples instead of everything—pulling one hundred checks, perhaps, out of a batch of four thousand. The young man trying to cash his seven duplicates worked for a large West Coast firm given to quick and dirty sampling; just tote up the odds of catching him through an audit if he’d been smart enough to go to different banks. Ideally, at least, your system should flag quirks like the seven checks.
You can also complicate life for computer crooks by studying classic cases of the past.
Mostly the criminals sinned with or against large computers. And yet eternal truths linger on even in the micro-mini age. In fact, some mainframe cases may mean even more to the desktop crowd today, with so many small computers hooked up as terminals on large systems. You might also say giant machines are acquiring plenty of pygmy siblings—joined Siamese style with them at the brains. And the big and small machines aren’t just wired together by phone or otherwise. Increasingly, mainframes are sending electronic copies to[to] micros outside data-processing departments. What’s more, in power and capabilities, the pygmies are matching some big IBMs and Univacs of yore.
So whether you’re using a $1,000 Apple or a $100,000 mini, you’ll come out ahead knowing about the Golden Oldies of computer crime.
Computer consultants, especially Donn Parker, a prominent expert with the SRI think tank in Menlo Park, California, have labeled various offenses.[[50]]