Chris and Jake in 1993, when modems filled the family garage.

More Memories from our 30-year History

In the late 1980s and 1990s, when Cruzio’s founders started offering dial-up connections, people connected to us over phone lines.

It seems primitive today, and jury-rigged. It was! We were using the tools available to us — and luckily the breakup of Ma Bell had freed people to use the infrastructure as we pleased. Fax machines, voice mail, and the internet resulted.

(Telecom monopolies have been reassembling in the 2000s, like some sort of Death Star, but that’s another topic…)

Sharing a phone line with the internet was kind of a drag, because when you connected to the internet you couldn’t make a phone call on the same line. And people used to use their landline telephones a lot more, since many didn’t have the internet and nobody had smart phones.

Lots of problems ensued, mostly intergenerational: older people got furious because the phone was busy for hours and hours while a kid in the house was playing a multiuser game on the computer. Even then, the internet was a huge time suck.

What if You Were the ISP?

In the Cruzio family household, founders Chris and Peggy had it worse than most because their house was the site of several modem servers which made loud modem noises all day and night. Every time a customer connected to Cruzio, the servers would screech and crackle. The equipment was in the attached garage but could be heard throughout most of their small house.

Boing, boing, boing. Crrrrrrr. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Add to this the alarms Chris set to go off whenever equipment faltered. Loud shrieks rang through the little house, waking everyone in the family as Chris valiantly rushed to repair whatever had gone wrong.

Cruzio’s founders knew from the start that the internet is a 24/7 responsibility 365 days a year. People rely on it. And when you host it in your house, you’re going to notice it. All night long.

Things got even worse after the Cruzio babies were born. Any problem with the internet service was immediately followed by a cascade of sound effects: the alarm shrieking, Mom and Dad yelling expletives, babies wailing.

That’s how you ran a startup ISP in 1992.

It’s Different Now

Luckily, Cruzio — maybe because of the valiant efforts — attracted enough customers to become a real business. When Cruzio moved to a downtown office building in 1994, great joy, and much more sleep, ensued.

And our world in 2019 — with its wifi and blue tooth, phones that play movies and fit in our pockets — looks very different now. The babies are grown up. But Cruzio still answers alarms any time there’s a problem with our internet service, any time of day or night.

1. We’ve created a high-speed fixed wireless network that can extend to remote areas, and we’ve worked with communities and government entities to create economically viable ways to deliver service. However, companies cannot survive on a small, widely dispersed customer base. Cruzio’s competitiveness in more urban areas allows us to survive.
2. As Cruzio expands our fiber network, we‘ve developed an expertise in serving low income communities, including workforce housing and mobile home parks. Equal Access Santa Cruz is just such a project. We’ve identified underserved urban areas and proposed a remedy.

What the Internet Is Doing with Your Data, Part II

As we mentioned last month. information about all of us is being collected and resold constantly by some of the largest corporations in the world. Our preferences, likes, and interests are being logged and examined for statistical correlations.

This isn’t entirely new. In the past, some patterns were predictable, too. If you lived in Chicago, you probably shopped mostly at stores in Chicago. If you bought hamburger meat, you might go to the ketchup aisle next. But now we have much more sophisticated tracking.

(By the way, not all internet companies gather and sell your data. Cruzio does not.)

New Tools are More Powerful Than Ever

Powerful data-crunching computers and artificial intelligence (AI) make it possible to store and analyze a lot more data and to make a lot more connections over a broad swath of the population. Social media and phone apps supply these powerhouses with the data they need. (What data do they collect? See last month’s newsletter.)

Market research companies use something called Predictive Analytics. One firm explains:

“Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. The goal is to go beyond knowing what has happened to providing a best assessment of what will happen in the future.” 

They go on:

“An analyst performs a regression analysis to spot strength of correlations between specific customer variables with the purchase of a particular product; they can then use the “regression coefficients” (i.e. the degree to which each variable affects the purchase behavior) and create a score for likelihood of future purchases.”

In other words, if we know what you did before, we can make a good guess at what you’ll do next.

Can Predictive Analysis be a Good Thing?

We’ve mentioned before that there’s a positive aspect to having your data analyzed and your behavior predicted. Companies can basically lay a smooth path before you, so that you are as comfortable in the vast online world as you are among friends.

But there are obvious drawbacks, too: giving people more and more of what they seem to like exaggerates the differences among us, putting us into silos of our own personalities. If you are elderly, you won’t see ads for baby food. Young people won’t get ads for arthritis. Politically, siloing has the effect of polarizing us as each person sees only what they already believe.

Some examples of predictive analytics are pretty impressive. For example, a Target customer was shown ads for products of interest to pregnant women before she knew she was pregnant. That’s amazing. The store was trying to be helpful, but that level of help might be unwanted, or even dangerous.

Some Funny Correlations

Other “insights” are bizarre. Scientific American captured a number of them. A few:

• Typing with proper capitalization indicates creditworthiness
• Women with large bra size spend more money
• Orange cars require less repair
• Vegetarians make their planes on time more often
• In general, 54 percent of people would rather have loud farts than stinky farts. But among those who are interested in calligraphy, 71 percent would rather have loud farts than stinky farts

Predictive analysis is often wrong. Even at Cruzio, we’ve experienced examples: One of our programmers has been mis-identified as a dentist and can’t escape the flood of ads for dental seminars. Another, who’s white, has been categorized as African-American. These make us chuckle; we seem to be hidden in plain sight, somehow winning the game.

But as data collection and analysis matures, it’s likely mistakes will diminish and more and more will be known about all of us. The small bargains that we accept every day — I’m alright letting my weather app know my location, I’m alright letting Facebook look at my email contact list — add up as data-mining companies purchase information from the vast number of apps, merge the data, package it and sell it. So our “identities” will follow us everywhere.

Cruzio was one of the first companies in the country to offer internet to private citizens. We used that early internet for a variety of things which would look ridiculously old-fashioned now, but back then were cutting edge. In 1993 Cruzio had only a few hundred subscribers — it was a pretty obscure hobby for a small group of (rather nerdy) people.

But that would soon change.

The internet wasn’t people-friendly until web browsers provided easier access. Mosaic, an early graphical browser invented at the University of Illinois, began to catch on in 1992. It was so popular that one of its student authors, Marc Andreesen, founded Netscape after he graduated. Netscape built on the Mosaic model, but was sold commercially, had private investment, and quickly outsped its predecessor. And many people local to Santa Cruz helped build it and use it.

Look how boring Mosaic’s content was in 1993. That was about to change:

Mosaic, pre-Netscape boom

Why did we all take to Netscape?

Removing the scientific notations and jargon from tools helped make the internet popular.

In fact it’s gotten easier and easier over the decades since. Remember having to type http://www in front of everything? WWW stood for world wide web. We typed it every time. But where else were you going with your web browser?

Cruzio loved the streamlining. It was the whole reason, really, for Cruzio’s existence. Founders Chris Neklason and Peggy Dolgenos were computer engineers at SCO, a local Unix software company. Cruzio was their side gig. Their vision was to make this powerful thing, the internet, accessible to regular people. And better tools like Netscape made the internet easier to provide.

As the better web browser got popular, more people were able to find web pages, so more web pages were created. That meant there was more for the browser to find, so the browser became more useful. It was an upward spiral.

When Netscape was released, Cruzio’s customer base started growing exponentially — doubling every few months. What had been a smallish community of local tech employees from HP or Borland, who wanted home email as well, grew to include many more people.

Of course, lots of kids pushed their parents to Cruzio’s doors. Some of the kids were under ten years old! And many went on to work in the tech industry. Probably their children, in turn, show them how to use phone apps today.

Netscape in 1996 — getting more interesting

Santa Cruz was on it

Cruzio got the internet to people’s homes and offices. But a lot of people in Santa Cruz were working on the technology that was feeding our growth.

More local connections: SCO, where Cruzio’s founders worked, was the first company to include a graphical web browser in its operating system. Lloyd Tabb, a talented engineer/entrepreneur who’s started several businesses in Santa Cruz, was an early employees at Netscape. And Netscape tapped UCSC for talent: Michael Lopp was an early manager after graduating from UCSC. James Clark was a former UCSC teacher.

What happened to Netscape?

As Michael Lopp writes on his LinkedIn page, “Microsoft ate us.”

We built it. We can fix it.

Sometimes, when the state of the internet looks grim (spam, privacy issues, fake news) we look back at that giddy era, and remember how much Santa Cruz contributed to the rise of the internet. And we think, well, there’s still Santa Cruz. Maybe we’ll help solve the problems.

Equal Access Santa Cruz

About Santa Cruz Fiber

“Underserved” areas of Santa Cruz County are in orange

Cruzio wants to protect your privacy. We are zealous about our own practices and we want to keep you informed of how other entities on the the internet are dealing with you.

We all know that data harvesting practices are widespread, but we can’t know all the details. When businesses are collecting data, they’re not subject to requirements for transparency. In fact, quite the opposite — methods of gathering and selling user data are considered trade secrets and are closely guarded. Private companies often “get away” with gathering more data than the government can.

(By the way, not all internet companies gather and sell your data. Cruzio does not.)

Despite the secrecy, public attention has recently encouraged reporters to dig in to the details. There’s so much to talk about that we’re separating it into several newsletters.

Here’s What We’ve Found, Part 1:

What, exactly, are online companies gathering from us?

A little background, to start. Most apps on your computer, phone, or other device have two purposes: one is the obvious one, the weather app that displays the weather, the social app that lets you see what your friends are doing.

The second purpose every app serves is much less obvious: to gather information incidental to the primary purpose, and sell it. You give the weather app your location. You give the social network your age, gender, and much more.

You might think, that’s not so valuable. What does any one app know? But the data doesn’t stay with that single company.

After gathering information, companies sell their caches to central data brokerages so that data from many different apps is gathered together in one place to form an ever-more-complete picture of you: where you hang out, what you spend, who you know, what you think. Data gatherers even brag that they can tell what stores you enter  — and where you go inside the store.

What Are They Vacuuming Up?

It all starts with the gathering of information. Gizmodo has an excellent summary of what apps, browsers, and web pages gather from the moment you click on them. They gather inconsequential bits of information that a browser uses to display your web page properly into what’s called a “fingerprint” — an identifier. Your name might not be gathered, but no one else on the internet, or very few people, are in the same part of town as you, with the same size and version computer, running the same version of a browser. You’re not known necessarily by name, but a name is easily attached when other information is added.

You Can See Tons of Data Collected by Google and Facebook

You can see a lot of the information that’s been gathered about you. Cruzio’s dauntless reporter Brian Bishop did a deep dive into the information cached in his blog post What Do Tech Companies Know About Me, Turns Out a Lot. The Guardian found even more.

The data gathered is often only tangentially related to what the app seems to be doing.  Tech Crunch reports:

“A great example of that is Facebook’s  Nearby Friends. The feature lets you share your position with your friends so — and here’s that shiny promise — you can more easily hang out with them. But do you know anyone who is actively using this feature? Yet millions of people started sharing their exact location with Facebook for a feature that’s now buried and mostly unused. Meanwhile Facebook is actively using your location to track your offline habits so it can make money targeting you with adverts.”

And did you know that Amazon keeps recordings of all your interactions with Alexa?

Can You Really Delete Information?

Many apps allow you to remove your information. But that often means they remove it from your sight, while keeping it in their data caches. And they may have already sold it to another company anyway. Even if data has been gathered or shared illicitly or illegally, the horse is out of the barn.

For example, Cambridge Analytica sold data in the 2016 election. Facebook had shared the data from tens of millions of users without their permission, but with the condition that it be deleted/returned afterward and used for limited purposes. But Cambridge Analytica never deleted the information. And they used it for their own, uncontracted, purposes, sold their findings to political campaigns, and there’s no way to walk that back — the company is gone but the personal profiles have been disseminated . Who else has data that’s left the barn?

And Then There’s the Data Collected by Hackers

You’ve certainly seen headlines about gigantic data thefts, where personal information is gathered by criminals who hack into the computers of large corporations, like Target, or banks, or even government bodies, like the Veterans Administration. We’ve written before about where your data goes after it’s been hacked. This information is less detailed than that gathered by apps and websites, but it’s much more devastatingly personal and can be used for dentity theft. It includes names, addresses, passwords, social security numbers, and more. You can check whether your information is out there by seeing if you have been “pwned.”

Do You Want to be Tracked?

Before we go further, let’s get down to a big question.

Gizmodo has published  tools to help you block some of the tracking. But remember: most of the data is gathered by an app you’re using for a reason, and blocking data may hurt the app’s performance. Do you want an online vendor to forget your shopping cart contents next time you go to the site? Do you want your weather app to lose track of locations you check frequently?

You might want to be selective about what tracking you prevent. Many of us go to a “stop tracking me” form and hesitate, mouse hovering over the choice. Do we want to lose the functionality that goes with the data? In a way it’s not really giving us a reasonable choice: it’s either everything or nothing

And we often hear, “I don’t care. I have nothing to hide.” Interesting, isn’t it, that people are more willing to let a corporation have access to their movements and activities at levels they’d never let the government see.

At the least, we can know more about what is tracked and how it’s used.

One More Time: Here are all the links from this blog post
https://gizmodo.com/heres-all-the-data-collected-from-you-as-you-browse-the-1820779304
https://gizmodo.com/how-to-avoid-getting-tracked-as-you-browse-the-web-1821008719
https://santacruzfiber.com/blog/what-do-tech-companies-know-about-me-turns-out-a-lot
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/28/all-the-data-facebook-google-has-on-you-privacy
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602040
Facebook’s  Nearby Friends
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/14/how-to-save-your-privacy-from-the-internets-clutches/
https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Us

Us

Santa Cruz can be horrifying. In the movies, that is.

We know this from Hitchcock’s The Birds (based on a real event — sooty shearwaters getting disoriented over Santa Cruz!) and from (this is a great clip) Lost Boys and, much more recently, from Jordan Peele’s new thriller, Us — which looks terrifying.

Us even recruited local extras on Facebook. Oops, missed that call!

Bumblebee

Bumblebee

And, do you simply dismiss Transformer movies out of hand, because you saw a couple of them and they were overly cheesed up?

Then you would have missed the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk’s starring role in the latest Transformers flick, Bumblebee.

Our newsletter squad doesn’t always get to the latest films but we’re assured by the much more in-the-know folks in Marketing and Business Development that Bumblebee is actually a much better movie than you’d expect. Must be Santa Cruz and the Bay Area that made the difference.

Bird Box

Bird Box

And there’s a third popular movie recently filmed in Santa Cruz — this one on Netflix — Bird Box. Another entry in super-scary cinema, this was partly filmed in Henry Cowell Park where the fog and the huge redwoods provided lots of moody atmosphere.

Maybe it’s our fog.

Want to see a big list of movies filmed locally? Someone put together a list on LocalWiki:

• Vertigo (1958) … 
• The Gnome-Mobile (1967) … 
• The Endless Summer (1966) … 
• My Blood Runs Cold (1965) …
• Tilt (1979) … 
• Escape to Witch Mountain (1975) … 
• Harold and Maude (1971) … 
• Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)
• A Romance of the Redwoods (1917)
• The Gnome-Mobile (1965)
• Harold and Maude (1971)
• Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)
• Tilt (1978)
• Heartbeeps (1981)
• Shadow Riders (1982)
• The Ugly Duckling (1982)
• The Sting II (1983)
• Sudden Impact (1983)
• Creator (1985)
• Hard Traveling (1985)
• Alone in the T-Shirt Zone (1986)
• Back to the Beach (1987)
• The Lost Boys (1987)
• Survival Game (1987)
• Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)
• Split (1989)
• Voyage of the Heart (1991)
• Strawberry Road (1990)
• Out on a Limb (1992)
• Steel Heel (1993)
• Dangerous Minds (1995)
• $40,000 (1996)
• Glory Daze (1996)
• Somebody is Waiting (1996)
• The Aqua Girls (1998)
• Frog and Wombat (1998)
• Homegrown (1998)
• Cirque de Soleil: Journey of Man (2000)
• The Truth About Beef Jerky (2002)
• Kinsey (2004)
• Grave’s End (2004)
• The Tripper (2006)
• 10 Inch Hero (2007)
• I Think We’re Alone Now (2008)
• Chasing Mavericks (2011)
• Tao of Surfing (2013)
• House on Rodeo Gulch (2016)

Mark Hanford

Ad 1: LSD/DSL

Before there were hipsters in Santa Cruz, there were (and are) hippies. When we introduced a brand new technology in 1999 — replacing good ol’ dialup with the new service called DSL — we had to find a way to explain it.

Here’s a script for an early DSL ad, written by the many-talented Mark Hanford, one of a handful of Cruzio employees at that time, who wrote and performed a lot of our ads in that era. He’s now our Chief Systems Engineer, but he was a pretty hilarious copywriter. Unfortunately we don’t seem to have audio, just the script:

Cruzio ‘LSD/DSL’ 60-second spot for KPIG.

(SP = Support Person)
(SD = Stoner Dude)

(SFX of phone ringing, and someone picking up)

SP: Hello, Cruzio tech support.

SD: Yeah.. ummm… I heard that you were umm… selling drugs?

SP: What?!?

SD: Yeah, I heard you had acid!

SP: Uhh.. no…

SD: No really, a friend told me about the LSD you’re offering.

SP: LS… Oh, you mean DSL! It’s always on Internet access at several times the speed of 56k.

SD: Uh… did you say speed?!? I could use some of that!

SP: No, I’m not talking about drugs, I’m talking about a high speed connection!

SD: Yeah, that’s what I need… a connection!

SP: Let me explain… Cruzio is Santa Cruz county’s oldest and largest local Internet Service provider. We offer web hosting, e-commerce, dial-up access, and new always-on, high-speed DSL connections at competitive rates. We also have some of the friendliest (and most patient) tech support and sales people around.

SD: Look, I don’t think you get what I need. Umm… Let me talk to Dave…

Tagline: Cruzio is offering a two hundred dollar cash rebate to anyone who signs up for a year of DSL service, now through May 7th. Some restrictions apply. Please visit www.cruzio.com or call 459-6301 for details.

Ad 2: Sock Monkeys

And here’s another Mark Hanford ad, circa 2000,  recorded with his partner, Barbara Diamond for our web design service and classes. Have a listen!

Ad 3: Three Little Pigs

Cruzio co-founder Peggy Dolgenos wrote ads, too. Here’s a script from a KPIG ad in 2002. Peggy always wanted to get the radio stations to use lots of sound effects in the ads:

> Sound of fiddle music playing a country tune.

> Sound of pigs squealing happily.

> Pig 2: It sure is snug here in your house of bricks, brother pig!

> Pig 3: (very stupid voice) Yeah, thanks for sharing this nice house after my straw house got blown away.

> Pig 1: (slowly and grandly) I take care of you, brother pigs.

> Pig 2: Now that the house is done, what else do we need?

> Pig 3: Big screen color TV!

> Pig 2: Waffle iron!

> (squealing)

> Pig 1: No! What we need is a good Internet connection.

> Pig 2: Brother Pig, you are always so smart.

> Pig 3: I know where to get an Internet connection made of straw!

> Pig 2: We can get one made of twigs!

> Pig 1: No straw, no twigs. For a very reasonable price we can get a connection with an excellent local company called Cruzio. It’s easy to use and very reliable. Cruzio has been around since 1989. They provide excellent service.

> Pig 3: (questioning) Cruzio????

> Pig 2: (enthusiastic) Cruzio!

> Pig 1: I’m ordering Cruzio service today.

> Pig 3: I stuck a bean up my nose, Brother Pig can you help me get it out?

> Pig 1: sighs.

> Fiddle music and pigs squealing again.