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Fish into Fowl: Organizations are like fish with people as their cells. They evolved to thrive in the ocean, the high-viscosity world of the idustrial age. These fish must now change into fowl to thrive in the zero-viscosity world of the informage age. Most of them won't make it. Evolution doesn't work that way.
---Brad Cox; Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier
Also see Academia, Bionomics, Big Brother, Economics, Electronic Property, Outlaws , Social Construction of Reality, Software Engineering
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier by Howard Rheingold. The Heart of the WELL Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net Grassroots Groupminds Multi-user Dungeons and Alternate Identities Real-time Tribes Japan and the Net Telematique and Messageries Rose: A Tale of Two Virtual Communities Electronic Frontiers and Online Activists Disinformocracy Bibliography. copyright 1993 by Howard Rheingold, is available as a HarperPerennial Paperback in USA, in the UK from Secker and Warburg, in Germany (Virtuelle Gemeinschafft) from Addison Wesley, in France from Addison Wesley, in Italy (Communita Virtuali) from Sperling
Deadly Black Widow on the Web: Her Name is JAVA "Don't trust Java online" That's the message from computer and Internet security watchdogs, in response to reports that "hostile" Java applets are stalking the WWW. These malicious applets can destroy data, interfere with mission critical intranets, and gain access to sensitive data.
GILDER ARTICLES INDEXThis series of articles by George Gilder provides some interesting background that may help prepare readers to better understand and place in proper perspective, the concepts and technologies related to what the popular press has chosen to label "The National Data Super Highway." Into The Fibersphere, The New Rule of Wireless, Issaquah Miracle, Metcalfe's Law and Legacy, Digital Dark Horse - Newspapers, Life After Television, Updated, Auctioning The Airways, Washington's Bogeymen, Ethersphere, The Bandwidth Tidal Wave, Gilder Meets His Critics, Mike Milken & The Two Trillion Dollar Opportunity, From Wires To Waves, The Coming Software Shift, George Gilder & His Critics, Angst And Awe On The Internet, Goliath At Bay
How the Propeller Heads Stole the Electronic Future by Steven Levy, NYT The silver-haired media monopolists follow their 500- channel dream. They haven't reckoned with the 500 million channels of Netscape and the Internet. (95Sep24)
Microsoft Network is Hacker Heaven As most of us are aware, the commercial online services, such as AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, represent certain risk to the unsophisticated user. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Network (MSN) raises the vulnerability of such users to unprecedented heights.
Ontological Breakdown by Brad De Long Not only is the virtual world behind the computer screen acquiring reality, but the real world is acquiring aspects of virtuality as well...
Effector Online EFF Campaign to stop the indecent Exon Decency Bill.
EFF Moves to California Electronic Frontier Foundation Statement Of The Board Eff Moves To California, Elects New Chairman
The Coming Jurisdictional Swamp of Global Internetworking (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Anonymity) Draft, Presented 11/16/94 Douglas Barnes, Austin Cypherpunks. Original at http://www.communities.com/paper/swamp.html
Wax Or The Discovery of Television by the Bees
The Robber Barons of the Information Highway By Joshua Wolf Shenk Telecommunications companies promise the digital kingdom of heaven. Don't count on it...But when I looked for signs of dedication to learning and civic improvement at Bell Atlantic's interactive demonstration project in Arlington, I was disappointed. I was shown a computer screen with the image of a small city, with an elegant town hall, a school, and a hospital. But point and click and x not much happens. The real action is in the virtual shopping mall-with dozens of catalogues and video games. "Ultimately," insists spokesperson Joan Rasmussen, "there will be communication from house to house and education and all that."
Online Liability: The IssuesHarvard Law School Seminar Who is responsible--in addition to the original posters--for legal violations on the information superhighway? Network providers? Sysops? The potential for anonymity makes some people think it unsatisfying to have the buck stop solely with whomever actually wrote the offending post.
A Child In Search Of Guidance By: William E.
Benso April 20, 1995 
The Internet is a "child". An undisciplined immature "child"
that is trying to walk before it learns to crawl. The modern Internet was developed
a little over 25 years ago and in the desire to achieve a decentralized design, fundamental
legal issues such as privacy were either overlooked, not realized, or simply not
taken into consideration. Today, society is immersed in cyberspace and computer bulletin
boards are everywhere. Yet these fundamental legal issues are still being debated
by both the private and public sectors. The government supports this new Information
Age and insists on a degree of regulatory responsibility while certain individuals
and organizations view government involvement simply as an infringement upon individual
rights.
Are we destined to recreate this split? by Jock Gill; White House As late as 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the Hill Country [of Texas] but throughout the United States. In that year, more than 6 million of America's 6.8 million farms did NOT have electricity. Decades after electric power had become part of urban life, the wood range, the washtub, the sad iron and the kerosene lamp were still the way of life for almost 90 percent of the 30 million Americans who lived in the countryside. All across the United States, wrote a public-power advocate, "Every city "white way" ends abruptly at the city limits. Beyond lies darkness." The lack of electric power, wrote the historian William E. Leuchterberg, had divided the United States into two nations: "the city dwellers and the country folk"; farmers, he wrote, "toiled in a nineteenth-century world; farm wives, who obviously eyed pictures in the Saturday Evening Post of city women with washing machines, refrigators, and vacuum cleaners, performed their backbreaking chores like peasant women in a preindustrial age."
Net Presence.html by Phil Agre Lately several people have remarked on my "net presence", and this has set me to thinking about what this phrase might mean.
Networking On The Network by Phil Agre A great deal of effort is being put into technical means for finding information resources on the net, but hardly anybody has been helping newcomers figure out where the net fits in the larger picture of their own careers. These notes are a first crude attempt to fill that gap, building on the most successful practices I've observed in my fifteen years on the net.
Is the Shortage of Radio Spectrum for Broadband Networks of the Future a Self Made Problem? by Paul Baran Visions of the 21st Century Communications: Keynote Talk Transcript, 8th Annual Conference on Next Generation Networks Washington, DC, November 9, 1994
BradburyFarenheit451 by Bradbury "...Well, I'd say it really got started around the time of a thing called the Civil War....The fact is we didn't get along well until photography came into its own. Then - motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.
Building the NII from the Bottom Up by Phil Agre A Strategy For Working Through Local Organizations
THE INTERNET: How it will change the way you do business by John Verity; Businessweek
The Information Highway is a bunch of Hooey by Jim Carroll "Hooey," granddad would say, spitting with contempt into the dirt. "It's a bunch of hooey." Well, folks, let's all spit into the dirt, and say "hooey," the next time we hear about the information superhighway.
ChuqExplosiveGrowth by chuq von rospach I just wrote this to someone I know. It explains pretty well what's been going on with this list the last week (and I want to apologize for the problems, glitches, delays, overloads and other hassles of the last week. I'm doing what I can to make sure this is ALL of the propblems you'll ever see on this list...), so I figured I'd share it with everyone. Hopefully, it make clearer why things have been a bit flakey.
CislerNetAids.html by Steve Cisler Apple Library sac@apple.com Apple Internet text in one package. I'm getting ready to do a presentation on the Internet in Havana, Cuba in August, and I decided to put together a variety of text sources on one disk for all the DOS and Mac users in the audience. If you want to ftp the collection of files (list is appended), use anonymous ftp to connect to ftp.apple.com (not apple.com) and look in the /alug/NETWORKS directory for INET.ZIP and INETZIP.TXT. There are unZip programs for the Mac, though it's prdominantly used in the DOS world (according to my cultural ambassadors from that world)
No Commercial Use by Bill Cook In addition to clearly stating a no commercial use policy for the vBNS for the first time, Steve Wolff explained his belief that the survival of the Internet would be enhanced by co-opting the telcos in such a way that by being invited into the Internet they would become assimilated into its culture. He concluded that with their economic and marketing muscle they could bring the Internet more cost effectively to more people more quickly than could the smaller providers. We disagree saying that we believe that he and the NSF are blinded by a high tech, high cost industrial age policy that fails to comprehend how effectively small ISPs can function.
The Dactyls of October by Geoff Nunberg Language Commentary for NPR. I've been looking over the new magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000. Cyberzines, they call themselves, the Vanity Fair or Interview of the information age. As best I can figure the information age runs from 18 to 25. Or at least the magazines have a rather MTV cast to them. Jazzy fonts on colored backgrounds, text running over the pictures. It's all very engaging, but a little hard to read for someone of my decade and diopter. I find myself yearning for the austere simplicity of the black-and-white screen on my antique Mac. But maybe that's the point of these magazines, to drive us all on line. Cyberquislings, boring from within.
DistanceEducationEthicalQuests With most if not all interactive technologies there are ethical and practical issues that require serious discussion and debate. These issues are perhaps the result of the 'openness' of the Internet. This 'openness' and the ease to which we can communicate with others carries with it a need for personal and professional responsibility.
Don't talk to cops by Robert W. Zeuner, Member of the New York State Bar My name is investigator Holmes. Do you mind answering a few simple questions?" If you open your door one day and are greeted with those words, stop and think! Whether it is the local police or the FBI at your door, you have certain legal rights of which you ought to be aware before you proceed any further.
FCCRegulationForgery This "news report" is total bullshit. You've been had. (Brock Meeks)
FisherElPubsAtMIT.html By Janet H. Fisher Beginning in late summer 1994 we will begin publishing a peer-reviewed electronic journal called _Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science_. With the same attention to peer-review and editorial quality that the Press applies to its twenty-eight print journals, we believe this journal will be important to the scholarly community for several reasons. It provides high-quality, backed by a standard publisher * incorporates the advantages of the electronic medium that scholars need * gives librarians an electronic publication purchasable by standard subscription procedures, accompanied by liberal use-guidelines consistent with its electronic form of publication; it is available through vendors * is committed to inclusion in traditional indexing and abstracting services * is committed to archiving by agreement with the MIT Libraries and a back-up archive
Ten Questions Parents Should Ask Their Children Clarifying answers to Where are the manuals, boxes, license agreements for the programs? you have or use? They don't have manuals or boxes. Should I not use them?
Digital Dark Horse by George Gilder LCD: no transistors, no polarizers, no color filters, no backlighting. Without these power-and space-hungry features, Yaniv's screens can achieve higher density of pixels at far lower energy use. This adds up to far higher resolution at milliwatts of power (rather than 20 watts) and at far higher manufacturing yields, and thus far lower cost. Yaniv predicts screens with laser-printer resolution and with contrast higher than paper, costing between $1 and $2 per square inch (compared with around $10 for current active-matrix devices). That means 8-1/2-by-11-inch tablets for $100 to $200 in manufacturing cost, well under Fidler's target price
GilderDigitalDarkhorse.html by George Gilder Still an R&D project in an intensely competitive industry, ATI may not have all the answers, but it points the way to a solution. Within the next three or four years, a portable tablet with laser-printer resolution and contrast and with hundreds of megabytes of solid-state or hard disk memory will be purchasable for an acceptable price. Fat Panel's tablet is not merely a toy; it is the token of a technology that will sweep the world.
The Coming Of The Fibersphere by George Gilder In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb
THE "Good Times" VIRUS IS AN URBAN LEGEND by CIAC In the early part of December, CIAC started to receive information requests about a supposed "virus" which could be contracted via America OnLine, simply by reading a message. The following is the message that CIAC received:
GovtInfoLocatorGILS.html In the early part of December, CIAC started to receive information requests
Ode to Dr. Seuss In the cademplynce of 'Fox in Socks'. A grandchild's guide toabout a supposed "virus" which could be contracted via America OnLine, using Grandpa's compute
Building Open Platforms: Public Policy for the Information Age by David Farber
"Information Highway" is a Bad Metaphor by MASOUDER@alex.stkate.edu Think about what users of the road system do on the highway. We sit as vehicles jiggle us around and propel us forward. We look out the window. We stop at rest areas to stretch and relieve ourselves and our children. We take side trips to amuse ourselves with scenic routes. When we are on the highway we are always travelling but are never "there."
The laser patent wars Laser Focus World recently ran an article on bitter patent wars that raged over laser technology for thirty years. It is an excellent article that shows that patent holders can be very nasty enforcing their patent rights (to the point of forcing companies out of business) without seriously impeding the continued growth of a technology and its industry (a charge often leveled at software patents).
Law, Ethics, and Society on the Information SuperhighwayThe LaMacchia Case What happened What really happened What really really happened What finally happened
`Rant Radio' promotes the politics of rage to brainwash American citizens by Doug Mallouk Review of The Way Things Ought To Be by Rush H. Limbaugh
The Market For Deadbeats by Margaret F. Brinig* & F.H. Buckley The flow of people from one state to another may provide useful information about both states. While people move for a variety of reasons, net immigration states are in general more attractive than net emigration ones. Thus, many of our intuitions about the attractiveness of different states are based on migration flows. Should we notice a mass exodus from Florida to Castro's Cuba, for example, we might want to reconsider our feelings about socialism.
Project McLuhan "Mini-Post" March 1994 In his later works, McLuhan demonstrated a form of thinking or analysis that he used in his private consulting assignments. We call this "McLuhan Process Analysis," and it uses key techniques and tools (including Gestalt analysis) to distinguish patterns. Patterns are key -- if you can distinguish a pattern you are no longer forced to rely on "rear view mirror" thinking, or history, to extrapolate what is coming next. Or, as we sometimes like to say, "don't merely count the arrows, DUCK!". In the material below, we include an extract from an article in a Canadian periodical which quotes Nelson Thall, our President and director of McLuhan Research, on the world financial markets. We are not especially interested -- or disinterested -- in the financial markets. However, we noticed that in the last 12 months in particular, virtually all the major Wall Street advisories have gone "quietly mad" because the action of the world markets has broken all established patterns going back to the turn of the century. The "experts" don't know what to do anymore. Perhaps the answer is that "the future doesn't always go where it has been; sometimes it goes where it is going."
ModemTaxAlert by Brock Meeks Well... it's back. Sort of. Ruth Milkman, legal advisor to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt, said during a recent question and answer session that the agency might again take up the issue of the so-called modem tax.
ObscenityBillAnalysis.html S. 1822, The telecommunications bill reported from the Senate Commerce Committee on August 11, 1994, contains provisions introduced by Sen. Exon (D-NE) to curtail transmission of obscene, indecent, or harassing, telecommunications. Although ostensibly simply extending existing federal prohibitions on obscene or harassing telephone calls to other telecommunications devices, these provisions would greatly expand prohibited conduct and would potentially make employers, service providers, and carriers liable for transmission of restricted communications.
Electronic Publication At Johns Hopkins: Project Muse In one of the first joint ventures of its kind, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, and Homewood Academic Computing have joined forces to launch Project Muse, an initiative that enables networked electronic access to the Press's scholarly journals. This collaboration draws the Johns Hopkins University community together to move scholarly communication into the electronic age and develop an economic model that addresses rising costs and diminishing budgets
Bill Gates Interview Playboy A candid conversation with the sultan of software about outsmarting his rivals
From The 35,000 Members Of Project Vote Smart Hundreds of citizens are volunteering to make Project Vote Smart possible. Month after month they labor to assemble an enormous system of factual information on over 2,000 candidates who want to represent you
The Psychology of Cyberspace by Storm A. King Cyberspace. The space between our terminals? Or a place in our minds? Definitions for (and debates about these definitions) of virtuality, cybermind, or virtual anything abound and conflict and occasionally coalesce. Through cyberspace. What was once strictly the domain of computer nerds and hackers or scientist and researchers is now increasingly occupied by middle class America. The field of the study of computer mediated communications started as research in to how people connected by computes could become more productive and increase profitability by cooperation. Now, it is shifting to look at the sociological implications of a new phase in the information revolution. A phase that has millions of ordinary citizens of the world reaching out to touch someone, keyboard to keyboard. Interpersonal interactivity, on a scale un-imagined only a few short years ago. Information is no longer constrained by the traditional mass media. This new "from many to many" paradigm of information exchange has permanently supplemented our reliance on a few centralized organizations to assemble, edit and disseminate to us information about others actions and ideas.
What is the Internet, Anyway? by John Quarterman We often mention the Internet, and in the press you read about the Internet as the prototype of the Information Highway; as a research tool; as open for business; as not ready for prime time; as a place your children might communicate with (pick one) a. strangers, b. teachers, c. pornographers, d. other children, e. their parents; as bigger than Poland; as smaller than Chicago; as a place to surf; as the biggest hype since Woodstock; as a competitive business tool; as the newest thing since sliced bread.
Life in Cyberspace by Joshua Quittner; Newsday I feel like that guy in "The Crying Game." All this time, I've been chatting with - no, getting educated by - A THIRTEEN YEAR OLD!
Rants On Universal Access As a so-called "ethnic minority" I often find myself somewhat ashamed of the value SOME people who share my culture place on luxury items, while giving low priority to things that will enrich them intellectually. How many times(Black people raise your hands because you know what I am talking about) have you gone over to a friends' or relatives' house, walked through the front door and nearly been crushed by the 99" television set in the living room?! :-( Yet when you bring up the subject of computers, whether they have one, or whether we should be celebrating the genius of Marc Hannah (Chief Scientist, Silicon Graphics and a Black man) instead of Michael "Duh" Jordan, you get a blank stare. Mind you, I'm flexible, so the above was just an example, but it applies to many types of technological issues and discussions that have been brought up.
Reaffirming Life through an Online Death by Jim Thomas Kathleen Johnston. September 29, 1945 - July or August, 1994. The days are dwindling, as is my energy, so I won't be around to correct your copious errors in logic. It's been fun. Of metastatic cancer.
Rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic by John Murray On September 30th, a symposium was held at the University of Michigan entitled "Competition and the Information Superhighway". It was sponsored by the Michigan Telecomminications & Technology Law Review, and was focused on the legal, business, and regulatory issues associated with the NII. There was an obsession with the supposed need to find source material to take advantage of "all this bandwidth". However, it wasn't clear to me how this obsession was linked to the expressed desire not to "squander these gifts provided by the scientists and engineers"!
Digital Reiko By Howard Rheingold Reiko Chiba, nineteen, is planning to spend the rest of her life in cyberspace. I met Digital Reiko when we both appeared on stage in Tokyo as part of a panel discussion of "digital culture." She's shy, poised, intelligent, but does seem to have one fetish: in the hours I spent with her, before, during, and after the panel discussion, she always had at least one hand on her portable computer. As one addict can recognize another, I understood that she was itching to find a telephone cable, plug it into her PowerBook's modem, and retrieve her e-mail. I believed her when she told me she's serious about never leaving her apartment again, once it is properly equipped.
Teleread At A Glance by David Rothman TeleRead is a nonpartisan plan to get electronic books into American homes--by way of a national digital library and small, sharp-screened computers--in an era of declining literacy. The author, David Rothman, proposes a focused procurement program for schools and libraries to promote the development of a private market for appropriate hardware. He suggests that the same computers could be used for electronic forms, home shopping, the Internet in general, and a variety of other purposes to cost-justify the library applications.
ELECTRONIC JOURNALS: NEITHER FREE NOR EASY By Fytton Rowland My perspective on questions of publishing, archiving and accessing electronic journals is that of someone who trained as an information scientist, has worked for most of the last 25 years for not-for-profit learned-society publishers, and is now a research fellow in electronic publishing in a university information & library studies department. My impression is that much of the continuing debate actually has little to do with the paper versus electronic issue. It is in fact quite an old controversy that predates the computer, and reflects the animosities that often exist between academics, librarians and publishers -- with the publishers being, on the whole, the people that everyone else loves to hate
Rsa And Eit Joint Venture Will Make Internet Transactions Secure PALO ALTO, Calif., June 13, 1994 -- RSA Data Security Inc. (RSA) and Enterprise Integration Technologies Corp. (EIT) today announced the formation of Terisa Systems, a joint venture that will market, license and support technologies that make secure Internet transactions possible. The new company will provide toolkits and support to developers of Internet applications for the World Wide Web (WWW) and NCSA Mosaic
Year 2020 Seattle Times I want to invite you to participate in a global group exploration of life in the year 2020. Let me introduce myself and then explain. My name is Kurt Dahl and I am currently the Vice President of Information Technology at The Seattle Times (Seattle's major metro newspaper). I am writing a new weekly column that will be published in the Sunday Seattle Times Personal Technology section. The column is called 2020world. The idea of 2020world is to explore how our lives will change when the information highway is a familiar and integral part of our society. The column will *NOT* be about technology, that's why I picked the year 2020, by then we can all agree that a broadband, fully switched, ubiquitous network will have been in place for many years. How that network will change our lives, not how it will work, is the question 2020world will address.
Why Censoring Cyberspace Is Futile By Howard Rheingold SF Examiner For years, many Netheads had a recurring nightmare that a pedophile would use a computer bulletin board system to make contact with a child, and follow up with physical abuse offline. Now this nightmare has become a reality. (See the news pages of today's Examiner.)
Shein; Why Companies Need Internet by Barry Shein This is something I wrote a while ago on this topic. It still needs some cleaning up (corrections welcome, flames not so welcome) and expansion but I think it does cover some of the core of this question reasonably well. Others have found it useful. I did a quick pass just now to fix some glaring errors but that's all. -
$25 million judgment over software trade secret theft A classic question is how to protect your software in the multi-billion dollar software industry. Patent, copyright or trade secret are the three best ways to go. However as Apple's loss to Microsoft shows, copyright is difficult to apply the amorphous structure of software, and does little to protect an innovative algorithm.
StallmanGetWebbed by Mark Stallman And, so far, the Internet is an unqualified commercial flop (despite some newly wealthy ISPs). Furthermore, since no one has yet figured out how to "commercialize" activities like *com-priv* (which remain the heart of the Internet as a "culture"), the future of commercialization of *THE NET* itself doesn't look great. And, why should it be?
Drive Through Democracy by Mark Surman The Info Superhighway could be a virtual democracy, or a shopping mall. Vote now.
Terror On The Internet by By Philip Elmer-dewitt; Time Magazine A pair of electronic mail bombings underscores the fragility of the world's largest computer networ
Wanted: Escape From The Tulsa County Jail While Being Held On Armed Robbery Charges Billy Wayne Jackson On Nov. 15, 1991 Billy Wayne Jackson robbed Pier One Imports at 5255 S. Sheridan. He took a store employee hostage that was leaving the business after closing up and told her that he would kill her if she didn't help. He forced her to disarm the alarm system and reopen the store to gain entrance. Once inside, Billy Jackson forced the woman at gun point to open the store safe, cut open a deposit bag, take the money out and put it into a sack. Billy Jackson also searched the woman employee for anything valuable and took a ring off the woman's finger. He then took the woman to the back of the store to check for more money. The woman explained that there was no more money in the store. Billy Jackson then locked the woman in the bathroom and fled the store. The woman escaped from the bathroom and called 911. The police arrived approximately 3 minutes after the 911 call. An extensive search of the area revealed nothing of the armed robber.
Writers Union Accuses Harcourt Brace Of Unfair Practices In Dispute Over Electronic Rights The National Writers Union (NWU) today accused Harcourt Brace Professional Publishing of acting unfairly in a dispute over electronic rights.
"Universal Access"- An Idea Whose Time Is Past By John Browning "Universal Service" may, indeed, be an idea whose time is past, and for some of the reasons mentioned by the author of this message, published in Wired. Nevertheless, the notion fervently advanced in this piece that whole-souled dependency on "the market" as a strategy to deliver the promise of the "Information Age," is not supported here and is unsupportable. This piece is an ode to power, which drives the market, and what we get from a civilization guided by the ethic of opportunism, wealth and power, is a culture of madness--children killing children, cities crumbling, families disintegrated, pervasive homelessness, soaring suicide, and rape and plunder of the citizenry on a scale beyond witness in the whole sordid history of civilization.
USPSEncryption Quebec City, Canada, August 3, 1994--The U.S. Postal Service has dramatically increased its commitment to the security of communications on the NII, with the announcement of Postal Electronic Commerce Services ("Postal ECS"), which will offer a nationwide public key certification service for the authentication of digital signatures used in paperless electronic commerce.
As We May Think by Vanevar Bush; The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945 In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.
What is the Information Highway? It's just like the internet, except...
The Process of Writing a Cybercolumn by Robert Rossney; San Francisco Chronicle; Now, I had a political problem to struggle with. About six months ago, I wrote a piece about Brendan Kehoe. I thought it was remarkable and touching that you could find the story of his catastrophic accident everywhere on the net, and that his coworkers had set up a .plan for people to finger so that they could track changes in his condition. My editor killed it. Said it was "too depressing."
Privacy Issues and The University of Michigan Alumni Association The following is the essence of a letter sent to U of Michigan officials about the blatant breach of individual privacy being perpetrated by the U of M Alumni Association. U of M alumni concerned about this project should probably call the Alumni Assn Director's office at 313-763-2452.
Telemarketing Telecommunications Some Notes For Discussion, by John Murray The use of so-called "high technology" for telemarketing purposes poses several interesting questions from legal and ethical points of view, as well as introducing some issues concerning the design of computer user interfaces. These notes concern a legal action taken in the United States by a private citizen against a telecommunications company. It appeared to the plaintiff that the company was overstepping the limits set down by FCC regulations concerning do-not-call lists and repeated telemarketing calls to a private residence. It is particularly important to note that the recipient of the calls was already a customer of the company in question. (Note for non-US readers: telephone service connection to private residences in the United States has generally been provided by just one carrier in a given area, and this company also handles the routing of local calls. However, most residential customers have a choice of long-distance service providers; they typically select one of these as the default or 'preferred' carrier.)
Explorations -- an electronic book by the Cornell University Theory Center "Explorations," a Cornell Theory Center Web site, is designed as a virtual book consisting of four chapters on ongoing scientific research : Above and Beyond, Down to Earth, Living Things, and Particle Particles. "Explorations" is intended to be an "interactive journey into the world of computational research for a wide range of viewers." Topics include cosmology, fluid flow, biodiversity, molecular biochemistry, ocean resources and ecosystems, carpal tunnel syndrome, and fusion, among others. What ties all these topics together in this virtual book is the use of computer generated visualizations to demonstrate various concepts. "Explorations" is readable only through Netscape 2.0 and incorporates frames, animations, images, and VRML files. This is a site rich in graphics and content and beautiful to view, but users with slow connections must be patient. Note that it is important to read the Navigation Tips section to make full use of the site.
EFF Quotes of the Week y Stanton McCandlish Updated: Mar. 9, 1995 A collection of the wittiest and stupidest, most sublime and most inane comments ever said or written about cryptography, civil liberties, networking, government, privacy, and more
Jacking in from the "Back to the Future" Port: CyberWire Dispatch Washington, DC -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation has fired its Policy Director Jerry Berman and will soon release a sweeping new agenda for 1995 that promises to return the organization to its original grassroots beginning.
EFF Euphemisms for Berman's Firing Press Release by EFF on Personnel Announcements at EFF. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced today several significant personnel changes. EFF is a non-profit, public interest organization that seeks to protect and enhance the growth of "Cyberspace" (the Global Information Infrastructure) as a diverse, free, responsible and empowering environment.
Speech at the High Technology Crime Investigation Association by Bruce Sterling Lake Tahoe, Nov 1994. Wonderful! Read This Now!
SterlingVoicesFromTheNet by Voices From the Net Interview of Bruce Sterling
Crypto Rebels by Steven Levy The battle is engaged. It's the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers. At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century. A report on the Pretty Good Revolution.
The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts by Richard A. Lanham The University of Chicago Press The Electronic Word is a stunner, an utterly original contribution to the discussion of reading, television, education, democracy, technology, competitiveness, and Theory.... Lanham is more literate than the defenders of literacy, more hip than the defenders of hipdom. He looks forward, not too far, and sees us all pushing computer mice and synthesizing music. The breadth of reference in the book is astonishing.... Who better than such a wordsmith as Lanham to welcome the new age? It is not some computer-mad barbarian but Richard Lanham, the historian of rhetoric, the master teacher of writing, who invites us in."--Donald McCloske
What University Presidents Need To Know About Information TechnologyStatic in Cyberspace by Jon Wiener (The Nation reprint) Free Speech on the Internet
The Internet And The Anti-net by Nick Arnett Two public internetworks are better than one
Bypassing the Poor and Minorities on the Data Highway: Let's BET? by Ken Komoski Recently the NAACP, other civil rights and consumer groups, plus members of Congress have charging the builders of the so called information highway with "electronic red-lining,"-- bypassing poor neighborhoods and minority populations, while wiring white, wealthier communities. But don't highways always bypass neighborhoods, or sometimes divide them? Maybe it's time to change metaphors. Right now, "toll road" or "cyberspace theme park"seem more apt. What's currently being built is the 21st Century's electronic marketplace. And it's burgeoning with businesses bent on collecting fees from those willing to sign up for cyberspace travel. But there's no free launch; especially for the poor.
PentiumFDIVBug;VaughanPratt This is a brief note to highlight an important point that is getting lost in the volume of technical traffic (to say nothing of the nontechnical) on the severity of the FDIV bug. There are two fundamental criteria for judging an arithmetic error, magnitude and frequency. (Those who follow my work on the duality of time and information, see my .sig http, will understand the sense of "fundamental" I mean here; physicists should identify magnitude with time and frequency with energy, forming a conjugate pair.)
Legally Speaking: The NII Intellectual Property Report by Pamela Samuelson (to be published in the December 1994 issue of Communications of the ACM). In July 1994 the Clinton Administration's Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights issued a Preliminary Draft Report on Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure[1]. This column reflects the principal comments I made about the Draft Report in response to a call for public comments on it.
Software Markets--How and When Will the Software Components Industry Develop? by Patricial Seybold The Center for the Study of Market Processes is an independent research center attached to the Department of Economics at George Mason University. The Center has been in existence for 10 years, studying business and government behavior as an ongoing process of entrepreneurship and change. Its economists belong to what is called the Austrian school of economics. Instead of viewing the central economic problem as that of how to allocate scarce resources, they see the central economic problem as that of dealing with the fact that knowledge about goods and resources is very dispersed. Therefore, the problem becomes how to collect and expose both dispersed local knowledge and tacit knowledge so that the greatest number of people can make informed decisions and coordinate their plans
FarberBackwardsToFuture.html by David Farber The advent of gigabit network technology has inspired a rethinking of, among other things, the structure of network computers, operating systems, and protocol structures. This rethinking has, in the author's opinion, led to the conclusion that a globally distributed computer system represents one of the best applications of this new technology. This paper will examine some of the considerations that led to this conclusion, as well as explore the nature of such a Global Computer.
A Global Map of Broadband Islands by David Farber This paper has two aims. First, it proposes an international experiment involving the three major areas of the developed world--Asia/Japan, North America, and the European Community--and the three evolving broadband experimental testbeds currently being developed. In addition, it makes some projections as to where the long term markets will be for very high bandwidth computer communication networks.
FarberTimeToGetThinking.html by David Farber Over the past four years, the United States has undertaken a joint industrial, university, and governmental research initiative designed to study the impact of gigabit networking on the future of networking, networking applications, and computer architecture. This study has led to the formation of five testbeds, each exploring different aspects of the emerging technology as well as motivating several non US experiments The experiment is now drawing to a close, at least in its first phase, so it is reasonable to ask what we've learned and what the implications are for the future.
Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net by John Perry Barlow
Crime and Puzzlement: Desperados of the Datasphere by John Perry Barlow So me and my sidekick Howard, we was sitting out in front of the 40 Rod Saloon one evening when he all of a sudden says, "Lookee here. What do you reckon?" I look up and there's these two strangers riding into town.
Decrypting the Puzzle Palace by John Perry Barlow
Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow
NetWorld! by David Rothman Hey, Brad, I've enjoyed your much-revised Web site; it was and is one of the most information-intensive areas in any kind of space, cyber or real. I've just done a link to you from http://www.clark.net/pub/rothman/tour1.htm. If you get a chance, take a look at:
It's hard to hack it when the Europlugs don't fit. By Andrew Marhsall The sad reality of the information dream is that things fall apart. We live in an information age. Knowledge is power. We have to put our foot on the gas, engage gear and cruise on to the information super-highway. Tune in, log on, hook up. But the sad reality of the noble information dream in Europe is that for all the big talk and thick books, things fall apart - if they work in the first place. The single internal market is a fine thing, but it has not yet got as far as harmonising telephone plugs and sockets switchboards, dial tones and ail the rest of the mundane things that are the tarmac and service stations of the fabled infobahn.
Slow steps on Europe's hi-tech highway by Andrew Marshall Martin Bangemann, commissioner for information technology has to steer EU telecommunications policy through both internal and international pressures. This weekend the European Commission is hosting a special G7 meeting in Brussels on information technology. It is not getting off to a promising start. A great deal of money and time has been devoted to making this high prestige event successful. It is the first time the Commission has hosted a G7 conference, composed of the US, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Italy. But even officials in the Commission complain that the event is largely devoid of substance and they describe it as "just a media event". Many of those attending a meeting last Friday to set up the conference emerged disappointed and cynical about the whole exercise.
Clips from Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater
The Department of Justice's brief in the Supreme Court case Reno v ACLU (the appeal of the Philadelphia court's decision striking down the Communications Decency Act on constitutional grounds) is on the Web at http://www.cdt.org/ciec/SC_appeal/970121_DOJ_brief.html
In response to my call for reading lists in social informatics, Chuck Huff pointed me at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/seas/impactcs/index.html and said "it contains the reports from ImpactCS, an NSF sponsored panel of folks who put together some standard for teaching social and ethical issues in computing in the undergraduate computer science program".
The syllabus for Bruce Umbaugh's "ethics in cyberspace" class is at http://www.websteruniv.edu/~bumbaugh/courses/cybersyl.html
Gene Spafford maintins the very extensive COAST Hotlist, a Web resource list on Computer Security, Law & Privacy. Its URL is http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/spaf/hotlists/csec-plain.html
The Stalker's Home Page, with many worrisome resources for finding people, is on the Web at http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~glr/stalk.html
A basic introduction to privacy-enhancing technologies for the Internet by Ian Goldberg, David Wagner, and Eric Brewer at Berkeley is online at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/privacy-compcon97-www/privacy-html.html
The MapBlaster is cool. It prints maps at any scale, centered on any point in the US. I wasn't actually impressed with its map of my own neighborhood, but like most of the Web it's the concept that counts. http://www.vicinity.com/yt.hm?CMD=FILL&FAM=mapblast&SEC=start
A useful survey of the Internet in 1996 -- assuming that 1996 isn't so long ago that a survey can't still be useful -- can be found at: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/1996review.html ChrisCorbyArrested.html EFFQuotes5.0