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Home Network Security: RedLINK™

In a previous post, I said that the Internet of Things (IoT) has increased the size and complexity of home networks. We had a new heating system installed recently that added a new dimension to our home IoT network: RedLINK ™, which, on the whole, was good for our home security.

Home network security sunrise
Home network security sunrise

IoT and network complexity

As networks increase in size and complexity, they become more difficult to manage and secure. Businesses hire technicians who are trained in security to manage their networks, which is usually a spendy proposition, but there is a lot at stake and security is one of many justifiable costs of doing business that accountants and managers prepare for.

Working from home network security

At home, we are in a different position. I’m not an accountant or a tax expert, so don’t take my word for it, but if your income is from a regular paycheck, the IRS probably will not allow you to deduct expenses derived from working at home. You might be able to convince your employer to reimburse you for these expenses, but be sure that the reimbursement will not be considered taxable income. In other words, in most cases, you secure your home network on your own nickel.

When I was working from home, most years, my employer, CA Technologies, permitted me a fixed amount on my expense account that I could request for working-from-home outlays. Not all employers do that, but take advantage if you can.

Since I retired and began writing books for extra income, I have deducted some for computing, network, and office overhead every year. I keep records of business expenses and have an accountant go over them to be sure they’ll pass an audit.

Home network security challenges

As a businessman, I don’t think I could justify investing much cash in our home network security. We are not juicy hacker bait. Although a successful attack could throw us in a world of hurt, it would not give a hacker much of a payday compared to even a moderately large business or agency.

Nevertheless, I worry about the security of our network. That means home network security is a DIY project for me. Fortunately, forty or so years in the computing industry has prepared me for this.

Securing HVAC

I’m working on methods to secure home networks that folks can do for themselves. In this post I will say something about securing home heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems (HVAC). This is an important topic for me because we just had a new heating system installed.

I was pleased to discover that our new system uses an alternative to standard Wi-Fi for communications. Sensors and controls connect wirelessly, but not the same way the rest of our computing gear connects.

IoT and Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi, the wireless network standard that almost every home network relies on, was designed with the capacity for data flows like streaming video, which is massive overbuilding for most IoT purposes. The data passing to and from IoT devices, with the exception of remote cameras and speakers, is typically miniscule compared to Wi-Fi loads.

There are several IoT platforms available that support low bandwidth communications. Our heating system uses the Honeywell RedLINK ™ platform specifically designed to support residential heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. It uses the 900 MHz band, which is a lower frequency than most Wi-Fi.

Lower frequencies have longer range and penetrate barriers like walls more easily than higher frequency signals. Thus, lower frequencies are more reliable and cover more area. The downside of lower frequency is lower data transfer rates, but for applications that don’t transmit a lot of data, like HVAC, lower data rates are fine.

A heating system that reports temperatures and humidity every 2 minutes from several sensors spread through a house is transmitting data at a trickle compared to streaming video, audio, and even sending a moderate size word-processing file. At 900 MHz, RedLINK ™ has better wall penetration and range than Bluetooth or typical Wi-Fi, which use 2.4 GHz and higher frequency bands. Even if Wi-Fi were unreliable in our house, I would expect RedLINK ™ to be solid.

Interference on the 900 MHz band

But the 900 MHz band is crowded. To begin, it’s designated for scientific, industrial, and medical device connectivity. Some cell phone and walkie-talkie type communications use it. Wireless telephone handsets often use the 900 MHz band. Amateur radio hobbyists also are permitted to use 900 MHz band signals. Consequently, in a residence, several devices might attempt to send a signal at the same frequency within the band at the same time. Colliding signals garble the message. This shows up as interference, which could be a big problem.

Frequency hopping

RedLINK ™, like Bluetooth, and the actress Hedy Lamar’s torpedo guidance system, has another trick: frequency hopping.

The military began to develop frequency hopping before WWI to protect battlefield radio messaging. By switching frequencies quickly in unison, the signal from transmitter to receiver never lingers long enough at a given frequency to degrade the overall message.

In addition, modern communication systems divide data into small chunks called packets that can be checked for consistency and resent if necessary. The combination of packet data and frequency hopping practically eliminates interference at low data volumes.

Canada geese
Canada geese sound a little like hopping frequencies

Changing frequencies also discourages interception and listening in on messages, but, unfortunately, the technology to follow most frequency hopping schemes is freely available now, so hopping is weak security, but it does effectively squelch interference on crowded bands.

Power consumption

The 900 MHz band consumes less power than higher frequency transmissions and batteries last longer. Since I don’t relish crawling into odd corners to change batteries on remote sensors, battery life is more important to me for IoT than other applications.

Proprietary protocol

A proprietary network protocol like RedLINK™ installs more easily and reliably than Wi-Fi for HVAC, but it tends to lock consumers into a single vendor. A version of the public Wi-Fi standard designed for low volume data transmission, called Wi-Fi HaLow, exists. But I haven’t found any HaLow equipment on the market.

Hacking RedLINK ™ could be devastating, essentially allowing a malicious invader to take over our heating system, making our lives uncomfortable, possibly wrecking our heating system, or setting our house on fire. I have no doubt that a diligent enough hacker could gain entrance to a RedLINK ™ network, but it would require detailed knowledge of a proprietary system, which would require a lot of effort for a low money skill.

A sigh of relief

In fact, I breathed a sigh of relief when I found that our thermostat doesn’t use Wi-Fi to communicate with our furnace. I am far more concerned with hacking our Wi-Fi system than RedLINK ™.

Issues remain

Our smart thermostat is attractive and easy to use because it’s a small but powerful  computer. This has drawbacks. For example, I found instructions on the internet for running the video game Doom on a model similar to the thermostat in our dining room. I worked on an application twenty-five years ago to rid corporate networks of that very game.

It’s not as bad as it may appear, but rogue Doom installations bear some scrutiny, which I will do in a future post.  More important, I have not enabled or begun to explore the app that connects a smartphone or other computer to the thermostat. This is a subject for a future post and an area for caution.

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Election Tampering: Y2K Fears Redux?

For the last few days, I’ve been reading reports on the Trickbot takedown. U.S. Cyber Command and Microsoft have been hitting the large botnet, called Trickbot, that is controlled from eastern Europe, most likely Russia, and appears to have been maneuvering to interfere with the November 3rd U.S. election. The takedown steps apparently were planned strategically to give the botmasters little time to rebuild before the election. I sincerely hope the strategy succeeds. And I hope, and believe, that the Trickbot takedown is only the tip of an iceberg in a battle that is freezing out cyberattacks on our election.

We survived Y2K fears.

Trickbot

Trickbot, a botnet, is a multi-purpose covert criminal supercomputer cobbled together from thousands of hacked Windows computers. The botnet’s design offers few clues to hack victims that their devices are secret participants in criminal cyber attacks. The Trickbot crimes are mostly ransomware exploits for illegal profit. For some background on botnets see Home Network Setup: Smart Kitchen Crisis.

Y2K fears

The reports reminded me of Y2K fears, the year 2000 computer scare of 20 years ago. I hope those efforts are as successful as the Y2K remediation, which were so successful, Y2K was called a hoax by those who did not understand the computer industry.

Y2K and Bolivian basket weavers

I remember the Y2K affair well. It was no hoax. Everyone in the computing industry knew trouble was coming. Already in the early 1980s the issue was a hot topic among engineers. The problem went back to the early days of computing when data storage was expensive. It’s hard to believe today, but in the early days, the fastest and most reliable computer memory was hand-crafted by weavers from copper wire and tiny donut shaped ferrite magnets called cores. My meatware memory is not entirely reliable, but I remember hearing that Bolivian basket weavers were recruited to manufacture woven core memory. The computers on the Apollo moon mission were based on hard-wired ferrite cores.

Today, we talk about terabytes (trillions of bytes) but in those days, even a single K (1012 bytes) of memory cost thousands of dollars. I guess everyone today knows that a byte is eight bits, a sequence of eight 0s and 1s. Each donut magnet in core memory represented a single 0 or 1. The costing rule of thumb for handcrafted core memory was $1 a bit. At that price, a terabyte of memory would cost 8 trillion dollars, roughly the market price of 8 Amazons.

In the 1960s and 70s, programmers did not waste storage. They saved a few bytes by storing the year as two digits. 1913 was “13” and 1967 was “67.”

Most business programs used “binary coded decimal.” Storing the year as 2 digits instead of 4 was a savings of 8 bits: at near eight bucks a bit, close to $70 in 2020 dollars. Put another way, today, the price of those two 1970 bytes will buy 2 terabytes of flash memory, delivered to your door by Amazon. That flash memory would have cost 16 trillion dollars in 1970, filled several warehouses, and probably generated enough heat to warm New England for the winter.

Dates and the year 2000

Dates are used heavily in business computing, somewhat less in scientific computing. Accounting, scheduling, supply chain management all depend on date calculations. Today most of these calculations are handled in a few standard code libraries that are used over and over, but those libraries did not exist when the programs that ran the world’s business in 1999 were written. Each time a program needed a date calculation, a programmer wrote code.

Man, did they write code. Programmers delight in rolling their own, writing their own code. Coming up with an entirely original mundane date calculation will make a skilled coder’s heart sing. And there is joy in writing code that looks like it does one thing and does something quite different. These tastes decree that given an opportunity, coders will come up with many obscure and abstruse ways to calculate and analyze dates.

When I was hiring coders, I challenged candidates to describe an algorithm to determine the late fee on an invoice payment if 1% was to be added for each calendar month that had passed after the date the invoice was cut. If you think that description’s a little vague, you’re right. A hidden part of the challenge was for the coder to determine exactly what I had asked for. I don’t believe I ever got two identical solutions, and some would have behaved wildly if the calculations had crossed the Y2K boundary.

The industry took Y2K seriously

For good reason, in the late nineties, the industry got serious about the approaching crisis.

Y2K was a big deal. By 1995, I, along with many of my colleagues, had intentionally forgotten how to code in COBOL, the mainframe programming language of most 20th century business programs that were at the heart of Y2K issues. I won’t say that COBOL is a bad language, but few programmers cared for its wordy style. The scarcity of COBOL programmers elevated the language to a money skill in the last days of the century.

Y2K in my products

At that time, I was managing the development of a service desk product that I had designed several years before. I was coding almost exclusively in C++ on Unix and Windows, which uses an internal representation for dates and times that would not, in theory, have Y2K problems.

Nevertheless, management, who didn’t know that our product was theoretically immune to Y2K, declared my Fiscal Year 2000 bonus would depend on the absence of Y2K errors in our code. I smiled when I read the letter that described my bonus terms. Most years, fickle market conditions that I could not influence decided my bonus. This time, my bonus was in the bag due to a wise previous decision to build on a platform that sidestepped the central Y2K issue.

Still, I don’t mess around with my bonus. I started feeding Y2K use cases into our test plans, just to be sure.

I’m glad I did. Management, bless their bottom-line focused hearts, were right to worry about Y2K. It’s been a long time, but I estimate my team spotted and fixed a dozen significant Y2K defects that could have brought the product down or caused crippling errors.

Our defects were not COBOL style issues, but they stemmed from the two-digit year mindset that then pervaded business coding. For example, serial numbers often embed a two-digit year somewhere. A clever developer might use that fact and create a Y2K defect from it.

If those dozen defects had kicked in simultaneously on New Year’s Eve, service desks would have begun failing mid-Pacific in a pattern that would repeat itself as New Year’s Day followed the sun around the globe to Hawaii the next day. That was in a product running on platforms that were supposedly immune to Y2K errors. The devil in it was that a service desk would be used to manage the response to incidents that arose from other Y2K system crashes, compounding the chaos.

A real threat

People who are not responsible for building and maintaining computer systems probably don’t realize what happens when a raft of defects appear at the same time. Troubleshooting the origin of a malfunction caused by a single mistake can be difficult. With two mistakes, the problem becomes more complex and confusing. Each added source compounds the difficulty. At a certain point, the system seems to behave randomly, and you want to delete the whole thing and start over.

In the bad old days, we often saw large software projects break in dozens of places at once when we fired up them up for the first time. We used to call it “big bang” testing. Since writing code is more fun than testing code, many developers embraced the methodology and put off testing. But untested code is buggy code. Those big bangs were intractable messes of defects that could take weeks and months to untangle. We soon learned to test small units of code early and often, before mild-mannered projects became monsters.

As testing proceeded in development labs, engineers began to recognize that Y2K threatened to be a mass conflagration like those big bang debacles. Worse. Y2K bugs were everywhere. Their corruption extended to hundreds of systems. Unremediated Y2K threatened software mayhem like I have never seen and hope to never to see.

The reaction

Some engineers seized the limelight by overreacting. Doomsday prophets got wind of what was happening in development labs all over the globe. They went to the media with predictions of the imminent collapse of financial systems, communications, and power grids, which threatened to halt the economy and provoke the mother of all economic disasters. ATMs and traffic lights were about to go out of control. The preppers stockpiled guns, freeze-dried chili, and toilet paper enough to isolate for months.

Y2K at CA Technologies

I checked in to the CA Technologies (then Computer Associates) development lab in Kirkland on the Seattle east side early in the morning of December 31, 1999. As the senior technology manager in Seattle, I had orders to gather a team of developers and support people to man an emergency response hotline. The idea was that any Computer Associates customer with any Y2K problem could call the hotline and get expert help. Most engineers thought this was a transparent marketing ploy to take advantage of fears that had been whipped to a frenzy by the doomsday crowd.

Highly publicized orders were issued that development teams were on the hook until the last Y2K customer issue was resolved. The company supplied special Y2K tee-shirts. A buffet of sandwiches and periodic deliveries of pizza and other snacks were set up in a large conference room we called the board room. A closed-circuit television feed from headquarters in New York was beamed onto a then-rare wall-sized flat video screen. Rumor said champagne was scheduled to arrive at midnight.

The big letdown

I honestly can’t remember if the bubbly ever appeared. Late in the afternoon, I told all my crew they could leave if they wanted. I had to stay until midnight, but there was no reason to spoil their New Year’s celebration.

Why? On the Pacific Coast, we were among the last time zones to flip to 2000. In the morning, a customer called to headquarters in New York with a minor problem in Australia. It was fixed in minutes–mostly a user misunderstanding as I recall. The Kirkland team was not called on once. Typical developers, the crew loaded up on free sandwiches and pizza, took the loot to their cubicles and silently worked on code. A few salespeople wandered in to check on the action; there was none.

After all the buildup, why the big meh? Because humans aren’t stupid. The industry responded to the danger with testing and fixing. I’ve seen and believe estimates that upwards of $200 billion were spent on Y2K remediation in the 1990s. That was money well-spent. Consequently, Y2K came and went with barely a ripple.

The Y2K hoax

I take it back about humans not being stupid. We immediately began to hear about the Y2K hoax, a conspiracy and scare tactic for whatever purpose the speaker or writer found convenient. I’m sure the loudest criers of hoax were the same loudmouths who screamed computer Armageddon. I’d like to roll back the calendar and give the world a taste of what would have happened if Y2K had been ignored.

Actually, I wish Y2K had been ignored outside the industry and the people who understood the problem were allowed to quietly fix it without all the noise.

But that wouldn’t be right either. We were not heroes. The cost of the Y2K remediation was the price of poor judgement. Acting as if it did not occur would only encourage future bad choices. The remediation was nothing to be proud of. The industry should be called to account.

Nonetheless, in my dark moments, I have no patience for people who broadcast opinions but don’t carry water, put out fires, and make things work. Not everyone was fortunate enough to be in on the action of Y2K, not everyone has the training and experience to know what it takes to keep our computer-dependent society viable.

Y2K and the general election

Which brings us back to the Trickbot takedown. November 3rd 2020 has begun to smell to me like the approach of January 1st 2000. I see real danger and a dead serious response. I’m not an active member of the cybersecurity community, but I keep up. I have no doubt that criminals, extremists from every corner of the political spectrum, and foreign nation-states are planning cyber attacks to extort payments from election agencies, stop people from voting, slow vote tallies, and question results.

Election tampering hoax

But I also see the seriousness and competence of the efforts to prevent and neutralize these bad actors. Some signs point to success. Already, two weeks before the election, 29 million voters have voted, almost five times the number that had voted at this point in 2016. I’m sure election day will be tough, but I will not be the least surprised to hear another big meh on November 4, followed by cries of “election interference hoax!” from every direction, but from my vantage now, it’s clear it is no hoax.

But I hope it looks like a hoax.

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Home Network Setup: Smart Kitchen Crisis

You may call it a smart kitchen. I call it a home network setup disaster: four hackable Linux computers installed and configured by kitchen appliance designers who are, at best, inexperienced in computer security. And I am ashamed to admit I didn’t put them through a security audit before we chose them. We wanted a convenient and efficient kitchen; I knew full well that my security worries would not have a voice in any decision.

Home network setup
Cool cat in smart refrigerator

Last week, Rebecca and I went shopping for new kitchen appliances: a refrigerator, range, hood, and microwave. We are not much attracted by network-connected kitchen appliance features—I supposed we’re old-fashioned in our cooking habits—but the appliances we chose all have Wi-Fi.

We had no choice. Appliances that are not networked are scarce in 2020. You either accept that your kitchen will be networked, or you shop for used appliances. Since replacing one set of used appliances with another set of used appliances was not on our agenda, we have four Internet of Things (IoT) devices scheduled for delivery.

IoT device security

Now, I am forced to think seriously about securing the home network setup of our kitchen against cyber-attack. Forty years ago, when the industry began to hook computers together with TCP/IP and Ethernet, I would never have guessed that home kitchen security would become a topic in 2020.

Why am I worried? I am not as frantic as my well-known colleague, Bruce Schneier, who wrote a popular book about the Internet of Things called Click Here to Kill Everybody, but I share his concerns. Most IoT devices are full-fledged multi-purpose computers: as powerful, versatile, and hackable as the workstations of only a few years ago.

The computer in our new three-speed range hood is more powerful than the coveted Sun SPARC that sat on my desk at Boeing Computer Services in the 90s. The computer in that range hood is also subject to almost any hack reported in the news over the last decade. Ransomware has shown up on a coffeemaker, of all places.

IoT botnets

To top it off, some security professionals expect large IoT botnets will be used in attempts to disrupt the U.S. national election next month by scrambling voter registration or bringing down vote tallying software.

A botnet is a collection of compromised computers under the central control of a botmaster who orchestrates the hacked devices. Thus, botnets are huge covert supercomputers that execute crimes like sending out waves of spam or jamming websites with meaningless traffic. Before the IoT, criminal gangs grabbed control of personal computers and enrolled them in botnets by tricking users into fiddling with fake email or installing bogus doctored applications. It’s easier now.

IoT devices have simplified criminal botnet recruiting. Some of these devices are so poorly secured, criminals can scan the network for vulnerable targets, then take over using default accounts and pathetically weak default passwords. In this way, enormous IoT botnets can be formed quickly with automated scripts.

Users don’t notice that their IoT devices have been invaded because they seldom interact directly with the device. We might never notice that our sleek new smart refrigerator has become a robot thug at the beck and call of a foreign national in a dacha overlooking the Volga river.

The IoT is growing uncontrollably

Log on to your home network router and look at the list of connected devices. I imagine our list is longer than most because my home office is practically a development lab with an assortment of Windows 10 lap and desktops and a Linux tower I use as a server. Both Rebecca and I have two smart phones each (one for phone calls, another without a cellular card for fun), and we also have several tablets distributed in various rooms. We also have smart TVs, Amazon Fire Sticks, and Alexas.

Every time I look at the router’s device list, it has grown longer. What used to be a cute two-line list of his and hers computers has become a configuration management database worthy of a fair-sized business. In the old days, I could glance at the list and know instantly that some bright neighbor kid was filching bandwidth. Now, puzzling it out is a job in itself. When our new appliances are installed, I imagine making sense of the network will get more difficult.

Home network setup crisis

Frankly, I’ve reached a home network management crisis. I no longer feel in control. I’m not sure I will know if I’ve been hacked.

This must change.

Fortunately for me, I’ve helped large enterprises manage their networks for a long time. My quiver has some razor sharp arrows. I can figure this out. No three-speed range hood will bring down our network.

I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time, basic computer hygiene will have to do. Check it out the six rules. They go a long way toward keeping you safe.

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Online Conferences and Covid-19

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Snow-Storm

Sounds cozy doesn’t it? Clustered around the fire, hot chocolate, spiced cider, hot buttered rum…

All friends shut out, the housemates sit…

Yeah. Right. We’ve been sitting around the fire with our housemates for what is it? Seven months now? That’s about long enough with our friends shut out, wouldn’t you say?

People bridle at the enforced privacy of pandemic lockdowns and social distancing. For me, the isolation is not so bad. I know the ropes of working from home and I’m an introvert.

I like and enjoy other people, but person to person encounters drain the life out of me. I know many of my friends are energized by getting together and breathing the same air with others, but it rarely works that way for me.

Pre-pandemic, I joined with a good friend or two for lunch regularly. Oh, I enjoyed those lunches, but when they were over, I exhaled a sigh of relief and took a nap to recover the energy I had lost. I used to think this personal quirk was a disadvantage, but now, I realize it is a boon not to be troubled by all this isolation. I’ve noticed that there are other folks like me, but in a group of ten, maybe only two of us.

The Washington Library Association online conference

This week, I’ve been participating in an online library conference. I’ve read that the online event business is booming. I can understand why. Online conferences are cheap and they work remarkably well; I prefer online conferences to the in-person species.

For attendees, traveling to and from these gatherings is expensive. Airfare, hotels, and meals cost, and time away from regular work costs more. On the event business side, conference hotels and centers are orders of magnitude more costly than electronic platforms. Speakers charge less to present electronically because presenting from a home or office takes less time and effort than crossing the country to check into a venue that is not much of a perk for a speaker who endures one-size-fits-all hotel décor several times a month.

As I understand it, the firms that stage these events have reduced their fees and made them back and more because the number of attendees has increased. This year, the Whatcom County Library System was able to purchase blanket admission to the Washington Library Association online conference that lets the entire library staff, and trustees attend rather than individual registrations.

I’ve gone to the Washington Library Association conference every year since I became a library trustee, but I almost decided not to go this year. I enjoy and benefit from attending, but the hectic move from our Ferndale house back to Waschke Road disrupted just about everything on top of the pandemic. Making it worse, I’ve started some time-consuming projects. I’ve always worked during conferences on a laptop or tablet, but this year, I’ve been able to work from my office in between conference events. It’s been great.

I have some suggestions for attending online conferences.

Schedule your time carefully

Attending a conference in person is a scheduling challenge. It’s easy to miss a session that you really wanted to attend because you skipped a page in the agenda, or you were distracted by a conversation with a colleague. When you’re attending from home, scheduling is more difficult because the events in your life are not built around the conference schedule— for example, your lunchtime may clash with sessions you want to attend. You can always listen to the recording, but that’s never the same. Review the agenda and plan ahead as carefully as you would in person.

Don’t multi-task

Efficiency experts liken multi-tasking to a speedway multi-car pileup. You get less done and what you do is seldom done well.

The temptation to multi-task is strong, especially attending a conference in your home office where you are likely to have several screens up and running. My usual home setup is a primary screen for the project I’m working on, another for online lookups, and a third for communications. I don’t have any trouble concentrating on my project at hand. For me, having one browser open to an online dictionary and another to email and Slack is the reverse of distracting: a quick side glance to a secondary screen and I’m back to the main subject. But when I have to fiddle opening and switching windows and desktops, I am distracted and likely to get stuck on whatever I have to bring up.

All those screens while listening to a conference presentation is different. Even the best presentations have dead spots that tempt me to look aside and process the current crop of sub-urgent communications or check on the latest minor question that’s been bugging me. Don’t do it! Boredom is lack of engagement. The instant I disengage, loss of interest in the presentation begins to snowball and before I know it, I am researching which village in Cornwall was most likely to have been the location of King Arthur’s round table, or some equally pressing subject, instead of taking a once in a lifetime chance to raise a question about tracking outcomes of library strategic initiatives. Yikes!

Take notes

I’m terrible at taking notes at conferences. While I am participating, new ideas and concepts pop into my head with crystal clarity that I couldn’t possibly forget. No need to write anything this exciting down.

Steller’s Jay eying the last thing that entered my head.

Sure. I’m seventy-one years old. If I’m distracted, the content of my head disappears with the cheerful readiness of a Steller’s Jay stealing peanuts. The arrival of the next idea clears my head of everything but lingering enthusiasm for whatever’s not there anymore. Come to think of it, the same thing happened 50 years ago when I was an undergraduate attending lectures.

Take notes, grasshopper.

Use chat

In the software development groups I used to lead, chat apps, like Slack, often were the key to productivity and communication. Most conferences have provisions for chatting among session attendees and community discussions. If you participate, chat takes the place of the conversations that go on in the hallways and over meals and drinks. Not perfect for establishing friendships, but chat discussions are often thoughtful, cogent, and well worth your time.

Remember, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” In a chat session, you’re as smart as what you say. Take time to think, be courteous, but don’t be shy.

Setup

Have your professional appearance, background, camera, microphone, and lighting set up before the conference begins. Not all sessions allow you to interact with the speakers, but when they do, be prepared as a courtesy to your fellow participants.

Your setup is like a pandemic mask. You wear it for others, not yourself. You won’t get any personal benefit from clear sound and a flattering Zoom image. Your questions will still be answered if you look like a bear in a cave and sound like a mouth full of crushed granite. And the chances that your boss will notice your setup are slim. Sorry, but this is true. However, think about your fellow participants. They want to be part of a professional and dignified group, not a pack of ill-fed scavengers. Give them a break. And a good appearance will make you feel better too.

I’m impatient with the pandemic. Like most people, I wish it were just over, but I’m a historian as well as an engineer. Plagues don’t disappear in a blink of the eye. They fade away with effects lingering for decades, even centuries. The plague in 14th century Europe is sometimes said to have lead to the Renaissance. We don’t know what the long term effect of covid-19 will be, but our best hope is to adapt to the snow storm, not fail at ignoring it.