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This Week's Featured
Recording: for Friday, January
14 "Resignation" by
Marteau Based on an anonymous
hymn tune (appearing in Southern Harmony,
1835), it is often set to the text "My
Shepherd Will Supply My Need" and it is in
this guise that it was sung by The Chorale, a
community choral organization whose founding
director, Julie Beyler, died last November. I
was on hand as a former accompanist of the
group, to play for her memorial service, which
took place at my former church in Illinois.
This piano setting of the tune was one of the
many musical selections that were a part of
the celebration of her life and its impact on
the people of East Central Illinois.
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Building
Walls January
14, 2022
In the first part of 2021,
this website's foreign audience began
to drop rather alarmingly. I should
mention that I usually drew about half
my audience from outside The United
States. There was a time when I was
apparently rather popular in China,
for instance, with a few recordings
getting thousands of listens a month.
Then the British newspaper The
Guardian linked to a page of mine and
I got some admiring email from some
very nice English folk. I had no idea
what it was about at first because the
newspaper hadn't asked ahead of time!
I must rather sheepishly admit that it
does seem a bit more fun to find out
that you have someone reading your
site from Indonesia than North Dakota,
though a person is a person and it
really shouldn't make a difference how
far away they are located.
Occasionally I can see that one of my
articles has been read in translation,
which, given my own experiences with
Google Translate, probably means that
some of the sentences read like sheer
nonsense. At least the music is the
same in any language; how it is
received, of course, varies in ways I
can't imagine.
It took the better part of a year, and
a tip from a friend abroad, to figure
out what had happened. I kept
suspecting the wrong party and
thinking it had something to do with
The Almighty Google, or to its
analytics. There was a time when you
could choose to target a domestic
audience, but except for a brief
experiment I've always tried to cast a
wide net. I think that feature must be
gone now, anyhow.
When I realized the culprit I felt
kind of silly for not fingering it
earlier. There is a theme in various
sectors of my experience and it seems
to be this: safety is important, so
let's make sure none of the bad people
get in. Which seems reasonable, except
that it can also result in nobody else
getting in either. I've seen, and
frankly, continue to see this in
physical spaces (such as where I
work); in terms of a website, the
security settings were up so high that
apparently people from all countries
that were not the United States were
being blocked. Doesn't that seem a
bit, well, xenophobic?
I thought so. My web host uses a
security firm called Cloudflare, just
like, it seems, the rest of the known
cyberworld. When I suggested they not
jack up the security settings quite so
high, they readily agreed to do it. If
I wanted to allow another country into
the green zone, why, I should just
tell them and they would include it.
Where was I getting my traffic from in
the past? This assumed I'd have to let
other countries in one at a time. And
even though the list of countries
where English in the primary language
is fairly small, it is still quite
possible to leave some out by
accident. And it assumes that people
who might have to translate my
articles, or would just like to listen
to the music couldn't get in. Couldn't
we look at it from another angle?
Where are these threats mostly coming
from? Well, they said, there have been
lots of attacks from Russia and China
(no surprise). Fine, I said, then
let's just leave them out. I feel kind
of bad about that, given that I'm sure
there would be some legitimate traffic
from China (at least, if the
government would allow it). But, at
least the rest of the world doesn't
all get labelled as one great big
security risk. There's still a fair
bit of stereotyping going on, though.
It's not as though the internet is
just one rosy, harmless place. For a
while I tended to keep a close eye on
my traffic, and I noticed that my site
got occasional robot attacks. At first
it was obvious. Suddenly 85 people
from the same town in Russia were on
my site at once. righhhht... These
manifest as sudden spikes in traffic,
and they never seemed to actually
cause any harm, other than to inflate
my apparent audience. Eventually,
these attacks changed locations to
friendlier countries (it is possible
to appear to come from just about
anywhere you are not if you know how),
and later on they even sometimes
appeared to come from the United
States. Some of these were probably
not attacks so much as web crawls by
some company trying to gather data.
For instance, I now know where the
headquarters of Amazon is located. I
don't know why they need to crawl my
site weekly. But they need to remain
omniscient, after all.
Once there was the guy who kept
registering new websites with
suspiciously similar names so I
couldn't block him. If I blocked the
site, he was back the next day with a
new one. These sites all had "SEO" in
the title, which is an IT term
referring to how to get The Google,
et. al, to notice your website and
give it a high ranking so people
looking for what you are selling find
your site first. For whatever reason
he always registered these sites under
his real name, which you can lookup in
a directory that the company in charge
of domain names on the internet
(ICANN) keeps. I tried reporting him,
but...yeah. I'm sure that will do a
lot.
This was a few years ago, and I can't
even remember how I eventually blocked
him for good. Anyhow, my point is that
I'm not dense. Stuff happens out here.
But if our answer is to put up the
walls so high that nobody can get over
them, then in addition to blocking
some bad actors, you lose most of your
real audience, too. That is not an
acceptable solution. I would have a
website if I just wanted to play the
piano in my own living room just for
my own pleasure. I mean, I do that,
too, but...
It is a challenge to be inviting and
friendly and still manage to protect
yourself from people who would do you
harm. We've all seen examples of
persons who over-estimate the danger
to themselves and wind up being a
danger to others. And we are steeped
in a culture in which casual hatred of
people who are not in your "in-group"
can once again be broadcast publicly.
All of these decisions, made by both
leaders and the people they govern,
spread like tentacles, affecting
everything.
I hadn't thought it was going to
strangle my web traffic, but here we
are. And if you are here, from
anywhere, down the street or around
the world, why, thank you. Pull up a
chair and listen to some Schubert or
something.
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