Author Archives: Peggy Dolgenos

In honor of Cruzio’s 30th anniversary this year, we’ll be putting out some of our crazy old stuff.

We’re being attacked by an orc

Our obsession was Rogue. Everyone played it when they should have been working. The graphics were all keyboard characters, like letters of the alphabet or symbols like # and @.

Why were we playing with such rudimentary graphics? Because that’s all we had. That’s right, this was before people had access to graphical computers, especially at work where we were using something called “dumb terminals.” In the early 1980s most people didn’t even have a mouse on their computer! Rogue was keyboard-driven. You didn’t even need to use the arrow keys: H,J,K, and L moved your player around the maze.

But computer graphics made big strides, killing the old character-based games

We didn’t have real graphics till Steve Jobs and Apple came out with the first mass-marketed graphical computers in 1983 (the Lisa) and 1984 (the Macintosh. Remember the 1984 superbowl ad? It’s worth a look, even now).

But when we played with ASCII, the game was Rogue. The game was maddening and addictive. It put you on a treasure hunt and attacked your vulnerable little self-character with bats, snakes, kestrels (kestrels? yes, kestrels) and all manner of imaginary creatures. A bat looked like this: B. A snake looked like this: S. Treasure looked like this: $

And you, little you — you were an at sign, @, constantly running, dodging, picking up $ whenever you could.

Cruzio’s founders worked in a software company where we and fellow engineers often worked all night and all weekend. We took brain-vacations at our desks by playing rogue. Everyone in the office played it.

Rogue was hard, and after getting through tunnels and mazes and evading weird creatures you got attached to your simple virtual @ self. Yelps and cries were heard in the office when the end finally came to a game. Then, back to work.

Rogue was created by Michael C. Toy and Kenneth C.R.C. Arnold in 1983. By the way, the aptly named Toy is a Santa Cruz resident so it’s one of those great Santa Cruz contributions to the world of tech.

Want to play? You can play Rogue on a simulator here. Try it!

What the Internet is Doing with Your Data

June 1, 2019

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

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/

Spotting Spam: Harder Than it Looks!

May 18, 2019

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

Recently, a few phishing*, or scam email, schemes got through Cruzio’s spam filters and landed in customer email boxes.

We catch more than 90% of spam, but sometimes the scammers who run these schemes are clever and manage to fool our filters. It’s a constant arms race as barriers improve but spammers figure out how to bypass them.

We have some tips to help you recognize phishing when you see it, so you can have more confidence in tossing phonies away. We’ll use the recent email imitating Cruzio as an example. It was well crafted, but there were some “tells” we’d like to point out.

(By the way, if you think you know all the tricks and are good at spotting spammy schemes, go ahead and skip these tips and try this Google quiz. How’d you do?)

Check the “From” Address

Here’s a great clue to a phishing email. Click the “From” email address to see the full address written out. Usually it won’t be what you expect. In this case, the return address is someone at “wildblue.net,” not Cruzio.

Roll Your Mouse Over the Links

The best indication of all is to roll your mouse over the links in the email. This is where the sender wants you to go to enter your password or other information. Don’t click on the link. Just put your mouse over the link and wait until the destination is revealed. (If you do click, just back out. Unless you enter information, clicking a link is pretty harmless.)

You’d expect this link to point to an address at cruzio.com. But it’s not. It’s sending you to “jamaioaa.com”. That’s a pretty sure sign that this is fake.

Notice that the text appearing in the email looks like the right website address. That’s a spoof. You have to mouse over the link to see where it will really send you.

Sometimes the scammer will put the word “cruzio” into their link to try to fool you. For example they might name the link http://jamaioaa.com/cruzio/verify. But other parts of the address are just words. It’s the “.com” part which shows the server’s identity.

Read Carefully: Does It Look or Sound Odd?

The example above is one of the best fakes we’ve ever seen. Still, there are several obvious problems, if you look closely:

The Cruzio logo is squished. We don’t display our logo with an oval cat, it’s a circle. In fact, the whole header, which has been copied off the internet, is compressed and looks wrong side by side with our real logo.
We don’t start emails with “Attention customer:”. If you’ve ever received email from us — and as a customer you certainly have — you know we are friendlier than that. The whole letter has a tone unlike our other communications.
This sentence is so poorly written, it doesn’t seem written by an English speaker. “Please verify your account with your details click link below” — what? We sometimes make typos or phrase something a bit awkwardly, but this sentence is grammatically wrong in several ways.
Often phishing email will contain easily-spotted typographical errors. In this case there’s an apostrophe in front of “Thank You”. Plus, the email is signed “Cruzio Customer Service” rather than “The folks at Cruzio.” Missing that friendliness again.

Overall, if you take the time to read carefully, this email doesn’t look or sound like us.

If you ever have doubts about an email sent to you by Cruzio or any other company, contact the company directly and ask what’s up. And if you fear you’ve fallen for a scheme, change the password you think you’ve compromised and contact the company and/or Cruzio. We’re always glad to help you.

Now that you’re familiar with scammers’ “tells,” if you didn’t do it before, take that Google quiz to test your knowledge. How’d you do now?

*”Phishing” is the term email that tries to get users to click on fake links and enter their passwords and other personal information into fake websites. The scammers imitate the look and feel of real companies, sometimes very convincingly. Even professionals can fall for these schemes — a campaign aide who fell for a phishing scheme is what gave Russian operatives access to Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails.

Santa Cruz in the Movies

March 22, 2019

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

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

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

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)

From LSD to Sock Monkeys: A Blast from Cruzio’s Past

March 20, 2019

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

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.

Are You on the Menu in 2019?

February 12, 2019

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

Richard Kiel played the alien in the above episode of Twilight Zone and Jaws in James Bond films

We all know what happened in 2015-2016.

Our personal information — our “profiles” — were bought and sold, not just for advertising, but for political gain. Like the episode in The Twilight Zone pictured above, something we think of as a service for our benefit (social media) turned out to have ulterior motives behind it (data collection and sale).

What kind of manipulation will the internet bring in 2019, with elections coming? How will consumers be consumed?

To be sure, there’s a big baby of good in the bathwater of the internet. We may decide some exchanges are worth the cost. Free service for exposure to ads is an example. We’ve been making that trade for decades. More concerning is the new and hidden level of advertiser access, which isn’t just one way (sending ads to our device) but two-way (sending ads and collecting data). Because that’s not a trade we’re making consciously, it doesn’t feel right.

The extent of quiet intrusion has been surprising, and mentioned in various news reports. Now that we know, what do we do?

Humans are great at fooling ourselves, so we have to watch out for “I’m not affected by propaganda, not me!” thinking. We are affected by propaganda. We are gullible, and need to guard against appeals to our own prejudices.

More we all can do toward a more accurate internet:

Use your dollars. If the market shows that people value privacy, companies will follow suit.
Don’t click on links to websites you’ve never heard of. CNN, NPR, or the Wall Street Journal are going to take responsibility for their reporting. Thousands of other “news” websites exist just to draw clicks. Don’t get lured in.
Avoid forwarding lurid, extreme news. Whatever side of the political spectrum you’re on, it’s giddy to imagine that the other side is committing crimes so foul they’ll be jailed for life. But that rarely happens. Reputable reporters (see above) will discover and describe crimes more accurately than clickbait creators.
If a friend or relative sends out irresponsible headlines, consider having a gentle word. Funny memes are one thing, stories that pretend to be news are a step beyond.
You vote with your mouse. You define yourself and your community — even, in a way, humans as a species! — with your clicks. If you’d like to see better quality stories, don’t click on the shallow ones.
Use incognito web browsing, but do recognize its limitations.
Support the good guys on the internet. Donate to Wikipedia. Subscribe to legitimate online newspapers and magazine.
Use the controls available to you: Check your browser’s privacy settings. Use Facebook’s and Google’s settings.
Support legislation like the Honest Ads Act. Fight back when internet companies protest that their usage policies are easy, obvious, or even a choice (what if you *don’t* agree with Facebook’s privacy agreement? It’s not negotiable, and the service has no real competitors.)

How Cruzio Fights Email Fraud (“Phishing”)

December 6, 2018

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

The internet’s been hit with increasingly tricky “phishing” scams — emails where a criminal tries to trick you with phony information.

What Do Phishers Do?

They might spoof your bank, or a company you’re likely to have an account with like Amazon or Facebook. Sometimes they spoof your ISP. Sometimes, as in the “sextortion” described above, they pretend they can watch you at your computer.

The internet — and email in particular — were originally designed with a small number of trusted users in mind. Programming to block nefarious emails has limited success, as hackers work hard to get past filters. So while email providers block most fakes, some always manage to get through.

How is Cruzio addressing the problem?

We asked our ever-resourceful and remarkably calm Customer Service manager, Justin Von Besser, about the best approach for a responsible ISP.

Says Justin: “We’ve developed procedures to kill these attacks as quickly as possible. First we report the fraud to the FBI. Next, we contact the compromised server— the owners usually know nothing about it, they just have an infected computer — and we tell them what’s happening so they can take their server down and scrub the virus. Our anti-spam software blocks most bogus messages and we are constantly working with our software vendor to make that process more effective. And we’ve been adding a network status to voice mail when an attack seems widespread, so people know what’s going on.”

What can you do to protect yourself? Here’s a summary from Boston University with great advice. We agree with them, except that instead of informing Boston University, you are welcome to tell Cruzio.

“Sextortion” — What It Is, What to Do

December 5, 2018

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

Announcements are commonplace now: hackers have stolen private information from companies like LinkedIn, Target, KickStarter, and Adobe. It’s numbing, to be honest. And that nagging worry: what really happens when our information is hacked?

Enough Information to Scare You, and a Warning About Porn

Lately, that personal information has been used for “sextortion” schemes. If your data’s been stolen, the criminal puts enough of it — maybe a stolen password you’ll instantly recognize — into an email subject line.

That gets your attention and you read the email, where the writer warns they’ve been watching you, and recording you looking at porn. They then demand a payment in bitcoin.

What to do?

First, know that the part about recording you is almost certainly bogus. The writer has simply bought your password off a hacker’s website along with many others. These emails go to everyone, hoping to find some who are embarrassed enough to pay.So:

Don’t panic.
Don’t respond. Don’t pay up.
If you’re using that password, change it immediately.
Consider using password protection programs and updating your anti-virus software.

In fact, this is a good time to check which of your accounts may have been compromised. It isn’t “have you been affected” any more, it’s “how often”.

Have You Been Pwned?

We get so many notices, it’s easy to put them to the side — but luckily you can get a big picture from haveibeenpwned.com. (“Pwned” means a hacker has gotten your account information.) You’ll doubtless find it interesting — if not shocking — to see a list of the times your information’s been stolen.For more information about sextortion and other dangers, we recommend the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Their website covers the topic of protecting privacy in great detail. Cruzio works with the EFF on Net Neutrality and other issues — they are a great non-profit, pro-consumer group.

Under the Sea

December 4, 2018

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

Once a year Cruzioworks opens its doors to the community, showcasing local art, food, beer, and wine free to all visitors. We call it the Open House Extravaganza since all our coworkers can join in — it’s a big, big party with multiple hosts.

2018’s 8th annual party went swimmingly, and we say that because the theme was “Under the Sea.”

We introduced our new fiber optic mascot, the Fiberopticpus, beautifully depicted by our ultra-talented graphics artist Ani Bilgutay. We’d planned to just use it for this party, but it’s so great we’re going to keep Fiberopticpuses around in our future ads and decorations.

Octopuses were everywhere: dangling from the ceiling along with fish and shells. And there was a giant inflatable whale. The music system played “Under the Sea” and “Octopus’s Garden” — among other tunes so as not to go overboard.

This year we invited folks to try a trivia game. Families and groups of friends gathered at tables, working on the questions, which were (purposely) incredibly hard. No one got 100%!

Want to try the quiz? Test Yourself: Cruzio’s Fiberopticpus Trivia Quiz.

Pictures of the party below. We can’t wait till next year, our 30th Anniversary!

Playing trivia at OHE 2018 Visitors enjoying art and working on the trivia quiz

lite brite at the OHE Coworking champs Jolokia displayed a giant Lite Bright

OHE 2018

First place prize in the trivia contest was a giant inflatable whale!

Trivia winners and prize The trivia winners: first and second place, with the whale

The FiberOpticpus Trivia Quiz

December 2, 2018

Peggy Dolgenos

Cruzio Blog No Comments

Here at Cruzio, in our community by Monterey Bay where we’ve been installing high-speed broadband, we’re very much interested in both octopuses and fiber optics. We adopted the Fiberopticpus, above, as our fiber mascot.

And we created this trivia quiz for our eighth annual Open House Extravaganza. Missed the party? Test your knowledge at home, see how you score! Answer key follows the questions.