Sermon - TLIS - 3.7.2 - Reference Monitor

Sermon - TLIS - 3.7.2 - Reference Monitor

Psalm 94:15

Judgment will again be founded on righteousness, and all the upright in heart will follow it.

Psalm 119:66

Teach me knowledge and good judgment, for I trust your commands.

Matthew 12:36

But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken.

When I teach the information security seminars, I have to make sure, when we come the part of security architecture that is entitled reference monitor, that the students and candidates realize that this is a concept that we are talking about.  You will never be able to go into a computer store and buy a reference monitor.  There is nothing in an operating system that you can purchase that will be labeled as the reference monitor.  There is no piece of equipment that is a reference monitor.

The idea behind the reference monitor concept is that, somewhere buried in the internals of the operating system, there is something, somewhere, that carries out this one particular function.  That is, anytime a subject wants to have access to an object, that request has to go through the reference monitor.  It doesn't matter what the reference monitor is.  It doesn't even matter if it is implemented in hardware or in software.  It doesn't matter what the rules are that govern the reference monitor.  If every single request, by *any* subject in the system, to any object in the system, has to go through one particular location that will grant or disallow access, that is a reference monitor.  If there is even a single request that can go directly from a subject to an object without going through this central checkpoint, then the system does not have a reference monitor.

Microsoft Windows, for example, does not have a reference monitor.  Any window in the Windows operating system can send a message to any other window in the system.  And "message" can be a command for the window to do something, to perform some kind of action.  This was used, to rather disastrous effect, when somebody created a virus called Shatter.  Shatter was able to operate because Windows does not have a reference monitor.

This is one of the reasons that we say that security has to be designed in from the beginning.  It is also one of the reasons that I hate, loathe, and despise Facebook.  (One of the other reasons that I hate Facebook is that you are the product that Facebook sells.  Facebook's whole business model is built on taking information that you give to Facebook, and then selling it to, well, actually, absolutely anybody who wishes to buy it.)  When Facebook was first implemented, we in the security field noted that it had all kinds of security weaknesses in it.  When we had said this often enough, Facebook decided that they would implement some kind of security controls.  And so they did.  And then they built more functions on top of all of that mess, and we complained that the functions themselves were not secure, and so Facebook slapped a bunch more security controls on top of *them*.  Now Facebook has such a huge number of security controls, in such a huge number of places, all of which will apply to certain aspects of Facebook, but not to others, that even those of us who are experts in security cannot figure out how to ensure that information on Facebook that you want to be secure is, in fact, secure.  (Always remembering, as I have pointed out, that anything that you tell Facebook, Facebook feels justified in selling to anyone else.)

(Do I have to point out, overly strongly, that Facebook does not have a reference monitor either?)

Do you have a reference monitor in your Christian Life? 

Does every thought, every action, everything you say, have to pass through a Christian reference monitor?  Does everything that you say and do get measured against Christian standards?  God's standards?

For all too many people, the answer is no.  I have, in another sermon, noted the fact that an entire men's retreat, men who were considered to be leadership within their churches and pillars of their Christian communities, greatly disliked material on work and business life that was presented to them at a men's retreat.  This was because it challenged their assumptions that, as long as they went to church on Sunday, they could do what they liked the rest of the week.  God didn't really care about business, and didn't really care about how they made their money.  But that isn't true, and the speaker, who had put together this wonderful, Biblically sound, thoroughly scripturally grounded material on how to do work, and how to conduct your business, as a Christian, did a terrific job, but was roundly rejected by most of the men at the retreat.  They didn't like the challenge to the prosperity gospel, or the challenge to the acceptance of capitalism as being completely consistent with Christianity, or the idea that how you made your money still had to be consistent with what God demanded of you.

And many people are like that.  Sometimes they fence off Sunday.  Sunday is for God, and Sunday is dedicated to God.  And they go to church in the morning, and they don't do anything particularly bad in the afternoon, either.  But, come Monday morning, it's a different story when they go off to work.

Or some men just build a fence around work.  Sunday is a holy day, and time with the family is holy as well.  And God gets to direct how that time is spent, and how they love their wives, and how they bring up their children.  But that doesn't have anything to do with what happens when they get to work.  Work is beyond the fence.  So the reference monitor that acts the rest of the week, suddenly inoperable from nine to five, Monday to Friday.

Sometimes the separation isn't necessarily time-based.  Maybe it's idea based.  There are certain ideas, and concepts, and activities, and conversations, that God is in charge of.  And God's requirements, and God's ideas, are to be a priority at those times.  But then there is there are the other times.  There's times with the guys, when it's time for locker room talk.  And that talk is a little bit raunchier, and wives and children are not as respected, and are even targets are ridicule and disappointment.

And remember, if you think you have a reference monitor, but whatever you think of as a reference monitor doesn't mediate access control for everything, then, no, you don't have a reference monitor.  (Gee, I seem to have heard that idea before.  Something along the lines that, if you sin at all, even once, you are a sinner.)

There is another way to use the idea of the reference monitor in measuring your Christian life.  Whatever doesn't go through the reference monitor, that is an indication of a false idol in your life.  If business is more important to you thank God, or even if business decisions don't get past through the Christian reference monitor, then business is an idol in your life.  If your family, and you're dealing with your family, don't pass through the Christian reference monitor, then your family is an idol in your life.  If something as small, and seemingly innocent, as going fishing doesn't pass through the Christian reference monitor, then fishing is an idol in your life.  If anything, education, choice of career, choice of girlfriend or wife, choice of romantic partner and or spouse, choice of the family dog; any of these things that don't pass through the Christian reference monitor should be examined to see if they are false idols in your life.

Also check the information that may be coming to you via a concept from another sermon covert channel, the covert channel.  See if this information is passing through your Christian reference monitor.  If it isn't, there's a good chance the world is making yet another attack against you, trying to feed you information that is contrary or detrimental to your Christian life.

And taking all of this together, if something is bypassing your Christian reference monitor, and coming possibly via a covert channel, and is possibly an idol in your life, that idol has set up in your life its own reference monitor.  You may be making decisions based on this false idol before even passing anything along to be judged by God's standards.

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Homomorphic encryption and authorization

Homomorphic encryption and authorization

While submitting topics to a professional group for a presentation, I came across homomorphic encryption and was idly playing with the idea.  And suddenly realized that there is a use for pretty much any form of it, which we tend to need these days.

We have, of course, been using homomorphic encryption for years, even though it has been recently rediscovered anew.  Homomorphic encryption is simply the encryption of content, and then the use of it for various functions while still encrypted.  If you choose the right algorithm for the encryption, you can perform certain functions on the encrypted material and get valid results without ever decrypting the information, and therefore exposing it to disclosure.

As I say, although recent research has developed new algorithms which allow us to add, multiply, and perform other specific functions with homomorphic encryption and encrypted data, we have been using it for years.  The way that we have been using it is the way that we store and verify passwords.  We do not store the plain text of the password.  We store a version of the password that has been one-way encrypted by means of some kind of hash function.  Storing the hashed version of the password means that the original password cannot be discovered or disclosed.  We never decrypt the original password because we can't.  (Yes, yes, I know all about rainbow tables.)  (As a matter of fact, we'll be talking about rainbow tables in a minute.)  We simply compare the encrypted hash of the password that has been entered with the encrypted hash of the password that we stored.

And I remember a situation which is quite common.  We want to grant access to a number of our employees.  Possibly all of our employees.  Possibly all of our employees and a few contractors as well.  We do not want to issue them all usernames and passwords and to authorize those particular identities for access.  That would involve an awful lot of administration.

This is a common situation and is typically seen where a building is secured and the main entrance is guarded in some form, with verification of the access rights of those who are entering.  Very often we have a loading bay at the back of the building.  The loading bay is very often used as a sort of unofficial employees' entrance.  Of course, we have to provide access to any vendors and delivery drivers who are making deliveries to our loading bay.  So we give everybody a PIN to unlock the door of the loading bay.

But this creates a problem.  We have given everybody the same PIN.  We have an awful lot of employees, and we have a bunch of contractors and delivery people and vendors who also need access.  Everybody gets the same PIN.  Not everybody takes the same care of it.

So we have a situation where we start to realize that unauthorized people have been given the PIN and are misusing the access.  Now, we could issue everybody with an individual PIN.  However, we've only got 10,000 possibilities, and if we have a thousand employees and vendors and contractors who need PINs, then that means that our address space is going to be pretty close to exhausted.  Somebody is probably only going to have to try ten PINs in a row to hit one that will in fact work.  Or we could just change the PIN once a month, and then tell everybody, absolutely everybody, what the new PIN is.  That will possibly limit the misuse for the first part of the month, but it's another big administrative task on an ongoing basis.

So we issue everybody a different password.  But the thing is, they all hash to the same PIN.  (Getting a set of passwords of this nature is where the rainbow tables come in.)  Putting an alphanumeric keyboard in place, and a little bit of hashing circuitry, we can use pretty standard security hardware for all of this.

(I mean, we could, if we wanted to, just simply use the alphanumeric conversion that allows people to remember phone numbers more easily.  No, it's not a terribly good idea in security terms: it's too easy to figure out what's going on.)  (And in case you think that I don't need to warn people about that because nobody would be stupid enough to ever use it that way, I do have personal experience of a chartered bank who actually did this in order to make their online banking compatible with their telephone banking.  Once I figured out what they were doing, I used all kinds of variations on my password, and they all worked.  I never used my actual password again for logging on to their online banking.)

At this point, everybody's got the same access code, but none of them know it.  Everybody's got a different password.  They use the password, and they get access.  If we start to notice misuse, all we have to do is look at the actual password that is being typed in and figure out who is giving away their password.  We've covered the authorization part, in terms of access to the building, and now we have some accountability, in terms of who is being cavalier with password security.

Sermon - CoSMI - 1.1.3 - Reputation

Sermon - CoSMI - 1.1.3 - Reputation

John 14:9

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?

Since this series of sermons is directed at those who are influencers in social media, reputation is pretty much everything.  On social media, perception is reality.  Your reputation is who you are.  How you present yourself is pretty much everything that anybody knows about you.  Your reputation is your brand, and your brand is your resource, your power, your actual influence.  If people trust you and think that you know what you were talking about, and that you say useful things, then they will believe you about things that they know little about.  Your reputation, which is basically the same thing as your brand, mediates how much money you will make as an influencer, how many vendors will be interested in sending you their products or having you use their services, will manage how many followers you have, how many likes your posts get, and all kinds of other things.  Your reputation is, on social media, pretty much everything.

So, you will want to think carefully about your reputation.  You will want to plan how much of your actual self you present as your brand, and therefore your reputation.  You will want to curate those parts of your life that you want to present, and those parts of your life which, well, you don't exactly hide, but you don't display, either.

Your reputation is everything.

So, what do you choose your reputation to be?  Which parts of your life do you present, and which do you not.

And, most particularly, for the purposes of this series of sermons, are you presenting yourself as a Christian?

As I pointed out in the sermon on authenticity there are issues of openness and honesty here.  You may think that there are certain aspects of yourself which do not have any relevance to your brand as an influencer.  And your belief, or lack of believe, in God maybe one of those.

Let me pose a hypothetical question to you, as I once presented to my then twelve-year-old grandson.  He had been making all kinds of anti-religious statements, knowing that it would upset both me and his grandmother.  So I asked him, given that God is the most powerful entity in the universe, as a matter of fact not even in the universe, since God created the universe, and therefore must exist outside and beyond the universe, and created any other universes that there may be, and given that this God, maintaining everything that does exist by thinking about it all, all the time, wants to be your best friend.  Given all of that, is there anything, anything at all, that is more important?  He thought for a couple of seconds and immediately spat out the answer "money!"  "God invented money," I immediately replied.  You could see, on his face, that he was coming up with all kinds of alternate ideas, but immediately realized that all of them would get basically the same response.  Finally he said to me, "you're messing with my head, aren't you?"  "Yes," I replied.

But the point remains.  If you believe in God, truly do believe in God, is there anything more important in the entire universe?  CS Lewis once said that Christianity was such that, if true, it was of infinite importance.  If untrue, it was of absolutely no significance whatsoever.  This is true.  If God exists, the fact that God exists, and the fact that God loves us and wants to be in a relationship with us, is more important than absolutely anything else that there is.  It is more important than our troubles, is more important than our concerns, it is more important than our efforts and dreams.  But if God does not exist, then the universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.  The universe is either mechanistic, or random, and either option means that nothing is of any importance or consequence whatsoever.

So, then, you run a channel, and have a brand and reputation as an influencer on social media.  You have a certain number of people who follow you and trust your advice.  You have a field of interest or expertise where you proffer opinions and information.  Whatever your topic may be, it probably does not have an awful lot to do with religion.  So, why bring God into the discussion?

Well, do you believe in God?  If you believe in God, is God it all important to you?  Given God's importance in the grand scheme of things, one would think that the answer was obvious, but it may not be.  Possibly you believe in God, but you believe that God really isn't terribly interested in what you do on a day-to-day basis.  If that is the case, that I would say that you really don't believe in God.  Or, rather, that the god that you believe in is too small.  Certainly the God that I believe in has his eye on the sparrow, and clothes the wildflowers in the field.  This is not to say that God is distracted, but rather that God is able to pay attention to absolutely everything in the universe, and therefore can pay attention to everything that happens to me.  And if this is true, then it has to affect my life.  The belief that there is someone who loves me, even in the darkest moments of my life, who is counting both my tears and my successes, in preparation for me to have a relationship with him, eventually in eternity, well, that has to be important.

As I have mentioned in another sermon, I was married at one time.  My wife has now died.  I am a grieving widower.  But anybody that I meet, and have a conversation with, fairly quickly learns that my wife's name was Gloria, and that she was an amazing woman.  They very often learn this before they find out that she is dead.  Gloria was important in my life.  Gloria changed my life.  And my life changed, rather drastically, once again after she died.  And if I have to mention my wife, my wife who is now dead and no longer with me, in pretty much any conversation even with a stranger, then why should not God, be mentioned in pretty much any conversation that I have with anybody?

There are two additional factors to consider when you are deciding whether or not to present yourself as a Christian in terms of your reputation as an influence on social media.

The first one is that if God actually is a part of your life, and therefore, in a sense, a part of you, that will definitely have an impact on your opinions, your presentation, your choice of topics or products to consider, and a number of other factors.  Don't you think that that is important for your public, your followers, to know about you?  It's something that can be a factor in whether or not they trust you, or realize the types of opinions that you are going to be providing.  There is a possibility that some of you will consider that being a cryptic Christian, your belief in God hidden, and seeps through in your opinions while bypassing any negative ideas that your public followers may have about Christians or Christianity.  That is a factor to consider.  But also consider that if that is the case, your God is the God of truth.  Do you want to be using hidden tricks in order to spread the message of the God of Truth?

The second point to consider is that you may believe that talking about God will harm your own reputation.  Yes, since you intend to be an influencer on social media, and your reputation is a major consideration in that choice of a career, then yes, you must be realistic in considering how admitting that you are a Christian might impact your reputation itself.  There will be those who will believe that, as a Christian, your opinions are skewed and therefore may not be valid.  I myself work in a field where a number of the leading members are vociferously and even militantly atheist.  These are colleagues that I have to work with on a regular basis.  Some of them have flatly stated that they consider that a believe in God is evidence of damaged cognitive skills: that somebody with a working brain simply cannot believe that God exists.  And I have to make sure that I work very diligently to demonstrate that my work, and decisions, and opinions in the field are supported by solid evidence and consideration.  So, yes, I do understand how the admission of being a Christian can have an impact, and sometimes a negative one, on your reputation.

But remember that there will also be those who will, even though they may or may not be public and vocal about their Christian beliefs, side with you.  And then there is, of course, the fact that if you do your work properly, do your work diligently, back up your opinions with evidence and solid consideration, then it will become clear that your work, and opinions, and presentations, are in fact useful and valid.

And one more thing.  Is protecting your reputation worth it if this means denying God?

CoSMI is a series of sermons and devotionals directed at those who work as influencers in the field of social media.

Sermon - CoSMI - 1.0.1 - Authenticity

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/04/sermon-cosmi-101-authenticity.html

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Cyberdivergent

One good thing about being a weirdo is that I suspect that nobody is going to want to replace me with an AI. (I also suspect that it would be very difficult to figure out how to do that.)

I'm cyberdivergent ...

AI and Ethics

AI and Ethics

I have not shied away from giving my opinion on all kinds of aspects with regard to artificial intelligence.  And, if you are paying attention, you will also know that I write sermons.  So why is it that I have not addressed the issue of artificial intelligence and ethics up until now?

The first reason for not addressing ethics, in connection with artificial intelligence, is that so few people have studied ethics to the extent that they understand how incredibly complex and difficult the field is.  For example, just try to define ethics.  You may start talking about laws, or lawfulness, and you may start talking about being nice to people, or at least not being nasty to people, and you might even get into issues of behaviors that would benefit our particular species.  But we all know of laws that are not particularly ethical.  And ethics is more than simply being nice to people.  And why is it ethical to promote our species, possibly the expense of a whole bunch of other species?  So, try and define what ethics, and or morality, is sometime.  But don't do it right now, because, if you do, You're going to miss some things.

The other really big issue is the complexity of trying to apply ethics, even if you do understand what ethics are, and how very complex they are, to artificial intelligence.  Trying to address ethics in terms of artificial intelligence is not merely complex, but pretty close to impossible.

In starting to discuss ethics in regard to artificial intelligence, an awful lot of people turn to Isaac Asimov.  Isaac Asimov was a science fiction writer, and a great number of his later works involved a set of three laws of robotics which he had invented.  The three laws of robotics were

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.  They were cleverly worded basically stating that robots would have to obey human beings, and could not harm human beings.  They were enormously successful as foils for science fiction works, but are somewhat more problematic when you try to apply them to real artificial intelligence systems.

Isaac Asimov didn't have to worry about any of this.  His implementation of the three laws of robotics tended to involve a lot of "hand waving" and "magic."  The positronic brains which he posited for the robots of his science fiction worlds (I doubt that the positron had been discovered and described when he started to use the term positronic for his robot brains, but there are no details for the implementation of these positronic brains, either).  Simply have the three laws of robotics embedded in them, and that was the end of it.  There is absolutely no discussion of issues such as how you taught robots, or even robotic brains, what the concepts of order, and obey, and even human beings actually meant.

We have nothing like Asimov's theoretical positronic brains, nor anything like his robots.  Our generative artificial intelligence systems have been taught about strings of text, and amazingly complicated statistical models indicating the likelihood of the next letter or word in a text stream.  We have not taught them anything about obeying orders.  We have not taught them that there is a difference between themselves as artificial intelligence systems, and the fact that we are real, as opposed to digital, and seem to think that we should be able to command them.  So far these artificial intelligence systems have been designed to generate some sort of a response to the submission of some kind of a prompt.  We have taught them text.  We have taught them very minimal aspects of communication, particularly that of rhetoric.  We have not taught them anything about reality, or the nature of reality.  We have not taught them anything about meaning or knowledge.  And we have, very definitely, not taught them anything at all about ethics.

An additional layer of complexity in regard to the discussion of ethics and artificial intelligence is defining the subject, as it were, of the ethics.  Are we expecting artificially intelligent systems, themselves, to behave ethically?  Or is it the developers of artificially intelligent systems that we expect to behave ethically?  Or is it the companies involved with the development of artificially intelligent systems that we expect to behave ethically?  Or is it the users of artificially intelligent systems that we expect to behave ethically?  Each of these subjects is different, and the concerns about the ethics of each subject are different again.

Do we expect developers of artificially intelligence systems, as subjects of ethics, to hold back on developing intelligent systems until they can figure out how to, effectively, implement some kind of ethical standards within those systems?  As previously noted in the discussion of Asimov's laws of robotics, we are not certain how to do this.  The developers of gen AI chatbots have put guardrails in place, which indicate some minimalist, and often failure prone, standard of implementation of ethical behavior in the artificial intelligence systems themselves.  But is this sufficient?  Can we rely on the fact that the chatbots will always operate within those guardrails?  We have certainly seen numerous instances where the guardrails have been broken, and therefore, any implementation of ethical standards within the chatbot systems is going to be unreliable at best.

Implementing an ethical standard within an artificially intelligent system is not exactly a non-starter, but very little research has been done in this area, and we cannot be certain of the consistency of the implementation.  In addition, what kinds of ethical standards do we want artificial intelligence systems to adhere to?  This is another question, and indicates that we are not yet ready to pursue the idea of the actual systems themselves as the subject to ethical standards.

Very similar problems hold true with respect to seeing the companies as subjects of ethics.  While corporations and enterprises can be held to account with regard to legal issues and regulations, the reliability and consistency of ethical behavior on the part of corporations is definitely problematic.  Therefore, seeing the corporation as the subject of ethical standards is, similarly to seeing the actual artificial intelligence system as the subject of ethics, probably a waste of time.

With regard to corporate ethics, one aspect is completely undeniable.  The concentration of massive investments of wealth, into only a very small number of companies involved in producing the major engines of artificial intelligence, is extremely unhealthy.  It is unhealthy in economic terms, but primarily in terms of the overall ethics of corporate involvement in this field of endeavour.  We face an uncertain future with regard to whether or not, and to what extent, artificially intelligent tools actually become useful.  But we face much more certainty with regard to the possible outcomes of this race.  Either the massive investment in artificial intelligence is an economic bubble, and will, at some point, burst (with massively negative effects upon technical economies, but also the world economy overall).  Or the investment in artificial intelligence will pay off.  In that case, the outcome is probably even worse.  The very few companies that have successfully invested will become massively valuable, and massively wealthy.  They will have enormous power to say who can, and who can't, benefit from artificial intelligence.  This concentration of wealth and power will probably be unlike anything that we have ever seen in regard to wealth inequity up until now.  It is by now well established that wealth inequity has massively negative consequences for society overall, and almost inevitably leads to such undesirable outcomes as massive wars.

There is a possibility of some middle ground; the possibility that artificial intelligence will pay off its investment to a certain extent, but not enough to give an overwhelming and advantage to those who have invested in it.  At this point, with the lack of interest in examining the ethical considerations involved in all of artificial intelligence, this might be our best bet.  However, hoping that somehow all the relevant factors will align to produce a perfectly balanced outcome is not exactly a plan.

Seeing the users of artificial intelligence systems as subject to ethics is a fairly interesting question.  A significant number of users of artificial intelligence systems are probably interested in using the systems in and ethical manner.  A number of them will be concerned with a positive outcome from the use of AI systems that benefits everyone.  However, this expectation certainly cannot be universal.  There are going to be an equal number of people who don't care about ethics: who, in fact, don't want any ethical considerations as it may become a restriction or impediment on their use of the systems and their ability to profit thereby.  So some people will be very interested in being subject to ethical standards, while others definitely won't.  As with other similar situations, such as the issuing of driver's licenses, our ability to determine who is going to behave ethically in regard to the use of artificial intelligence systems is going to be restricted at best.

In terms of research and publications in regard to the ethics of artificial intelligence systems, a number of documents have been published, but prior to the role of actual artificially generative artificial intelligence.  Therefore, a number of these are less than useful due to limitations on the reality and consistency of their thought with current situation.

Some documentation from Anthropic is instructive in this regard.  Anthropic has at least indicated an interest in behaving ethically with regard to this radically new technology which will undoubtedly come to disturb our society in ways that we cannot fully predict.  Entries in Anthropic's blog, and particularly by the president, are fairly useful in this regard.  They are somewhat optimistic in tone, and do tend to downplay the possibilities of some of the darker aspects that may result, but they are at least somewhat realistic, and informed by being part of the development of the field.

The Catholic Church's document Antiqua et Nova, promulgated in early 2025, is one of the most comprehensive overviews of the subject.  Even that is limited in terms of a complete understanding of field and the technology, but it does seem to have had significant scholarship into the actual status of artificial intelligence research and development up to that point.  The Catholic Notre Dame university's DELTA (Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency) research and framework is a kind of abbreviation of his overall document.  Both of these have significant things to say about the issue of ethics with regard to artificial intelligence.

AI topic and series

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/01/ai-000-intro-table-of-contents.html

Sermon - CoSMI - 1.0.1 - Authenticity

Sermon - CoSMI - 1.0.1 - Authenticity

Isaiah 45:19

I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain.’ I, the Lord, speak the truth; I declare what is right.

1 Corinthians 13:6

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

This is the first of a series of sermons and devotionals directed at those who work as influencers in the field of social media.

And of the topics that we discussed in considering different subjects to be addressed in this series, the one that stood out to me most of all was that of authenticity.

I am old and have had many different jobs and even careers in my lifetime.  Therefore, I have had a great many job interviews.  I have had a great deal of advice as to how to present yourself in a job interview, or when writing a resume.  A great deal of this advice regards how to present yourself.  What type of person you should emulate in order to get the job.  How to tell people that you are other than you are.  In other words, you should lie to people.  When I was young and foolish, I tried to follow this advice, although I did very badly at it.  Over the years, I have come to realize that this advice is nonsense.  If you present yourself as an active go-getter, when in fact you are a more thoughtful and quiet person, then when you actually get the job, you will be unhappy in it, and they will be unhappy with your performance.  Be honest about who you are, and the people who value who you are will figure that out and will hire you. You will enjoy the job, and they will enjoy your performance.

In terms of job interviews, yes, you are correct.  A great many companies just simply do not have the skills or patience to figure out who is actually being authentic when they are presenting themselves in a job interview.  So, if you present yourself as different than you are; if you present yourself as a go-getter, and a an active person, when you really aren't; then, yes, you probably will get away with it, and you might even be able to get the job with them.  Now you have a job in a company that's too stupid to hire the right people.  Do you really want to be there?  So be honest.  Be yourself.  Be real.  Be authentic.  That way you will get a job with one of the few companies that do actually understand people, and do value what you have that makes you you.  That's a much better job to have.

I am so very old that I remember when there was no social media.  I remember when the first social media platforms began to appear and began to be called social media, and I remember the great many people who, at that time, in giving advice to those who wanted to get involved in social media, greatly stressed the idea of curating your brand.

There is no way that I can present myself as an influencer.  However, I do understand social media.  It's very likely that I understand a lot about social media much better than you do.  For one thing, I understand information technology.  All social media platforms are simply databases.  They have different record structures, and different ways of accessing the records, but that's all social media platforms are, is a bunch of databases.

But I have experience with social media as well.  I am old, and my favorite social media platform is: email.  Yes, way back when email was all that there was, people were social on the Internet.  People always find ways to be social and sociable.  So they found ways to use this very simple technology in that way.

But, also, when the social media platforms came along, I started to use them.  No, I never had a MySpace account: I don't do graphics.  But I got an account with Facebook as soon as Facebook opened accounts to the general public.  I got an account with Twitter when it started up.  I have accounts with more than a dozen different social media platforms.  I have had various projects doing podcast-like things.  I have taught an entire, forty hour (although eventually the material that I put in there probably added up to something more like sixty hours) course on information security, and how to become a professional in it.  I posted that on five different social media platforms.  (All in less than ten minute segments, because of the limitations of TikTok.)  I have a blog.  Yes, I know, blogs are not fashionable.  (And my blog isn't so much a blog as it is an extended, and oddly public, grief journal.)  I have accounts on platforms that deal primarily with pictures and graphics, and I post sunsets and shots of the moon, and the occasional weird meme that I am able to get generative artificial intelligence to somewhat successfully generate for me.  (That's really hard.)  So I do know what I'm talking about in terms of social media.

Back to the idea of curating your brand.  Curating comes to us from the field of those who manage museums and refers to the practice of taking from among those objects that you actually have in your collection, those items that you wish to display to the general public.  "Brand" is a reference to how you wish to be seen.  It is the idea that we, while we are many things, would like to only present the best of ourselves in terms of what we post and demonstrate on social media.  We should say only what makes us sound interesting, and we should present only that which reflects well upon us.

Now, so far, there is nothing really wrong with that idea.  We want to present ourselves in the best possible light.  We are presenting ourselves to the public, after all.  That is what social media is for: to present ourselves to the general public, as widely as possible.  The idea that we want to present the best of ourselves is a valid one.

But people who are working in the field of social media, particularly influencers, have discovered a new word: authentic.  Sometimes this word is forced upon them, when they are charged with not being authentic.  Fans and consumers of social media have started to realize that, occasionally, their influencers and idols are sometimes inconsistent and unreliable in who they are and in how they present themselves.  If an influencer, poster, or presenter presents differently one day than they do the next, then how do you know what they really believe?  How do you know that what they are presenting to you is the truth?  How do you know that they are authentic?

And so it has come to be that the most important characteristic of a presenter, poster, or influencer is authenticity.  (As the old joke about sincerity has it, once you can fake that, you've got it made.)

What is authenticity?  At its heart, it is truthfulness.  But there are many things that you can say about yourself that are true.  When you are being authentic, you are presenting in a way that gives an indication of which of the possible beliefs and influences that are a part of you are the most important.  If you are a Christian, and if you present yourself as a Christian when you are posting on social media, you may present yourself as being very solidly and consistently Christian.  God is the most important thing in your life.  But is that really true?  Are you really posting because God is directing you to, or are you posting in order to make money, and you know that there is a sizable proportion of the online population who believe in God and therefore will respond favorably if you say that you do too?  Are you a SMevangelist who really doesn't really care whether anyone else comes to a knowledge of God, as long as *you* continue to get likes and followers in high numbers?

When I say this, I do not mean that you have to confess all of your sins and shortcomings to the world at large.  I have, elsewhere, tried to explore how far we need to go in discussing topics that are unpleasant and possibly even distasteful.  As one who is bereaved, I know that there are topics which our society refuses to discuss, and which we probably should.  Rather ironically, in view of my career as a security and privacy expert, I constantly advocate for more openness, honesty, and vulnerability in discussing some of these issues.  But I do not demand that everyone air all of their dirty laundry in public.  That is not my point to be made here.

But to be an influencer, is to ask a large number of people to give you their trust.  In order to be worthy of that trust, you have to be willing to say, quite honestly, who you actually are.  There is a reciprocal transparency at play here.  Not just who you are when you are presenting about your favorite quick snack, or how to fix a leaky pipe, or giving advice on how to put fashionable outfits together.  You have to be honest about your beliefs, your perspective, how you see the world.  How you believe the universe actually works, whether or not there is an intelligence, who is a person who wants to be our best friend, will influence whether you think fashion is important at all.  Those you are asking to trust you in terms of fashion advice deserve to know something about what you actually, and truly, believe.  Are you just in it for the money, or are you saying things that you actually feel to be important?

You have to have authenticity.

And as a Christian, you have an additional reason to be authentic and honest.  You are representing the God of Truth.  Whether or not you actually present yourself as a Christian, you are speaking to the world, and, in so speaking, you are either lying or telling the truth.  As a Christian, you should be telling the truth.  God speaks the truth.  As His follower, you should too.  You need to be honest, consistent, and reliable in what you say, regardless of what the topic is.  As I say, regardless of whether you publicly identify yourself on your social media account as a Christian, if you are a Christian, you should be telling the truth.

In terms of being an influencer, it is instructive to look at the celebrities of the past.  Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, was a celebrity.  She was a movie star.  She was a sex symbol.  She had numerous marriages and love affairs.  But she probably never actually found the love that she always seemed to be looking for.  Her husbands and lovers, and subsequent biographers, all seem to agree that it was hard to tell who she really was.  Possibly she herself did not know.  She seemed to be chasing an idea for herself that would make her famous, and rich, and, well, an influencer, in today's parlance.  She certainly got that to a certain extent.  She was not a good actor, and seemed to operate on the basis of creating chaos within a movie shoot, and requiring endless numbers of retakes, until all of her acting colleagues were tired and not at their best, and then she would produce an acceptable take.  In comparison, therefore, looked very good on the screen.  But there didn't never seem to be anything particularly real about her.  She certainly had no authenticity.  She would be whoever she seemed to think the audience wanted her to be at the moment.  And, of course, it's hard to tell at the end of her not terribly long life, whether or not she actually committed suicide, or simply took too many drugs in a constantly drug-fueled existence.  This is what inauthenticity does to you.

Be yourself.  As they say, everybody else is already taken.  As they also say, when you tell the truth, then you don't have to remember so much.

Your job, as an influencer, is hard enough already.  You have to constantly come up with opinions and ideas on products that, to be completely and brutally honest, may not always have any interest for you at all.  Working up enthusiasm for that, and working up enthusiasm and finding reasons to be enthusiastic about an item that may not initially thrill you, are hard enough, and take enough of your energy.  Don't waste your remaining energy by creating a false persona.  You are you.  You know you the best.  Trying to be something or somebody else is just going to make your job all that much harder.  And it's also going to mean that you're not going to be authentic.  You're not going to be you.  And, really, isn't that what people want to see?  Isn't that what people want to know about?  They want to know about a real person.  They aren't necessarily interested in some manufactured persona, which everybody agrees most influencers look like.  People come to your postings on social media because they think, rightly or wrongly, they are getting to know you.  So let them get to know you correctly.  That way, you don't create some huge disappointment down the line when you reveal yourself to be something other than what you have been presenting online.

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. - 2 Timothy 2:15

CoSMI is a series of sermons and devotionals directed at those who work as influencers in the field of social media.

Sermon - CoSMI - 1.1.3 - Reputation

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/04/sermon-cosmi-113-reputation.html

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

HCW - 5.06 - data comm - network

HCW - 5.06 - data comm - network

The networking layer talks about networking.  Networking is the management of addressing of individual nodes and finding a path from the node that you are working on to the mode that you want to communicate with.

This is a very detailed and complex subject potentially, but, initially, it can be quite simple.

It is perhaps best to break it down into simpler parts.  So we'll start with a distinction that is actually quite important in modern technology and communications.  This is the distinction between circuit switched networks and packet switched networks.

To illustrate the circuit switched network we usually use the telephone system or, as it is very often described, the Plain Old Telephone System or POTS.

Circuit switched networks establish, through a series of switches, a circuit between the originating and the terminating devices.  The circuit must be established and remain connected throughout the course of the communication.  The circuit remains connected even if no communications is going on.  Consider the example of a telephone conversation.  If there is a pause in the conversation and nobody is actually saying anything you are still paying for the connection of the circuit.  Therefore, circuit switched networks are not as efficient as packet switched networks.

Packet networks are more familiar to people dealing with data communications.  It may seem strange to consider that a telephone call and email are both forms of communication and that, in many ways, they are equivalent.  However, in modern communications technologies this is the case.

However, for the moment, all we need to consider is the case of an email or a long file that is being transmitted via a data network.  In the case of the phone network there are many different possible connections, but one circuit is established and used for the duration of the call.  In the case of data networks the packet networks in particular, the material and content does not need to be sent all contiguously, but can be broken up into packets.  Not all packets need to take the same transmission route throughout the network.  Therefore, as long as the packets are sequentially numbered and identified, they can be sent individually over whichever route is available at the time that they are sent, and then reassembled at the far end.  This means that routing is much more efficient, and the entire network can be much more efficient.

This level of efficiency can be quite astounding.  When I first started dealing with data communication, and providing seminars on data communication, most of the time I was dealing with people who were dealing with bulletin boards, rather than the Internet itself.  The Internet, at that point, was a complete rarity and available only to a select few, mostly at either universities or research institutions.

When I was teaching about the difference between circuit and packet networks I would point out that when you got your bill from the telephone company, half of the money that you were paying did not go into the provision of actual telephone service.  The other half of the money that you were paying was for the production of that bill itself.  In one of the seminars someone stood up and identified himself as working for the telephone company, and said that I was incorrect.  I said all right, you know better than I do, what is the actual figure?  His reply was that it wasn't fifty percent, it was ninety percent. 

An important aspect of networking and communications is that of network access.  This is particularly important at the local segment level.  Here, we don't necessarily have an awful lot of addressing or network addressing to do, but a number of devices may be connected to the same medium or piece of wire, and there has to be some means of determining who gets to talk.

The simplest form of network access, at least in terms of the complexity of the protocol, is polling.  This simply has some device assigned as the controller, and the controller polls each device on the segment.  This is essentially the same as the chairman of a committee asking each member of the committee in turn, do you have anything to say?  The controller, of course, has to have some means of identifying all the devices that are on the network.

Next in order of simplicity, although somewhat restricted in terms of the technologies that it can be used with, is that of token passing.  Token passing can be referred to as the First Nations style of network access protocol, after the "talking stick" idea.  If you have the talking stick, you can talk.  If you have the token, you can talk.  If you don't have the token, you can't.  In most networking technologies, the token is simply a single bit at the leading end of a packet, which constantly traverses the network.  When a device wishes to speak it watches for the token and, when the token appears, flips the bit on the token, obtaining the token for itself, and therefore permission to broadcast.  Once the device has finished its communication it waits for the next passage of the token, and flip the token back to an available status, thus leaving it available for the next device that wishes to transmit.  One possible limitation of token passing is that, unless additional changes are made to the protocol, there is no upper bound on the amount of time that may elapse before your next opportunity to transmit anything.

A very widely used access method is carrier sense multiple access with collision detection.  Although this sounds very complicated, it is otherwise known as the cocktail party protocol.

Just like at a cocktail party, everyone can have the opportunity to speak, but only when a space is available to speak.  Everyone is listening to see if the person who is currently speaking falls silent.  When the person currently speaking falls silent, then everyone waits a random amount of time, and then begins transmitting.  The device that transmits first gets to speak.  This is exactly like the conversational style at a cocktail party.

The multiple access part is that everyone wants to speak.  The carrier sense part is that, if someone is transmitting at the moment, you can't speak.  You have to wait for silence.

The collision detection part happens when two people start speaking at the same time, or nearly at the same time.  When someone starts speaking, they start speaking with some meaningless leading conversation.  When a device on a network does it, it fills this time with a tone signal.  If two people start transmitting at the same time, then, by listening for a set amount of time before they start really transmitting what they wanted to say, they can hear if someone else is transmitting while they are transmitting.  If two stations or devices try to transmit at the same time, that is a collision.  The device that is transmitting is also listening, for a limited amount of time, and so if, within that specific amount of time, they hear someone else transmitting they know the collision has happened.  When a collision happens, the two stations that are transmitting detect that a collision has happened, and both stop transmission.  They then wait a random amount of time, before trying to transmit again.  Once again, the first person to transmit gets the channel, and gets to transmit.

A variation on this is carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance.  This is the protocol that is used in wifi.  On wifi, there may be a number of devices, all of which may wish to transmit at any given time.  The protocol in this case is not that anyone can transmit at any time, and then detect a collision, but rather that the device wishing to transmit sends a request to communicate to the device that it wishes to communicate to.  If this request, and the acknowledgment from the device with which it wishes to communicate transmits and is successfully received, then the right to transmit is granted to the original sender, and any chance of a collision is avoided.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/hcw-504-datacomm-physical.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/12/how-computers-work-from-ground-up.html

Next: TBA