“Satanic Risks?”

Oh, this is funny. I found myself in a backwater folder in my email client, searching for some long-forgotten credentials (came up dry, BTW) when I ran across some uuencoded messages. That’s right! When’s the last time you even thought about uuencode? Yeah, me too.

This particular message was dated 12 January 1998, sent from my personal email address to an address within the company I worked for at the time. It was funny then, it must still be funny now. The “don’t be evil” company hadn’t yet been invented; Larry and Sergey had already come up with the Google name but hadn’t yet received their first cash infusion or even formally formed their little company. (ref. Google history)

Satanic Risks?
“Lindsay F. Marshall”
Mon, 15 Dec 1997 11:33:31 +0000 (GMT)

In the *Letters* page of this month’s *Fortean Times* (FT106, January 1998)
there is a letter entitled Brotherly Communications, raising the privacy
risks of mandating GPS in every mobile phone — which it claims will be the
case in the USA in 1999. However, the letter then goes on to say the
following:

> Much of the data concerning mobile phone paranoia (or the enhanced 911
> service) comes from the publications of Lucent — also known as Bell
> Laboratories — AT&T and Sandia National Laboratories.

> Lucent seems an odd sort of name — Luc(iferic) Ent(erprises) as people on
> a witch hunt might suggest — but when it comes to software they have a
> real-time operating system called Inferno, written in a language called
> Limbo, with a communications protocol called Styx. Reading the product
> literature is less like engineering and more like indoctrination. The head
> offices are at 666 5th Avenue in New York. The company motif is a fiery
> red circle that might represent a bull’s eye, the star Aldebaran in the
> constellation Taurus — also associated with the Egyptian god Set …

> Lucent has been doing a lot of recruiting recently — their headline
> product is something called Airloop(tm) which looks like a cellular phone
> microcell incorporating voice and data. It is controlled by a little box
> that I expect we’ll be seeing everywhere, called the BSD2000 (Lucent seem
> to have a millennial flavour in their product numbers).

Lucent is, of course, at http://www.lucent.com, and the *Fortean Times* is at
http://www.forteantimes.com.

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One thought on ““Satanic Risks?””

  1. Well, not uuencode, but I did mention uuto in a technical argument with a couple of whippersnapppers last week or the week before.

    Luciferic sounds a bit contrived — Luc[ifer] Ent[erprises] would have sufficed.

    In 2010, I called the police from my landline on a bunch of JW’s crawling all over my “NO SOLICITING” apartment complex. The dispatcher said, “They’re a religious groups and exempt.” I said, “Well, I’ll just take my cane, go down and crack a few heads.” Two seconds later, one of my cell phones that was on, but had no account, rang — it was the police dispatcher.

    I salute you, George Orwell (or should I damn you for giving them ideas). BIG BROTHER is alive and well today, and growing. I still pity the fool who tries to inject an RFID chip in my butt!

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