Crashing Starbucks

That Time I Borked the Starbucks Wifi Network

I was driving across a bridge within sight of the high-rise office building where I worked when my cell phone rang.

“Are you watching the news?”, the caller asked.

“No, I’m on my way to the office.”

“Well, turn it on. A jet plane just flew into one of the twin towers.”

By the time I got to the office, we had wives, in tears, calling their husbands, pleading with them to get out of the high-rise building.

That’s how my day started on 9/11 in 2001. It’s odd to consider that universities and colleges across the land are now populated with students who weren’t even born when those events occurred. For most of them, 9/11 probably seems like Pearl Harbor did to me: a chronologically distant event that, while traumatic, mostly affected people I didn’t know. Many modern college students are so culturally distant from those events, and so morally depraved for that matter, that thousands of them now demonstrate in the streets in celebration of the rape and dismemberment of the victims of modern Islamic terrorists who are pursuing the very same goals as those who flew into the twin towers: extending dar al-Islam to the entire world.

Three months after 9/11, I sat at home during the Christmas holidays reading the Koran. Ever since the Twin Towers had collapsed, we had been told by the political class that the perpetrators were not truly representative of Islam. We were constantly assured of the inherent, peaceable central core of Islam. “Islam means peace”, we were soothingly assured. (Actually, “Islam” means “submission”.) The dissonance between the events we could see with our own eyes, and the way those events were being spun by those in charge, was an early example of what we later saw during the summer of 2020. That summer, though American cities were literally aflame, we were nevertheless assured by mellifluous voices that the BLM riots were “mostly peaceful”.

I think it was the disconnect between what was plain to my own eyes, and what I was being told to think, that made me sit down and read the Koran for myself. What I found there was not exactly a surprise, but I came away with the unmistakable impression that things were worse than I had previously imagined. As I sat and read that Christmas, I began to share the most egregious passages, reading them out loud to my wife. After a few days of this behavior, she pleaded with me to stop: “You are ruining Christmas”.

The same intuition which nudged me to read the Koran for myself - the sense that we were being played by the authorities - reemerged in the extreme during Covid, when every person not in thrall to the state perceived that the authorities were lying about origins, vaccines, masks, lockdowns, transmission - you name it. So everyone had to fend for themselves in gathering information that was critical for their health and well-being. In hindsight, the behavior of the political and bureaucratic classes in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, nearly a generation ago now, was already revealing that the corruption of our institutions was well underway.

A few months after that Christmas, in April of 2002, my father suddenly and unexpectedly died. And just a few months after that, the internet technology company I had founded in 1995 closed its doors.

So by late 2002 I was unemployed and looking back on one of the worst years of my life. At the time, things weren’t quite as dire as they might seem when compressed together in a short retelling like this. I had plenty of other job opportunities and enough savings that I wasn’t in a particularly big hurry to go back to work. I decided to take a few months off and work on developing some new technology that had been rattling around in the back of my head.

It was during this period that I was provoked by an editorial published in the Wall Street Journal. It was written by a woman who was lamenting the fact that Yahoo! discussion groups were functioning as a veritable recruiting ground for militant Islam. Her complaint was that Yahoo! was not policing and censoring these groups. If this concern sounds eerily familiar and current, well, it is. It’s just that these kinds of sentiments and intentions long ago moved beyond the early confines of thwarting radical Islam and have now been expanded to target, say, conservative Catholics, Christian Nationalists, engaged parents at school board meetings and anyone else that progressives find insufficiently obsequious toward the state. We now even have a name for such tools and targeting: “cancel culture”.

At any rate, 2002 was long before anyone knew that the events of 9/11 would eventually be exploited as a way to install a thoroughgoing gaslighting infrastructure on the Internet. At the time, we were just concerned with preventing another 9/11 and wanted to explore how technology could be brought to bear to help with that goal.

On a lark, I e-mailed the woman who had written the piece for the Wall Street Journal, and explained to her that her interest in monitoring these groups was not necessarily in the economic interest of Yahoo!, but that outside parties could certainly build their own technology which could do that kind of monitoring on their own. To my surprise, she wrote me back and we subsequently engaged in a back-and-forth exchange about how that might be done.

Long story short, I set out to build a working prototype of something that would harvest detailed information from Yahoo! discussion groups. I was not so clueless as to be willing to do this work from behind the internet address where I lived. One’s internet address can expose his geographic location, and I wasn’t interested in anyone knowing where I lived. Especially I wasn’t interested in having the kinds of people who frequented these discussion groups know my location. So I decided to confine my work to a nearby Starbucks, where the WiFi was good and the coffee was tolerable, if unjustifiably expensive.

As a complete aside, one of the things I discovered doing this work was an unexpected level of cross-linking between progressive web sites and Islamic groups. I didn’t have, or take, the time to investigate the nature of those cross-links. But the recent visible alliance between progressives and pro-Hamas communities in support of the October 7th atrocities has reminded me of the cross pollination I observed in 2002, which had apparently been on-going since before even 9/11.

But back to my story. Over a couple of weeks, I built a bot that would crawl any discussion group it was pointed toward, harvesting key information from Yahoo’s system. I even discovered that, due to a flaw in Yahoo’s implementation, I could de-obfuscate the e-mail addresses of the people posting to these groups. It was also possible, I learned, to accurately infer their geographic location and, having obtained the actual e-mail addresses of the participants. I could also find out other information about the people on those forums by automatically populating search engine queries with their e-mail addresses.

I remember the day that I decided to set my bot loose to do a thorough crawl, planning to hoover up gobs of data from one of those problematic Yahoo! groups. I got to Starbucks early that morning. I didn’t always work from the same Starbucks, for the same reason that I didn’t work from home - I was cautious about revealing what I was up to, or where I was located, to anyone on those groups. So I set up my laptop at Starbucks, ordered a grande Americano, and prepared to launch my bot. You have to remember that this was during a time in history in which Yahoo! was a site that mattered and lots of people used it. It’s hard to imagine that now, of course, but there was actually a time when Yahoo! was one of the most important brands on the Internet.

Well, there were plenty of people in Starbucks that morning, sitting in comfortable chairs with their laptops open. That was back during the days when Starbucks was a kind of gathering place instead of the inhospitable drive-by caffeinator it has become in the intervening years.

I launched my bot, and things were immediately going swimmingly. I could see updates on the screen from the bot’s activities as it rapidly gathered a ton of information about the participants in the specific group I was targeting. But after a few minutes, I noticed that all of the bot’s requests to Yahoo! started failing. Before I could try to determine what had gone wrong, I noticed several of the people around me on their laptops start to look around at the other people using laptops. They seemed to be trying to see if the other person nearby was able to access the Internet. The person next to me leaned over and said, “Are you able to get your e-mail? Mine seems to have stopped working.”

Oops.

It turned out that Yahoo! had interpreted my bot’s activity as something nefarious, and peremptorily blacklisted the internet address that my bot’s activity was originating from. The problem was that the entire Starbucks network in that metropolitan area appeared as a single internet address to the outside world. So when Yahoo! shunned my bot, they effectively blocked all Starbucks users in the entire city from accessing any of Yahoo!’s sites. I figured this out when I quietly left my current location and went to another Starbucks, where I discovered that I still couldn’t access Yahoo! groups. After doing some snooping on Starbucks’ network topology, I discovered that (at that time) all the Starbucks locations in the entire city had been shunned by the Yahoo! network, because all the traffic originating from Starbucks in the entire city appeared to the Internet as a single address.

It’s been almost 22 years since those events, but I hereby apologize to any Starbucks customers who were inconvenienced by my actions that day. Happily the Starbucks network was only shunned by Yahoo! for a few hours before being reinstated to its former glory. Though we can’t say as much for Yahoo! itself, I’m afraid. May it rest in peace.