Dream City Mall

Vivid dreams this morning, at the Dream City Mall. I walked up the stopped escalator to the second floor. There were dozens of nearly empty shops. Each shop had one person in them. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. I walked the length of the mall's upper floor. There'd been a furniture store at one end, but it was closed. I turned around, and headed back for the escalators. I realized then, that the people in the store fronts weren't just the owners of those spaces, but also the products. They each were available to join the dream in progress.

            I didn't recognize any of them. Thinking about it now, I know I wouldn't have recognized them; they were "new" people.

            I window shopped for a bit, but couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do. They weren't imprisoned or anything, just available, although I didn't see any prices.

            The dream shifted and I was back on the lower floor of the mall, in a computer shop. I was playing around on a system that was supposed to be 100% Malware proof. I went to a couple of web sites that downloaded crud onto the system. It slowed down to a crawl.

            The shop manager came over, irate. "What are you doing?"

            "Testing your system on a real site that loads crapware."

            "You've screwed it up! What did you do?"

            "I just went to this web site."

            The manager shut the system down and re-booted. It came up, clean as a whistle.

            I asked him where, and how, user data was stored, and how could the system protect it from being snooped, corrupted or deleted.

            He didn't know anything, other than the data was on removable media of some sort, but it wasn't installed on the demo model.

            It seems the system was running like one I proposed for our school district. The OS loaded into a virtual disk from write protected media. The custom parts of the environment being configured from a network connection. All user data was in network storage (internet in the case of this dream) an applications were either preinstalled or loaded from the network/internet. When the system was shut down, the alterations and changes any malware, or user, could make were gone. Apparently I think there are still issues to be worked out.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF