Nastier than a virus
September 3, 2001 | 12:00am
I got the shock of my life last Friday when a friend of mine – one of the university’s and the country’s top scientists – wrote me a very polite e-mail note acknowledging receipt of a message I was supposed to have sent him earlier, charging him $100 for a repair job I was doing on his laptop computer, ending with the warning "Huwag mo akong lolokohin, kung akala mo maloloko mo ako, huwag ka na lang magpagawa sa akin."
The other part of the message seemed credible enough, and was based on an earlier and entirely cordial exchange of messages between us. The only trouble with this last message was that I never sent it; someone had hijacked my e-mail account or address (yup, the "penmanila" one below), and had used it to send a fabricated and utterly malicious warning to my friend. Only a quick phone call and my friend’s goodwill saved the day.
How can these things happen? If you really want to know, there are manuals all over the Web (and even in print – in a recent issue of MacAddict, for example) that give detailed instructions on how to send e-mail "from" somebody else’s address. I routinely get mail at my Hotmail account from me to me, so often that I don’t bother opening the messages anymore, which usually involve some kind of sales pitch, annoying but harmless.
This particular turn, however, was nastier than a virus in its execution and intent. It means that someone has been combing through my inbox and reading my messages for the express purpose of making trouble between me and my addressees.
Now, I’m no saint, and I do admit to firing off the occasional ill-tempered missive when sufficiently provoked. I suppose that’s what gets my goat, here. I want to be able to pick my own fights, thank you, no need to be so helpful.
I have my own short list of suspects – one of whom must realize that this game can be played both ways, and that the same instructions that tell you how to hack into someone’s account also tell you how to run a trace on the Internet.
Meanwhile, I disavow any knowledge of and responsibility for the purchase or the offer of Porsche convertibles, inflatable dolls, swampland in Florida, and cheap cell phones from the address penmanila@ yahoo.com. Affiant further sayeth none.
On a more pleasant note, let me be one of the first to publicly congratulate my fellow Philippine STAR Lifestyle columnist, beer buddy, and literary kuya (a distinction for which I suppose being born nine years ahead of me qualifies him eminently) Krip Yuson, for two recent milestones: his election as the new chairman of the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas or UMPIL, and his ascension to the Palanca Hall of Fame.
These good things couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, not that niceness has anything to do with literary talent.
But when they happen to Krip, it’s justice, considering that no one else takes the kind of trouble he does to keep good writing alive in this country, both by helping new writers along and promoting the work of their seniors – all this, while managing to write the odd poem to keep his own flame burning.
You won’t find a more thoughtful friend, either, the one who remembers everybody’s birthday and sends a lovely gift (something I have been hopelessly rotten at).
Now, again, Krip didn’t win his fifth Palanca first Prize for being Kris (Krip?) Kringle – but it won’t hurt to celebrate the event with a tub of beer and a shot or two of his favorite Laphroaig.
My Philippine Science High School batch celebrates its 30th year of life after graduation this week (the PSHS Foundation Day is on Sept. 5) and, to mark the event, I wrote up this little piece:
One Sunday morning, just a little over a year-and-a-half ago, I was lounging in my chair in our apartment in Norwich – an idyllic corner of Southeastern England, where I had gone on a nine-month writing fellowship – when I was overcome by a great pang of longing: a longing to reconnect with long-lost friends, to make good use of idle time by seeking them out across space and, in many cases, across time.
I might have been spurred by the recent death of another colleague – not a PSHSer, but she might as well have been one, for her intelligence – in a plane crash on Samal Island in Davao; she died instantly, with her husband and two children.
Thirty-five years ago, death was the last thing on my mind and, I’m sure, on the minds of the hundred-plus 12- and 13-year-olds in my batch of entering freshmen (or "zero-year" students, as we were called). The future was a broad and luminous horizon, full of hope and idealism. It seemed that, except for whining over small discomforts, all we knew how to do was smile. And yes, of course, be smart and act smart, like the blessed people we were supposed to be.
Graduation, college, marriage, and the many aftermaths of adulthood would change much of that. Our batch’s first death was a political one: Cecilio Reyes would die in Davao in the late 70s, a hero in a dirty war; the rest, increasingly, would be more prosaic, losses to assorted cancers, heart attacks, accidents.
That Sunday in Norwich, as I looked out my picture window at a scene of absolute beauty and wonder – a shimmering lake adorned by swans, and dandelions making a golden carpet of the grass – I decided that I would do what I could to celebrate life and companionship, the only sane response we can make to the inevitability of decay and death.
Like the weekend geek I fancied myself to be, I took it upon myself to set up an e-groups list for my batch. Within an hour, working from a list of e-mail addresses earlier compiled by our de facto batch coordinator, Moy Santiago, I was able to bring many of us, wherever we were on the planet, within a few mouse clicks of one another. We had entered the future – but more importantly, we had re-entered the common space we once inhabited, the playground, garden, and perhaps only incidentally the schoolroom we keep coming back to in our memories for the rest of our lives.
Going and meeting on-line may seem the most logical thing to do for recent PSHS alumni, but even to a batch that produced the UP’s present Dean of the College of Engineering, Egay Atanacio (one of our few certified geeks), it took nothing less than what columnists and speechwriters like to call "political will" for most of us to clamber aboard the Internet and toss our typewriters into the ocean for G4 and Pentium III machines.
You’d have to remember that we belong to a generation of PSHS students who carried slide rules to class and to whom a calculator – something that could have been as big and as thick as a pocketbook, with large red or green numbers glowing in the display – was a thing of wonder.
We’d heard about computers, but had yet to see one. In the mid-60s, they were probably still the size of buses, and not even a science high school could afford one in the lab. Speaking of buses, our one and only school bus was rotting in the backyard by the time our batch (PSHS’s third) took our places in classrooms with accordion walls and wooden jalousies.
In any event, we were more interested in making discoveries about the Beatles, the Justice League of America, and the opposite sex (not necessarily in that order) than in the periodic table and Avogadro’s Number. It was our last fling with innocence, and we made the most of it, as only the truly innocent can. We pretended to be 18-year-olds, shamelessly securing fraudulent cedulas at City Hall, just so we could sneak into The Graduate and Barbarella; some of us (unhappily not me) went even further, sampling the nightlife of a certain district called Calumpang, across the Marikina River. Like the men they would grow up to be, the boys among us had no idea what the girls were thinking, nor did they, at that point, particularly seem to care.
Ours was the batch in a hurry to leave high school. Enamored of a girl who was entering college and leaving me in the dust two years behind, I embarked (as school paper editor) on a crusade to cut the five-year curriculum down to four, or even three, years, on the logical (and entirely, ahem, selfless) proposition that smarter people needed less schooling. Miraculously, the measure passed, and one truly unique section – the "Ruby" seniors – left school in September, the only 4-1/2 year batch in PSHS history.
That alone should have made us feel extra special in a school of special people. One of the things you never have to worry about in the company of like-minded batchmates is the possibility of the other person not getting your joke. Wit and witticisms come naturally to Science High graduates; we take our IQs for granted, and as high-schoolers with little else to show for our lives, it was what we cherished most, a kind of charm or talisman against pain and sorrow.
But as the years passed, we would find – like most other PSHSers – that it was much more than IQ that bound us together; it was, rather, the very adult realization that it took much more than raw intelligence to find happiness and success. The older we got, the more normal our lives became – except that our intelligence continued to assert itself, no longer in schoolboyish arrogance, but in what would sometimes be a humbling and burdensome self-awareness: a knowledge of how little one knew and how little one really was in the grand scheme of things. IQ had begun to give way to something more meaningful.
Today, more than three decades after graduation, we meet and frolic on-line, cracking the same old jokes and carrying pretty much the same old images of one another, updated only for the life that must follow after age 16. We commiserate with one another over our losses, divorces, and sundry disasters – and celebrate our gains, if not in money or wisdom, then at least in sheer heft and raw experience. We may be fewer in number and much older in age, but it doesn’t seem to matter much; in the facelessness of e-mail, we can all be 14, 15, and 16 again, deathless and irrepressible.
Send nice e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
The other part of the message seemed credible enough, and was based on an earlier and entirely cordial exchange of messages between us. The only trouble with this last message was that I never sent it; someone had hijacked my e-mail account or address (yup, the "penmanila" one below), and had used it to send a fabricated and utterly malicious warning to my friend. Only a quick phone call and my friend’s goodwill saved the day.
How can these things happen? If you really want to know, there are manuals all over the Web (and even in print – in a recent issue of MacAddict, for example) that give detailed instructions on how to send e-mail "from" somebody else’s address. I routinely get mail at my Hotmail account from me to me, so often that I don’t bother opening the messages anymore, which usually involve some kind of sales pitch, annoying but harmless.
This particular turn, however, was nastier than a virus in its execution and intent. It means that someone has been combing through my inbox and reading my messages for the express purpose of making trouble between me and my addressees.
Now, I’m no saint, and I do admit to firing off the occasional ill-tempered missive when sufficiently provoked. I suppose that’s what gets my goat, here. I want to be able to pick my own fights, thank you, no need to be so helpful.
I have my own short list of suspects – one of whom must realize that this game can be played both ways, and that the same instructions that tell you how to hack into someone’s account also tell you how to run a trace on the Internet.
Meanwhile, I disavow any knowledge of and responsibility for the purchase or the offer of Porsche convertibles, inflatable dolls, swampland in Florida, and cheap cell phones from the address penmanila@ yahoo.com. Affiant further sayeth none.
These good things couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, not that niceness has anything to do with literary talent.
But when they happen to Krip, it’s justice, considering that no one else takes the kind of trouble he does to keep good writing alive in this country, both by helping new writers along and promoting the work of their seniors – all this, while managing to write the odd poem to keep his own flame burning.
You won’t find a more thoughtful friend, either, the one who remembers everybody’s birthday and sends a lovely gift (something I have been hopelessly rotten at).
Now, again, Krip didn’t win his fifth Palanca first Prize for being Kris (Krip?) Kringle – but it won’t hurt to celebrate the event with a tub of beer and a shot or two of his favorite Laphroaig.
One Sunday morning, just a little over a year-and-a-half ago, I was lounging in my chair in our apartment in Norwich – an idyllic corner of Southeastern England, where I had gone on a nine-month writing fellowship – when I was overcome by a great pang of longing: a longing to reconnect with long-lost friends, to make good use of idle time by seeking them out across space and, in many cases, across time.
I might have been spurred by the recent death of another colleague – not a PSHSer, but she might as well have been one, for her intelligence – in a plane crash on Samal Island in Davao; she died instantly, with her husband and two children.
Thirty-five years ago, death was the last thing on my mind and, I’m sure, on the minds of the hundred-plus 12- and 13-year-olds in my batch of entering freshmen (or "zero-year" students, as we were called). The future was a broad and luminous horizon, full of hope and idealism. It seemed that, except for whining over small discomforts, all we knew how to do was smile. And yes, of course, be smart and act smart, like the blessed people we were supposed to be.
Graduation, college, marriage, and the many aftermaths of adulthood would change much of that. Our batch’s first death was a political one: Cecilio Reyes would die in Davao in the late 70s, a hero in a dirty war; the rest, increasingly, would be more prosaic, losses to assorted cancers, heart attacks, accidents.
That Sunday in Norwich, as I looked out my picture window at a scene of absolute beauty and wonder – a shimmering lake adorned by swans, and dandelions making a golden carpet of the grass – I decided that I would do what I could to celebrate life and companionship, the only sane response we can make to the inevitability of decay and death.
Like the weekend geek I fancied myself to be, I took it upon myself to set up an e-groups list for my batch. Within an hour, working from a list of e-mail addresses earlier compiled by our de facto batch coordinator, Moy Santiago, I was able to bring many of us, wherever we were on the planet, within a few mouse clicks of one another. We had entered the future – but more importantly, we had re-entered the common space we once inhabited, the playground, garden, and perhaps only incidentally the schoolroom we keep coming back to in our memories for the rest of our lives.
Going and meeting on-line may seem the most logical thing to do for recent PSHS alumni, but even to a batch that produced the UP’s present Dean of the College of Engineering, Egay Atanacio (one of our few certified geeks), it took nothing less than what columnists and speechwriters like to call "political will" for most of us to clamber aboard the Internet and toss our typewriters into the ocean for G4 and Pentium III machines.
You’d have to remember that we belong to a generation of PSHS students who carried slide rules to class and to whom a calculator – something that could have been as big and as thick as a pocketbook, with large red or green numbers glowing in the display – was a thing of wonder.
We’d heard about computers, but had yet to see one. In the mid-60s, they were probably still the size of buses, and not even a science high school could afford one in the lab. Speaking of buses, our one and only school bus was rotting in the backyard by the time our batch (PSHS’s third) took our places in classrooms with accordion walls and wooden jalousies.
In any event, we were more interested in making discoveries about the Beatles, the Justice League of America, and the opposite sex (not necessarily in that order) than in the periodic table and Avogadro’s Number. It was our last fling with innocence, and we made the most of it, as only the truly innocent can. We pretended to be 18-year-olds, shamelessly securing fraudulent cedulas at City Hall, just so we could sneak into The Graduate and Barbarella; some of us (unhappily not me) went even further, sampling the nightlife of a certain district called Calumpang, across the Marikina River. Like the men they would grow up to be, the boys among us had no idea what the girls were thinking, nor did they, at that point, particularly seem to care.
Ours was the batch in a hurry to leave high school. Enamored of a girl who was entering college and leaving me in the dust two years behind, I embarked (as school paper editor) on a crusade to cut the five-year curriculum down to four, or even three, years, on the logical (and entirely, ahem, selfless) proposition that smarter people needed less schooling. Miraculously, the measure passed, and one truly unique section – the "Ruby" seniors – left school in September, the only 4-1/2 year batch in PSHS history.
That alone should have made us feel extra special in a school of special people. One of the things you never have to worry about in the company of like-minded batchmates is the possibility of the other person not getting your joke. Wit and witticisms come naturally to Science High graduates; we take our IQs for granted, and as high-schoolers with little else to show for our lives, it was what we cherished most, a kind of charm or talisman against pain and sorrow.
But as the years passed, we would find – like most other PSHSers – that it was much more than IQ that bound us together; it was, rather, the very adult realization that it took much more than raw intelligence to find happiness and success. The older we got, the more normal our lives became – except that our intelligence continued to assert itself, no longer in schoolboyish arrogance, but in what would sometimes be a humbling and burdensome self-awareness: a knowledge of how little one knew and how little one really was in the grand scheme of things. IQ had begun to give way to something more meaningful.
Today, more than three decades after graduation, we meet and frolic on-line, cracking the same old jokes and carrying pretty much the same old images of one another, updated only for the life that must follow after age 16. We commiserate with one another over our losses, divorces, and sundry disasters – and celebrate our gains, if not in money or wisdom, then at least in sheer heft and raw experience. We may be fewer in number and much older in age, but it doesn’t seem to matter much; in the facelessness of e-mail, we can all be 14, 15, and 16 again, deathless and irrepressible.
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