![]() ![]() ![]() He is mourned by the many friends he made over the decades, of course most of all by his wife, June, with whom he recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. I considered Michael Jones a good friend, and someone with the too-rare combination of intellectual brilliance and temperamental big-heartedness. It was because of both factors-his virtuosity in the technological world, and his generosity on a personal level-that he was a leading figure in an Atlantic article I wrote ten years ago, called “ Hacked.” The article described what happened after the email account and related electronic identities of my wife, Deb, were taken over by a hacker. Remember those phony emails you used to get, from what appeared to be a friend’s account? “I regret to inform you that I have been mugged in Manila. Please wire me $10,000 immediately, and include your banking details,” etc. Deb’s account was an early vector for such a scam-pulled off by a hacker, later traced to West Africa, whose first step was to permanently erase the entirety of her existing messages. Michael Jones was at the time the Chief Technology Advocate for the Google company as a whole-a job title invented specifically for him-and, as explained in the article, he helped me understand exactly how the hackers worked how tech companies were trying to keep ahead of them and how, eventually, many years’ worth of Deb’s correspondence could be retrieved.Īlso I learned: Always use two-factor sign-on systems!ĭeb and I had known Michael for several years at that point. ![]() I first met him at a tech-world conference where he and colleagues from a small company called Keyhole were describing a new digital-mapping product they had developed. In 2004, Google acquired that Keyhole company and its software, which in turn became the basis of Google Earth. I don’t know how many people around the world would recognize Michael Jones’s name or be aware of his story. But by most reckonings at least a billion people around the world, every day, use the company’s mapping tools-Google Earth, Google Maps, and related products-to get through traffic, to find out if a store is open, to see how their house looks from above. That last example is deliberate: When demonstrating Google Earth’s aerial view to me in the program’s early stages, Michael said that the first thing nearly all users did was enter their own address and zoom in on it. In 2013, I did a Q-and-A with Michael Jones in the magazine on how always-available mapping had already changed daily life, and what changes lay ahead. One of his answers illustrated his constant linking of technology and the humanities. He likened the rise of digital mapping tools to previous revolutions in systematized knowledge: (Although his formal education lasted only through one year at North Carolina State University, he was deeply informed about history and literature, and their connections with technology). Johnson’s compilation of a dictionary of the English language, or maybe the rise of the encyclopedia. It’s the creation of a universal reference work, reflecting a lot of labor and great expense, that everybody can rely on. Johnson’s dictionary from the point of view of English literature, you might say, “Well, Johnson-he did a dictionary.” But what else could you do with words on a piece of paper? Maybe you could write mysteries, or comedy, or adventure stories. You can do a lot of things with the words in his dictionary. We think there will be a new literature from the mapping dictionary that’s now being built.Īnd another answer reflected what I can only call a boyish joy in discovery and learning, which lasted through his final days. I asked what had surprised him in the effects of mapping technology, and he said that one bad surprise was the touchiness of many governments about geographical-labeling issues. But:Ī better surprise has to do with the interest of people in geography. Geography was a class that few embraced in school. In elementary school, they make you color in maps to show where the oceans and continents are. ![]()
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