The Internet of Things

 Suppose that somebody ran an automated scan of your network for vulnerabilities, and reported that this web server had an outdated version of PHP, and that one an outdated version of JQuery. You would know to deal with this: if in a hurry, you would upgrade the packages at once, and trust in the developers to have maintained compatibility. If cautious, you might clone the servers, upgrade, and test carefully before upgrading the production servers. Either way, the path to the upgrade would be clear.

Now suppose that the outdated version warnings came attached to addresses that you did not recognize, and that on checking you found that they belonged to televisions and security cameras. Documentation on maintaining web servers is an internet search away, but not necessarily when those web servers simply provide the management interface for a device. A friend remarks that such servers could be implemented in firmware and essentially impossible for the owner to upgrade.

What can happen if someone uses a vulnerability in PHP or JQuery to take over a television or camera? Perhaps they could bore us by showing bad movies, or stream live video of our yards in Pyongyang. More likely, I suppose, intruders could set up the device as a base from which to try to break into more interesting systems. I would think that the facilities offered by a camera would be substantially less than those of a general-purpose computer, but I don't know.

Do "smart" devices with network interfaces--refrigerators, washing machines, etc.--make one's home less secure? I suspect that they do, but not substantially so, mostly because so much of the home is likely to be insecure already--routers with weak passwords, PCs without anti-virus software, users careless about clicking on links. Still, I wish that we didn't have to worry about the security of computers in devices that don't appear to have them.

Over the Heads

 Having found my copy of The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport, I turned to an essay I did not remember, "Travel Reconsidered", and saw

This past summer I was cooling my heels outside the Musée du Louvre, a shrine not to be missed by the passionate pilgrim (Henry James's phrase for the American absorbing culture in Europe). Two such pilgrims with whom I was on vacation had wanted to see the Mona Lisa, and I, having shown them what I wanted them to see, had declined to try to see Leonardo's painting over the heads of five Lutheran Sunday School classes from Oslo, two busloads of Japanese businessmen, and a contingent of Mexican Rotarians.

I recall seeing the painting at some distance in 2007, and supposing that the crowds were brought by the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. But The Hunter Gracchus was published in 1996, so one can blame Dan Brown only so far. I do remember thinking that one could build a good small city museum around the paintings on any ten linear yards of the walls past which folks marched, eyes front, to see the Mona Lisa.

A couple of fellow Americans informed Davenport that the Mona Lisa was at the Louver, across town, and that what he was looking at was not the Louver but an old royal palace. Well, one can, as he goes on to write, get misinformation closer to home.

Grundoons and Others

 When my father worked at a Geological Survey laboratory in the early to middle 1950s, "grundoon" was a common facetious term for a small child. This was about the peak of the baby boom, so the term must have received a lot of use. I had supposed that "grundoon" was somehow related to "grandson", for I first heard it in relation to my father's grandson. In fact, the term came from Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo, and the Grundoon was a baby groundhog.

When I first encountered the original Grundoon, in the book I Go Pogo, it was clear how the expression had caught on. One notices two qualities of the Grundoon: he is always asleep, and he is always utterly limber, draped over someone's forearm. Newborns spend most of their time sleeping, and they are very limber. It is true that few of them have the fine head of hair, something like Elvis Presley's, that I recall the Grundoon as having.

This came to mind at the sight of a neighbor's daughter, just two months old, and sometimes to be seen toted in a sling, curled up. We have met seldom, and so far I think she has been asleep or drowsy each time.

In Janet Lewis's novel The Invasion, Waub-ojeeg, a chief of the Ojibways along the western end of Lake Superior, and his son-in-law John Johnston, consider the infant Lewis Saurin Johnston:

One evening as the grandmother was taking the child back to his mother, his grandfather said, softly, affectionately, "Very soon he will be doing the only thing that Manabozho [a god of the Ojibways] could never do. You will be proud of him then."
"And what was that?" asked Johnston innocently.
"Manabozho could not put his toe in his mouth."