Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, 2nd Edition

Planning and Preparation

Because they all happened at the same time—the move to Martha’s Vineyard, the renovations on the house, and the creation of the Vineyard.NET Internet service provider—they are all intractably tangled together in my mind. Repairing the roof, building a new bathroom, pulling Category 5 network cables to every room, and putting in special grounded outlets for the ISP’s computers were all items on the short list of things that needed to be done to make the house habitable. A few months later, when we realized that we had bitten off more than we could chew, the ISP was simply one more reason why we couldn’t just leave.

I got Bill Bennett’s name out of the phone book. He’s an electrician on Martha’s Vineyard who had a big advertisement boasting “home theater” and “smart house” systems. Truth be told, Bill is more interested in electronics than electrics. He seemed like an ideal person to help with the wide assortment of electrical tasks that we needed. Bill took the job. He also pointed me to Eric Bates, a carpenter who was also running the computer systems for the town of Oak Bluffs.

Eric moved to Martha’s Vineyard after graduating from Dartmouth College. He wanted to crew on the Shenandoah, a topsail schooner in the Vineyard Haven Harbor. Eric went from being boat crew to being a carpenter, and he had been doing that for most of the past decade. Eric had been into computers for years—he even owned one of the original Macintosh computers. But Eric wasn’t simply ...