Lessons from Dangerous Computer Domains

"The world is getting to be such a dangerous place, a man is lucky to get out of it alive." – W. C. Fields

The author of that joke lived a long time ago, but the world is still a dangerous place. You can lead a life that brings you down the path of death, or a path that leads you toward life.

Let me see if an analogy from technology can help us. To re-phrase W. C. Fields, "The Internet is getting to be such a dangerous place, a computer is lucky to get out alive." The constant threat of a virus, malware, can kill them.

It has been said many times in our wired world that the Internet has created a global society - an environment where people from many different countries and cultures connect as neighbors, conduct business and explore the myriad ways in which humans live and work in the world. Thirty years ago, few people would have thought it possible to sit in your house and have the world readily available, traveling across the globe with just a few clicks of what would become known as a "mouse."

However, although the advent of the 'Net has revolutionized the way we live, work and do business, it has also brought to light some of the seamier aspects of human life. Because nobody really "runs" or controls the Internet, it is a wide-open smorgasbord of the sublime, the ridiculous and, most disturbingly, the salacious and the downright scary. Little did we know that little mouse would lead us down a rabbit hole of both wonder and wickedness.

Like any big city, or even like the countries of the globe, the Internet has some good and bad neighborhoods, each of which is known by its "domain." For the nontechnical person, the domain is the dot-whatever you type in when entering a Web address (.com, .net, .edu, .gov, etc.). The domain is the realm and designation of the Web site's type and/or origin, and different countries often have different domains (.us for U.S. government sites, .ca for Canada, .ru for Russia and the like). Like different neighborhoods, cities and countries, however, different domains can get different reputations based on the character of the people who "populate" them. Some domains are delightful, and some are downright devilish.

I try to keep up with this stuff. I got caught once when a harmless site for free wall paper and backgrounds got bought out by some pornography group. That was just odd. On Facebook, you get caught by clicking on something that appears relatively harmless and interesting, and suddenly there is a shot of someone or something that you would not want.

The point is, it is dangerous out there for you and for your computer.

Such dangers for our computers have also led companies to help us in protecting them. McAfee, a leading provider of Internet security for personal computers, recently released its list of the most dangerous domains on the Internet. The report was titled "Mapping the Mal Web" ("mal," of course, being shorthand for malicious, or the Spanish word for "bad" - you get the point). Spending too much time clicking around a dangerous domain can be bad for your computer - what with all the viruses, malware and spyware out there.

Some domains are unavoidable and are rated bad because of sheer volume. McAfee's number-one dangerous domain, for example, is the .com family of sites. It is by far the most prevalent domain, so it is the most likely to mess up your machine if you are not careful. Second is the .info (information) domain. This one might seem to be misplaced, but it may be a classic example of the adage, "Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it." Rounding out the top five are the domains of three Third World countries: .vn (Vietnam), .cm (Cameroon) and .am (Armenia). A good rule of thumb is that places you would not think of as a vacation spot are probably places you should avoid on the Internet, as well.

By contrast, the five safest domains are places you would probably like to go. The safest is .travel (used by travel-industry sites), followed by .edu (education), which is used by colleges and universities. The others are all seemingly nice countries: .jp (Japan), .cat (Catalan - a region of Spain) and .gg (Guernsey - an island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy, France, that is a possession of the United Kingdom).

In other words, the computer on the Internet is kind of like a human life, which has plenty of dangerous paths down which to travel. Human life needs some “anti-virus” and “mal-ware” protection for it.

It is not only your computer that can be affected by the disreputable activity of a dangerous domain. Perhaps even more insidious is the effect it can have on the person viewing what the domain is trying to push. Pornography sites, gambling sites, get-rich-quick sites, certain chat rooms and social-networking sites - all these are likely sources for both computer viruses and sickness of the soul. Addictions to these soul-crushing images and activities are a form of slavery to the real masters of the domain: evil, sin and spiritual death.

This reflection on “domains” makes me think of Paul, in his discussion of just two domains. We find it in Romans 6:12-23. We learn that Paul also had a concern for dangerous domains, long before McAfee ever hit the scene. His concern was for the realm or domain of sin and its ability to enslave us to its power. He invites us to live in another domain, one that is life-giving. As we learn with Paul, the point is not so much to “try,” but to abide “in Christ,” thereby letting the fruit of such abiding come forth in our lives.

Fracticals and Human Life

Where in nature do we see straight lines, exact triangles, perfect circles and other standardized shapes? Nowhere. As mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, a man I will tell you more about in a moment, put it, "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." Nature does not follow traditional Euclidian geometry.

Let us think for a moment about the lowly cauliflower, for example. If we want to get some sense of measurement of a cauliflower head, we can easily weigh it and come up with a number. However, if we want to measure its surface, we have great difficulty arriving at a number, for the surface is neither flat nor smooth. To measure it, we would need some way to measure irregularity or roughness. What is more, if we cut off one of the florets and study it, we see that it, like the whole cauliflower head, is also rough. The same is true if we break a sprig off the floret - and is even true of smaller pieces of the sprig. In fact, each smaller part is like the whole cauliflower, only more diminutive.

It turns out that this principle applies to many things in nature, such as trees. If we look at a tree closely, we see that the individual branches look like small trees, and the same is true of the smaller branches off the larger ones.

Now let us return to the mathematician. Mandelbrot was not the first to notice that in natural formations, small parts often resemble the whole. However, before him, people regarded this feature as an isolated, nonintuitive curiosity. In the 1970s, however, Mandelbrot took this phenomenon - which he calls "self-similarity" - and used it as a basis on which to build a new kind of geometry, a non-Euclidian geometry for applying science and measurement to non-smooth objects in the real world. Self-similarity is the property of having a substructure analagous or identical to an overall structure. For example, a part of a line segment is itself a line segment, and thus a line segment exhibits self-similarity. By contrast, no part of a circle is a circle, and thus a circle does not exhibit self-similarity. Many natural phenomena, such as clouds and plants, are self-similar to some degree. In the process, he coined the word fractals to refer to these irregular shapes. However, more importantly, he demonstrated that the irregularly shaped objects in nature do not have a random shape. Such shapes actually follow simple rules to generate seemingly complex and chaotic patterns. Mandelbrot said the roughness of shapes in nature is not a mess but something in which he found "very strong traces of order." (He developed the word fractals from the Latin fractus, which means broken.)  Mandelbrot went on to write a book about his new geometry based on fractals, which he also described as the "science of roughness." He said he preferred the word roughness to irregularity because grammatically, "irregularity is the contrary of regularity," whereas in nature, the contrary of regularity is rough.

One more example sometimes used to explain fractals is a coastline, which, of course, is irregular or "rough." On a map, we might represent a small section of coastline as a straight line, but, in reality, even small sections do not form straight lines. If we look at that section closely, we see that it is made up of several small peninsulas and inlets. If we look even more closely, we see that each peninsula and inlet has its own bays and headlands. If we continue to look at even smaller sections, we will discover that the pattern is always present. Moreover, the recurring pattern of roughness is more or less the same, no matter how closely we look at the object in question.

Understanding fractals has made possible significant advances in fields as varied as physics, music, linguistics, weather forecasting, medicine, economics and even movie-making. In the case of the latter, for example, a film director needing a shot with a mountain in the background can put into a computer a fractal algorithm of a pattern of peaks and crags, and the computer can generate the whole mountain, reproducing those basic shapes on varying scales. Granted, the result is not a real mountain, but it looks like a real one. In addition, if the director decides the mountain is not rugged enough for the scene, the special-effects people can simply bump up the roughness number and regenerate the mountain.

All of this suggests that nature does have an order, even if the order is not the smooth surface on which Euclidean geometry paints. Rather, the order of nature is more like the rough surface of fractal geometry. If you have followed me so far, maybe we can think of this type of order in nature as a metaphor of the type of order we find in human life. After all, human beings are part of nature. What if we viewed what occurs in the human life as having an order something like that of fractal geometry? Human life is hardly smooth. It has all the twists and turns that we find in nature. In our limited experience of our personal lives or of human life on this planet, it may appear irregular. In reality, it may simply be rough, having an order that one might perceive if one could gain the proper perspective. It has a design, if you please, even if our limited perspective makes it look random.