Unsurprisingly, the weekend was a trip down memory lane. We sifted through boxes of files and crates of knick-knacks. We perused old photographs, flyers, newspaper clippings and notebooks. We flipped through late 60s yearbooks, marveling at the afros and beehives, and debated throwing out Consumer Reports magazines from 1982. Most of the momentos were from or about my parents. But some stretched back another generation, even two.

The oldest artifact survived from 1905 — a small, yellowing notebook bearing a cover price of 5¢ and the name “Hattie Nelson” — my maternal, maternal great-grandmother’s maiden name. Inside, repetitive lines of her tight, measured handwriting filled the fragile pages. The content revealed nothing — just grammar exercises, not at all personal or creative — but the style evoked a fading, past America that my generation can only know through legend.

Looking at the notebook, I wondered what Great Grandma Hattie looked like. And what her mother had looked like, and her mother before. Chances are, somewhere in some family vault lie photographs of at least five generations of my ancestors. Maybe six. Before that, photography was inaccessible to the masses, and I doubt any of my forefathers were rich enough to commission painted portraits. If I’m lucky to find that vault, I might be able to show my kids images of their great, great, great grandparents. Like Wolf Hausman, Lincoln’s middle-namesake, or William Flood, Evelyn’s middle-namesake. What a treat!

But what will happen if that vault goes undiscovered? Or its contents are lost, destroyed, thrown out? As my weekend of purging Dad’s house proved, material possessions can’t last forever. Eventually, all the physical photographs will disappear. All photos from my grandparents generation, my parents’ generation, even the photos of me as a kid — lost to an unrecorded past.

Not so, for Lincoln and Evelyn. They’ve been born in the age of digital — digital photography, digital video, digital mail, digital telephones, digital everything. Freed from the constraints of physical film and paper and ink, their photographs (and video, etc) exist only as data. And that data is indestructible, because it is nowhere and everywhere. It lives in the cloud of the Internet, stored on distributed and duplicated servers, unthreatened by physical realities. Its colors never fade.

In fact, Linc and Evie may be the first generation whose entire lives, from their moments of birth, will be documented and preserved for eternity. As in, forever. Or at least until the end of society as we know it. The cost of storing digital data is so low, why would any future generation throw out Lincoln’s “007 lbs” video? The task of finding digital data is so easy, how could any future generation lose Evelyn’s “Coming Home” movie? Though our digital storage technologies may (will) change, it seems unlikely that they’ll change enough to obviate early digital data. A thousand generations from now, Linc and Evie’s descendants will be able to know exactly what their great-to-the-thousandth-power-grandparents looked like — and whether they liked sweet potatoes, survived Hollywood fame, or tortured their adorable pets.

This seems like a profound historical shift. From my kids’ generation on, ancestors will never be lost. They will be searchable. And, quite likely, they will be overwhelmingly documented. Every photograph, video, email, text, IM, tweet, blog post and a zillion other digital data points will paint a robust picture of who they were. Their stories will live for a digital eternity.

How bizarre!

Check out the video, courtesy of Treehugger.com:

For months, I’ve been struggling with TateHausman.com. Someone (or more likely, some bot) hacked into my code and planted something ugly there. I couldn’t find it. And it started spewing out all sorts of nonsense — I think it was trying to sell Viagra to eastern Europeans. Or maybe Turks. I don’t know. As a result, Google dropped TateHausman.com from its rankings.

This was all pretty annoying, but not annoying enough that I did anything about it. Until my friend Roy came over. Roy is a computer systems professional. Unlike yours truly, he actually knows his way around code, instead of just pretend- pseudo- kinda-hacking like me.

Within 20 minutes, Roy had found the problem, (in the htaccess file, btw), isolated it, and fixed it. Within 2 days, Google had re-indexed the site. And now, finally, TateHausman.com is once again the top hit when you search for my name.

Thanks, Roy! For your genius detective work, I hereby reward you with a link to your clever but incomprehensible blog, forexroy.blogspot.com, about the ups and downs of foreign exchange currency trading. You helped me with the Google; here’s backatcha!

http://www.glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/

Here’s the straight explanation about it, including Beck’s attempt to silence the site in an international governing body (the type he’s railed against in the past). Great stuff.

I post this mostly to show off my ridonculously cute kid, but also to prove the immediate intimacy of web video. It took me 2 minutes to film, 5 minutes to upload to YouTube, and 5 minutes to write this post. 12 minutes, and now my friends on the other side of the globe can immediately see their gift in action. Pretty powerful!

A few months ago, Google dumped me. The blog software that runs TateHausman.com (Wordpress) had become infected with all sorts of spam-generating code. Malicious bots or hackers or viruses had weaseled their way deep into my website. They started spewing out all kinds of ugliness — credit card spam, refinancing spam, online poker spam, you name it.

To Google, it seemed like I’d become a different person. I wasn’t the same lovable blogger as when we first met. “You’re different,” Google told me. “You spend all day generating penis keywords. You never have anything nice to say. You don’t bring me flowers anymore.”

So Google dumped me. A few months ago, when you Googled “Tate Hausman,” TateHausman.com was the first result. Now TateHausman.com doesn’t even show up!

For months, I was depressed. Who wouldn’t be, after getting dumped by Google? The worst part was, I didn’t know how to win Google back. I tried every spurned lover trick in the book. I read the advice columns (”Google Help for Webmasters”). I started exercising (my anti-spam plugins). I cleaned up and got a new look (upgraded to Wordpress 2.6) I even went a couple times to church (of SEO).

Nothing worked. I couldn’t win my spiteful Google back.

Finally, I tried one last desperate act: I went to confessional. That is, the Wordpress.com support forums. There I laid bare my sins. “I let evil into my code,” I confessed. “I can’t do anything right. Help me, oh merciful web gods!”

I must have sounded pathetic, because a very kind soul responded to my plea. Screen name Whooami, a frequent poster at the Wordpress support forums. Whooami (who asked to remain anonymous in this post) offered a bunch of friendly suggestions for winning Google back. But they were beyond my technical skill level. I needed some real help. I asked for it.

Whooami offered to take a look at my code. It was exactly the kind of help I needed. I looked up Whooami’s profile and decided I should take a leap of faith. I sent Whooami my login info, and offered a bounty if my site could be fixed. I had no idea what to expect. Was Whooami a hack? A fraud?

Within 48 hours, and before any money was exchanged, Whooami had gone through my entire site, stripped all the bad code, upgraded me AGAIN to a newer version of Wordpress, and helped me configure my security settings to keep the spambots out.

Wow. I promptly PayPaled Whooami $100, even though I didn’t really have to, I suppose. Whooami and I had no contract. It was a job done entirely on faith. Blind trust in the network. I could have gotten burned. Whooami could have taken my login info and installed even more malicious code, or erased TateHausman.com from the map. Instead, I got exactly what I wanted — another chance with Google.

No, Google hasn’t come back to me quite yet. I still haven’t been re-indexed and accelerated to the top of the search pile. But nobody said that winning back an ex was easy!

And no matter what happens with Google, I’ve fallen back in love with the Internet. Where else can you post a desperate plea, meet an angel named Whooami, and have your problem solved in 48 hours for $100?

So if you ever have any Wordpress or spambot or security problems on your website, don’t be afraid to ask Whooami for help. I would be happy to give you Whooami’s email address for you to get directly in contact … with HER!

(Yeah, a female anti-spam white hat hacker … how awesome is that?)

Meaning, of course, that she started out with a ton of great press and is about to quickly, brutally flame out. Like the Pet Rock. Or New Coke. The revelations about Palin just keep getting weirder:

• Her 17-year-old is pregnant out of wedlock.
• She belonged to an Alaskan political party that favors succeeding from the U.S.
• She claimed to have visited four countries outside the U.S. — Canada, Germany, Kuwait and Ireland — except now it comes out that Ireland was only a refueling stop on the way to Germany.
• She’s got a drunk driving arrest on her record.
• … and that’s in the first 3 days!

What, oh what, was John McCain thinking? Enjoy your Segway while you can, Johnny…

I recently had the pleasure of meeting a super-smart Internet security analyst, Andrew Jaquith. He gets paid to understand how hackers, spammers and web criminals make money off us, the unsuspecting online masses. How cool of a job is that? Clearly, I’d found the guy to answer my nagging spam questions.

I’ve always wondered how spammers hide their money tracks. Once you start dealing in real dollars, I assumed, it should be fairly easy to follow the money. If someone clicks through a Viagra spam and actually plunks down a credit card, that money gets transfered to a real bank account somewhere. Even if the money gets passed from account to account, in and out of Switzerland or the Bahamas, shouldn’t authorities be able follow the money trail to an ultimate recipient? I always assumed spammers wouldn’t stoop to the level of real-world money laundering … way too meatspace for online criminals. Then how to launder the profits?

One common spammer scheme, Andrew explained to me, involves World of Warcraft (WoW). Spammers set up bank accounts to receive the original purchase. Once the money hits that account, the spammers use it to “buy” digital currency — WoW gold. Gold is usually used to buy digital swords and armor and the like from other players. Those items can be given to another “player’s” account (also controlled by the spammer), sold to a third party to recoup the gold, and then extracted from the game as real dollars. Since the authorities are nowhere near smart enough to trace hand-offs inside World of Warcraft, poof! The money trail has disappeared.

So the next time a strange warlock offers to sell you an incredibly valuable Pegasus, you may want to think twice!

I’ve been in Florida for the past few days, visiting my 93-year-old grandmother Marie. One of my favorite pastimes is hearing her tell old family stories. This trip, her stories focused on her father, August Henkel. Gus, as he was known, was a working artist of German decent who lived in Queens, NY, back when Queens was more farmland than suburb. His lithographs hang throughout my grandmother’s house — beautiful, emotive scenes from another era. To his family, he was a gentle, wise, hard-working father of three. To the government, he was an enemy of the state.

Turns out my great grandfather was a pacifist and a free-thinker, at a time when war and conformity crushed dissent. He left his church, my grandmother told me, during World War I, when the hawkish pastor of his Lutheran congregation invoked a blessing on the guns of American soldiers. “The pastor literally had guns on the altar,” my grandmother told me, “and Gus watched him as he prayed that the guns would ‘find their targets and destroy their enemies.’ And Gus said to himself, ‘Can this be? How can this same man, who preaches about Jesus Christ, peace on earth and the brotherhood of men, how can he bless killing and destruction?’ Gus left and never came back.”

And that’s where my grandmother’s memory left off. But not the Internet’s.

A Google search on August Henkel reveals that Gus joined (or at least attended a service at) the Church of the Social Revolution in 1917. Remember, this was during the height of America’s war fever. Woodrow Wilson was ramming through the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, to stifle dissent in a time of war. Socialist, Communists and Wobblies everywhere were getting their heads cracked or spending time in jail. Not a great time to be a peacenik.

On a dramatic June Sunday in 1917, Gus participated in a peace ceremony at the Church of Social Revolution. The ceremony included boiling a cauldron of water and dumping in it flags from all over the world — literally, creating a “melting pot.” Gus thought this symbolized the common blood and brotherhood of all men. The US government thought it was treason.

Gus was tried, found guilty of desecrating the flag, and sentenced to a $100 fine and 30 days in the workhouse. He accepted the sentence with characteristically good cheer. “Oh well,” he apparently said. “That’s what happens when you have a capitalist press teaming up with a capitalist government.” And he managed to stay out of the headlines for the next 20 years.

In 1939, Gus was working for the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration. The FAP was a Depression-era program that employed thousands of out-of-work artists, including giants like Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko. Often, their jobs were to decorate public buildings with large-scale murals. Gus’s charge was Floyd Bennett Field, New York City’s first big airport. Inspired by aviators of history and mythology, Gus started in on a 900 square foot mural depicting the Wright Brothers, Lindbergh, Icarus, Earhart … and a man that looked a lot like Stalin. Oh, and a very prominent red star.

Was he trying to make a pro-communist declaration of hate against America? Or were the mustache’d strongman and red star simply artistic choices gone awry? My grandmother thinks the later. The US government thought the former. Once again, Gus went on trial — this time, primarily in the press — and was declared a red, a commie, a subversive, and any number of colorful invectives reserved for those who did not fully support America and its war effort. The murals were ripped down and burned. Gus never held a government contract again. The FAP was disbanded within a year.

My wife and I asked grandma Marie to describe the murals. Aside from their dimensions and general composition, and what we could all read in the press, there wasn’t much to say. Her memory didn’t reach back that far.

But the Internet’s did.

After just a few seconds of poking through the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art, we came upon three amazing old photographs of the Floyd Bennett Field murals in progress. One depicts Eugene Chodorow, Gus’s junior partner, painting the side of the enormous airplane hangar with an imposing propeller in the foreground. Another shows Chodorow standing at the same mural, with a young boy reclining on a plane’s wing and a hunched figure in the lower left corner. And the third shows Gus. Brush to the canvas, his intense eyes are set on the camera, somewhere between weary and determined. An artist at work. My great grandfather, the radical, at work.

I wake up every day and use the Internet for business, for play, for friends. I rarely use it to travel back in time. Today I did. And frankly, I’m relieved that the Internet has a better memory than me.

A few months ago, I realized that my generation will be the first for which
no history will be lost. All our records are digital. Barring a catastrophic breakdown of society, our progeny will be able to trace our digital footprints for centuries — indeed, for millennia — to come. After finding mere traces of my great grandfather, I’m left hungry for more. And also left glad that my great grandchildren will be able to find these exact footprints, the ones that I am leaving right now, on this peculiar time machine we call the Internet.