READERS WHO WRITE: A person mentioned to the cyberverse: Sir, I exist

READERS WHO WRITE: A person mentioned to the cyberverse: Sir, I exist

Published 7:00 am Sunday, March 15, 2026

The Gatekeeper’s web page to a website I needed to go to couldn’t have been clearer in what it needed from me.

It learn, merely: “Verify you are a human.”

Oh boy.

Well, Gatekeeper, it’s like this: I’m a human. I’ve a nasty again, different-sized toes, caffeine-stained enamel, more and more stronger prescriptions for my eyeglasses, and an enormous wasteland round my midsection.

I may have proven an image of my humanness to the Gatekeeper however, today, who is aware of if we are able to imagine what we see … particularly on-line.

Ai-yi-yi, this was a pickle.

“This website,” the Gatekeeper warned, “uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot.”

See, now, that’s simply unfair. How am I, a human (trustworthy), speculated to belief a generically described “security service” to find out that I’m not a bot — malicious or in any other case.

I used to be getting a bit flustered. Do bots get flustered, I questioned. Come to consider it … what’s a bot?

A fast search revealed that bots — brief, in fact, for robotic — account for over 50% of internet site visitors. That appears slightly excessive to me. Does it imply that greater than half of the individuals in any given coffeehouse at any given hour of the day are literally robots?

If so, they have to be notably shady to get previous the verification course of utilized by the Gatekeeper’s safety system.

“Bots,” I additional learn, “typically imitate or replace human user behavior.”

Does that imply they will’t hit a 3-wood from the golf green? Do they hold their automobile’s blinker on utterly round a rotary circle? Do they vote?

My try to achieve the specified web site was changing into sidetracked by the worry that maybe I used to be not a human in spite of everything. All my childhood recollections may simply be an implanted fiction supposed to present me a false sense of humanity.

Nah … even essentially the most malicious of bots wouldn’t use my childhood as a foundation for fiction.

I hope.

Justifying the truth of my existence has turn out to be one thing of an obsession lately, as I’ve spent fairly a little bit of time streaming seasons of that the majority dastardly of tv exhibits, “The Traitors.”

Not the U.S. model thoughts you, the one the place they try and have you ever settle for Housewives and gamers of different actuality sequence as “celebrities.” But these from abroad — the UK, Australia and New Zealand, to be exact — the place actual individuals should show they’re harmless Faithfuls below a siege of verbal assaults.

There isn’t any protection these accused of being in league with the Traitors can wage below such an assault, apart from to say “I am myself. I am a Faithful.”

Paranoia, nervousness and suspicion runs deep in these recreation exhibits, however I watch intently as gamers try and separate reality from lies.

It positive beats maintaining with present occasions.

Thankfully, I used to be not below menace of banishment from the Gatekeeper. All I needed to do was put a checkmark in a field … and let the safety system do its factor.

“Verifying you are a human,” I used to be advised. “This may take a few seconds.”

Phew, good factor bots can’t work out how you can click on on a field.

As these few seconds ticked away, I observed a pair of tabs on the Gatekeeper’s web page that beckoned me — on learn “Privacy,” the opposite “Help.”

My verifiably human response was to be cautious of each provides.

Robert Galvin lives in Medford. He wrote columns for the Mail Tribune and Rogue Valley Times from 1999 to his retirement in 2024.