When I first met Chiquita Marbury I think she was the cur­rent Tech­no­logy Co­ord­ina­tor for the Jefferson County School Sys­tem. (More at Wikipedia.org.)

For those who don’t know, that’s in cen­tral Ala­bama. Accord­ing to Wikipedia.org it now has 56 schools, 36,000 students, and 2,500 teachers.

Although the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) (more: Wikipedia.org) wasn’t under the Jefferson County School Sys­tem because we were a state­wide institu­tion, we had a great rela­tion­ship with her as we helped each system achieve its goals. I worked under the ASFA Math/Science Out­reach Coord­inator who received leads from Chiquita on schools and teachers to call. Teachers and schools heard about us from her then called us to arrange a visit from a small group of our high school students bringing some form of tech­no­logy and a rele­vant lesson.

If memory serves, on this summer day in inner-city Birming­ham, Chiquita visited us with a brand new Apple Quick­Take 100. She let us inspect it and take some photos with it. Like the photo you, I hope, see now. Once you see the Quick­Take 100 and compare it to a modern “smart phone,” let alone the quality of the pict­ures, you’ll laugh. And she would too.

I think its original resolu­tion was 320-⁠pixels by 240-⁠pixels. (Postage stamps have better resolu­tion.) The picture was up­scaled to 640x480 pixels to make it appear bigger. And I’m pretty sure it came with a codec Apple never shipped in its OS or QuickTime.

Thus I’m sorry to say I’m sure there were/are some unhappy people who didn’t hold on to their install disks and lost access to that codec before being able to convert the pictures to an open format like JPEG (.jpg). In other words, they had their picture files but couldn’t view them.

The photo­graph was taken by my boss, Michael Froning Ph.D., head of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, Math & Science Department. (Not cropped.)

You can tell how we’re smiling for Mike and holding each other, this wasn’t the fist time we’d met.

We used to talk for many hours on the phone.

I was glad she took my calls, and honored she called me and picked my brain.

Chiquita helped me get work. Per­haps among the first remote tech­no­logy jobs for the masses; it was part-time. Being an Auth­orized Apple Product Rep­re­sen­ta­tive (AAPR) was a good exper­ience for work­ing some­where and hav­ing never met your bosses, most­ly commun­ica­ting by email.

She also recom­mend­ed me to the Birm­ing­ham Civil Rights Institute (more: Wikipedia.org) and I did some small-time computer con­sult­ing for them. I really wanted them to hire me to shoot pano­ramas of their place and per­haps make a web­site for them too. I was so eager to do so, I asked and re­ceiv­ed perm­is­sion to shoot a bunch of panos to demo for them.

I’d known Chi­quita for about 10-years by the time I moved away from Ala­bama to take a job else­where.

She had taken a new job with the state, which I’m sure kept her far more busy than when she worked for the county.

The time be­tween us talk­ing grew to slight­ly over a year! Defin­ite­ly a record compared to how it had been. Not long after 1-year away I was very glad to receive a letter from one of my best friends in Ala­bama.

In the letter was this picture of Chiquita. I took out a clipping, perhaps some­thing about one of her accom­plish­ments. In­stead, deva­sta­tion as I read her obituary. Immediately I called my friend, she had a heart-attack. I was very sad for a long time.

It’s no wonder the Ala­bama Depart­ment of Educa­tion named an award in her honor.

Coda: Startrek Circle

In looking up links to the rele­vant sites men­tion­ed above I was sorry to find they all seem to block Tor by default. *

I’m posi­tive if she were here and our lines of com­mun­i­ca­tion were still going, Chiquita would like both Onion Routing and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) (more: Wikipedia.org); among other tech­no­lo­gies which have appear­ed since her pass­ing.

I don’t mean to imply she would like every­thing, she did live on Star­trek Circle—some­thing I learned early and always thought was fun—but she was smart enough to know not all shiny objects were worth spend­ing time and money on. She was familiar with Solo­mon’s admon­ish­ments to not chase after the wind.

No matter who learn­ed about Onion Routing or IPFS, for example, or some­thing else first, one of us would share it and it would be dis­cus­sed. And discussed.

And discussed in terms of edu­ca­tion (ob­ject­ives, stu­dents, teachers, our jobs), in terms of the larg­er soc­iety, may­be in terms of hist­ory, may­be in terms of relig­ion, maybe in terms of race, wherever our con­ver­sa­tion went. Pros and cons would be men­tion­ed and questioned.

Therefore I have no prob­lem say­ing I’m sure Chiquita would have been in­stru­men­tal in setting up an onion address for each of the things she was involv­ed with, like her late­st position with the state, and the Ala­bama Edu­ca­tion­al Tech­no­lo­gy Conference (AETC).

Holodeck Program T1.a1

If she had discovered the Tor Project, Tor Browser, and onion sites before me, it’s easy for me to believe she would tell me with a little twinkle-hint in her voice about a link she was going to send me.

May­be if we were talk­ing on the phone already, I’d say “I’ve never seen a dot onion domain name before. And what’s up with that domain name?! Who’s going to remem­ber that?! It looks like a hash, or like some­thing that’s sup­pos­ed to be top-secret.”

She would laugh at how in­cred­u­lous I would sound about it, me ham­ming it up slight­ly for ef­fect, be­cause I knew she would only tell me about some­thing if it was in­ter­est­ing, educational, and cool.

“That contains a public key.

“It’s how you know you’re con­nect­ing to that dot onion ad­dress. The ad­dress is self-authenticating.

“The dot onion ‘domain name’ is the public key, ver­sion number, and check­sum all-in-one; it’s really very clever.”

Then I’d ooh and aah about it, fol­low­ed by lots of questions.

Holodeck Program T1.a2

If I discovered the Tor Project, Tor Browser, and onion sites before her, I would definitely have told her.

But instead of pre­tend­ing the con­ver­sa­tion would go like above in Holo­deck 1, which it very well could have—since we shared a deep interest in tech­no­lo­gy, edu­ca­tion, and God—let’s pre­tend I was ex­cited about it and she’d only heard bad things about it.

That sounds slight­ly real­is­tic since, well, some­how the links above tend to deny Tor Browser upon the first click and first circuit.

If we hadn’t spoken about a subject before, depending on what it was, she might not tell me her opinions at first, but ask me mine.

“Why are you so interest­ed in Tor?”

“Wow! It’s not just one thing! It’s fancy router soft­ware. It’s open source and free. It’s design­ed to keep its users safe.

“Your computer never con­nects direct­ly to the com­puter you talk with, it’s always done through inter­mediar­ies. Those inter­mediar­ies are volun­teers compris­ing the Tor net­work, the ‘Tor cloud.’

“When connecting to an onion site, the address contains the public key, thus you can only connect to the computer holding the private key that created it.

“So between the Tor software you’re run­ning and the Tor soft­ware of the onion site you’re con­nect­ing to, your requests can’t be diverted or hijacked. Let alone the other great prop­er­ties of the onion routing con­nec­tion.

“In other words, the com­pu­ters be­tween you and the one you’re try­ing to reach can’t get away with lying to you.”

She might ask, “Why is that a concern to you?”

“I think it’s best to cir­cum­vent that option up front. Fewer prob­lems to trouble­shoot later.”

Perhaps she’d say, “Some people call it a ‘dark web’ and say it’s only used for sick and dis­gust­ing and illegal things.”

“Well, of course we both know that’s hog­wash; a smear by the ignorant for the ignorant. Which I know you’re not; thank you. That com­plete­ly ignores the math and science, the tech­no­lo­gy, the research that’s been done into onion routing and the privacy it affords.

“It’s easily disproven by the long list of not-illegal sites which includes DuckDuckGo, Twitter, Facebook, the CIA, the New York Times, the BBC, Yahoo News, and many more.

“And once you set up yours, wink-wink nudge-nudge, I feel 100% cer­tain it will have zero illegal con­tent,” I would say in a sing-song way to empha­size the obviousness.

“Thank you Drew,” she might reply wryly, “I knew you had faith in me.”

I imagine we’d chat more and end up agreeing on our rock of truth. Math is a tool, a guitar is a tool, the Internet, computers, fire, forks and knives are tools, technologies, and gifts. People who abuse the gift of freewill to hurt others are usually chased and sometimes caught—by other people that is—no one and nothing is hidden from God on Judgement Day.

“Ok, Drew, you convinced me. I’ll see if someone from the Tor Project can give a presentation at this year’s AETC.”

Then I’d be excited and tell her what I was doing.⁠