THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN UNDERGROUND COMPUTING - April 30,1994 ISSN 1074-3111

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EDITOR'S NOTES:

FREE-NET: I had intended to do some kind of informative article on the Free-Net systems around the world for this issue. In my attempts to get information, I mailed about 60 individuals/groups requesting information on their organization. I contacted persons in several countries as well as many, many people here in the states. ...and low and behold, only 2 people responded offering information. Half did not reply at all, and the other half (minus the two brave souls mentioned above) replied saying that they had not developed an organization, had no info, no volunteers, etc... Go figure...(Is Free-Net the Vapor-Ware of the 90's??)

PUBLISHING: Our original publishing schedule has gone to hell-in-a-handbasket to say the least. We will probably release 2 or 3 times per quarter.

Order some Legion Of Doom T-Shirts!

Share this issue with all of the little boys and girls that you know who have an e-mail address.

VISA ESTABLISHES INTERNATIONAL CONSORTIUM FOR

ELECTRONIC PURSE SPECIFICATIONS

/PRNEWSWIRE (C)opyright 1994

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Visa today formed an international consortium of market leaders in the consumer payments industry to develop common specifications for a new way to pay -- an "Electronic Purse," a card with a micro chip that can be used instead of cash and coins for everything from vending machines to public transportation.

The Electronic Purse would consist of a micro-chip embedded in a credit card, debit card, or stand alone card to store value electronically. The card would replace cash and coins for small-ticket purchases (less than U.S. $10), such as gasoline stations, pay phones, road/bridge tolls, video games, school cafeterias, fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and cash lanes at supermarkets. Cardholders can "reload" the micro-chip and control the amount of value stored in the card's memory. The Electronic Purse provides cardholders with the security and convenience of carrying less cash and coins, eliminating the need for exact change. Many participants in this worldwide effort are currently pilot testing electronic purse products, additional pilots are expected in late 1995.

Joining forces with Visa to develop international technical specifications for the Electronic Purse are: Banksys; Electronic Payment Services, Inc., (EPS); Financial Information Systems Center, (FISC); Groupement des Cartes Bancaires, (CB); NationsBank Corporation; Sociedad Espanola de Medios de Pago, (SEMP); Sociedade Interbancaria de Servicos, S.A., (SIBS); and Wachovia Corporation. To ensure worldwide representation, limited additional payment systems that have invested energies in open-market electronic purse projects, will be invited to join. In addition, Visa will form a parallel group with technology companies to ensure the specifications support low-cost, efficient production of necessary equipment.

"The goal of our combined efforts is to lead the market into the next frontier of payment processing -- the automation of cash and coins," said Ed Jensen, president and chief executive officer, Visa International. "The highly complementary capabilities of the participating companies will allow us to address issues for all aspects of smart card-based electronic purse solutions, including the cards themselves, point-of-sale systems, networks and back-end interchange and settlement systems."

This announcement reflects Visa's commitment to providing superior, convenient payment services to its member financial institutions who serve consumers and merchants around the globe. The consortium was formed in response to member requests that Visa take the lead in facilitating the addition of an electronic purse to existing credit and debit cards, as well as the introduction of a stand alone card. Visa will leverage its global brand presence by teaming up with strategic partners to develop common standards.

"The most critical step in making this concept a global market reality is the definition of open standards that can be shared among all participants," said Wesley Tallman, president, Visa Products and Information Services. "Recognizing that important domestic electronic purse developments are underway, the consortium will leverage the expertise of all participants. Group 'knowledge sharing,' especially with our European participants that have made significant advancements in the chip card arena, will facilitate the development of a specification that is relevant to markets worldwide." The technological specifications will govern the standards needed to establish an infrastructure that supports electronic purse payments.

The worldwide market for automating cash transactions remains virtually untapped. According to the Bank for International Settlement, consumer cash transactions in the U.S. alone exceed 300 billion per year. By contrast, bank-facilitated consumer transactions, such as credit and debit cards, checks, and wire transfers total only 60 billion per year. As these figures indicate, there is a vast market potential for automating cash transactions. "EPS has been investing significant resources to develop smart card solutions since 1991," stated David Van Lear, chairman and chief executive officer of Electronic Payment Services, Inc. "Combining the resources of these industry leaders will accelerate market acceptance."

Just as the standard operating environments have fueled the growth of the personal computer industry, the specifications that emerge from this collective effort will provide the essential framework to ensure compatibility, reduce development time and cost, and open up the market for others.

International payment system participants included in this cooperative effort are:

Banksys -- based in Brussels, Belgium, is a leading European specialist in electronic funds transfer (EFT) and payment security. Banksys operates the automated teller machine (ATM) and point-of-sale (POS) network on behalf of all card issuing banks in Belgium. Besides Belgium, 10 other countries are equipped with the Banksys system. Banksys is entrusted with the development of the Belgian Electronic Purse project, with pilot testing expected to begin in December 1994.

Electronic Payment Services, Inc.(EPS) -- based in Wilmington, Del., is the leading electronic funds transfer company in the United States with an annual transaction volume of 1.7 billion. EPS is the holding company for BUYPASS Corporation and MONEY ACCESS SERVICE INC., operator of the MAC(R) network.

Financial Information Systems Center (FISC) -- based in Taipei, Taiwan, is a government organization that supports electronic purse initiatives in that country. Through its members, FISC has issued 80 thousand integrated circuit cards and has installed more than one thousand point-of-sale systems with integrated circuit card readers.

Groupement des Cartes Bancaires (CB) -- based in Paris, is the country's payment cards organization that has succeeded in launching the world's largest integrated circuit card program, with more than 22 million cards in circulation generating 2.2 billion transactions per year.

NationsBank Corporation -- headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is the third largest banking company in the United States with approximately $158 billion in assets, more than 1,900 retail banking centers in nine states and the District of Columbia, and consumer offices in 33 states. NationsBank is a financial services company providing products and services nationally and internationally to individuals, businesses, corporations, institutional investors and government agencies.

Sociedad Espanola de Medios de Pago (SEMP) -- based in Madrid, SEMP is a sister company of Visa Espana, a group member of Visa banks in Spain. SEMP operates Sermepa, the card processing company of Visa Espana.

Sociedade Interbancaria de Servicos, S.A., (SIBS) -- based in Lisbon, Portugal, is the country's leading bank payments company which provides electronic clearing services and operates the national Multibanco ATM and EFT/POS networks. As an extension to its service offerings, SIBS, is introducing the Multibanco Electronic Purse, (MEP).

Visa International -- headquartered in the United States, is the world's leading consumer payments system with more than 333 million cards issued, more than 11 million acceptance locations, and the largest global ATM network.

Wachovia Corporation -- with dual headquarters in Atlanta, and Winston-Salem, N.C., is one of the United States' leading debit card issuers and provides credit card services to three million cardholders nationwide.

/NOTE TO EDITORS: In December 1993 Visa International, MasterCard International and Europay announced an agreement to form a joint working group to develop a common set of technical specifications for the integration of microprocessor chips in payment cards -- commonly known as "Integrated Circuit," "Chip," and "Smart" cards. The electronic currency specifications referenced in this release will enable the electronic purse application to be added to the integrated circuit cards./

/CONTACT: Albert Coscia of Visa, 415-432-2039/

03/28 VISA TECHNOLOGY GROUP SUPPORTS ELECTRONIC PURSE SPECIFICATIONS

SAN FRANCISCO, /PRNewswire/ -- Visa today announced the formation of a technology group of international manufacturers to support the adaptation of specifications for a variety of technologies that will facilitate the issuance and acceptance of the "Electronic Purse" -- a payment card that stores value electronically and is designed to replace cash and coins for a wide range of low-value (under U.S. $10) consumer payments.

The technology group will work with Visa who recently formed an international consortium of payment systems that will develop common specifications for Electronic Purse programs. Because plans are underway for the card to be used globally in a variety of venues -- including, gas/petrol stations, grocery stores, convenience stores, fast food restaurants, school cafeterias, and for such routine items as telephone calls from pay phones, road/bridge tolls and video games -- a number of technologies required to support card acceptance in global markets will be examined by the group.

The first suppliers to join the international technology group are VeriFone, Inc., the leading global provider of point-of-sale transaction systems, and Gemplus, SCA, the world's leading manufacturer of smart cards. VeriFone and Gemplus have formed a joint venture, called VeriGem, to pursue electronic purse opportunities. To ensure worldwide representation, additional technology leaders who have invested energies in electronic purse applications will be invited to join the group.

In addition to acceptance technologies, "loading" systems that enable cardholders to restore currency value into the micro chip will also be analyzed. Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) are expected to play an important role in loading value into the electronic purse. Future loading methods, such as specialized devices located at merchant locations or in the home, will also be explored. Operating both the largest international consumer payment network, VisaNet, and the world's largest ATM network puts Visa in a unique position to lead this global effort.

"As with all emerging technologies, consultation with suppliers responsible for physically implementing the technology is critical to ensuring the viability of the product design," said Wesley Tallman, president, Visa Products and Information Services. "As market leaders in the payment systems field, all of those who have joined us in this initiative are truly partners in paving this 'express lane' of the electronic payment superhighway."

Tallman emphasized that the technology group will be charged with ensuring that the specifications developed by the consortium support low-cost, efficient production of necessary systems and equipment. This group approach has been a key tool in support of Visa's product and market development efforts. In December 1992, Visa formed a manufacturer's group to support development efforts for security specifications of integrated circuits on payment cards. Still active today, this group lends critical on-going support and expertise to Visa's chip card efforts. Participants in this international group include: Bull, CPS (France); Gemplus, (France); Giesecke and Devrient (Germany); Schlumberger Industries (France); and Toshiba Corporation (Japan). Visa expects and welcomes the participation of these and other technology partners in the electronic purse effort.

Hatim Tyabji, chairman, president and chief executive officer of VeriFone, agreed with the need for a supplier's group that would lend systems expertise to this effort. "Establishing worldwde specifications is the essential first step in the global standardization of the electronic purse, uniting all industry participants on a common playing field with a common set of rules. The endorsement and support of the electronic purse by Visa, its member banks and leading worldwide payment systems send a strong message to the industry -- the electronic purse is no longer merely a possibility, but a real market direction," said Tyabji.

"With their high storage capacity, programmability and increasing affordability, smart cards are now poised to move beyond specialized applications and become a truly universal payment medium," said Dr. Marc Lassus, president and chief executive officer of Gemplus. "We share the consortium's vision of the electronic purse, and are excited about helping to bring speed, reliability and efficiency of smart card-based electronic cash to markets around the globe."

Visa International, headquartered in San Francisco, California, is the world's leading consumer payments system with more than 333 million cards issued, more than 11 million acceptance locations, and the largest global ATM network.

VeriFone, Inc., based in Redwood City, California, is a leading global provider of Transaction Automation solutions used to deliver payment processing and other transaction services to various retail market segments, as well as the healthcare and government benefits market. The company has more than 30 facilities located throughout Asia, Europe and the United States. To date, VeriFone has shipped more than 3.4 million Transaction Automation systems, which have been installed in more than 70 countries. Net revenues in 1993 were U.S. $258.9 million.

Gemplus Card International, based in Gemenos, France, is the leading worldwide manufacturer of smart cards. Gemplus' cards are used for secure transactions in public and cellular telephone, banking, pay TV, transportation, healthcare and defense applications. The company has three manufacturing facilities: two near Marseilles, France, and one near Stuttgart, Germany. Current Gemplus production exceeds 14 million cards per month. The company has direct sales offices in 12 countries and a distribution network covering an additional 50 countries worldwide. The company's 1993 revenues were U.S. $130 million.

NOTE: Gemplus is a registered trademark of Gemplus Card International. VeriFone is a registered trademark of VeriFone, Inc. Visa is a registered trademark of Visa International, Inc.

/NOTE TO EDITORS: On March 22, 1994, Visa announced the formation of an international consortium to develop worldwide technical specifications for the Electronic Purse. The supplier's group discussed in this release is a complementary effort, serving Visa in a consultative or advisory capacity.

/CONTACT: Albert Coscia of Visa, 415-432-2039/

CYBERSPACE COWBOY

John Perry Barlow rides the range on the electronic frontier

By Maureen Harrington

PINEDALE WY- John Perry Barlow isn't exactly your average computer big shot. Burly and bearded, prone to an eccentric mix of gaudy cowboy shirts and Italian leather jackets, he's a far cry from a pencil neck geek with a pocket protector and a Mensa membership. His interest in technology tends less to megabytes than toward souping up the V-8 in his pickup.

But neither is he cut out for a corporate dance card. Barlow's sarcasm would get him tossed out of most boardrooms.

Despite his unusual resume'- lyricist for the Grateful Dead, former Students for a Democratic Society organizer with an impeccable Republican pedigree, and failed Wyoming cattle rancher with the heart of an environmentalist- Barlow, 46, found a niche in computers. Accidentally.

He's an outlaw at heart who lost his home on the range and found another. Barlow intends to keep the electronic frontier free of rustlers, ruffians and the strong and long arm of the feds. Just as he fought to keep the West free of polluters, developers and the strong and long arm of the law.

The computer community has its first cultural historian, critic and social activist. Barlow has set out to watchdog the goings on in cyberspace- the intangible place between the computer key board and the dots that appear on the computer screen.

He's become, by dint of his megaverbal skills and nontechnical point of view, the cowboy conscience of the computer culture. He's regarded by computer CEO's, journalists who follow the industry and the wildcatters who swoop through systems as the man to ask about the future of technology.

Barlow not only writes and speaks about the future that is racing down the information highway, he puts his talent where his mouth is: he helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1991, along with Mitch Kapor, inventor of Lotus 1-2-3, the best- selling spreadsheet software in the world and with an assist from Steve Wozniak, Apple computer's onetime whiz kid.

Kapor and Barlow started the foundation to protect the right to privacy in cyberspace. They had both been visited by federal agents looking for the second-story men of the computer industry- hackers. They became alarmed.

The tale of Kapor and Barlow's friendship has become one of the first cyberspace legends.

"I was sitting here in Pindale, enjoying this new found world on my computer, when an FBI agent shows up asking me what I might be doing on it," said Barlow.

At the time, Barlow was unaware of a growing government concern about what they considered computer crimes of the most heinous nature.

"A nice guy, but he was expert in cattle rustling, not in high- tech crime," recalled Barlow. "I tried to explain it to him, but he didn't really understand computers. He went on back to the office."

Barlow got on the techies' horn- the WELL, a computer bulletin board- and alerted users all over the country to what happened. In Connecticut, at about the same time, Kapor also had been visited by the feds. Like Barlow, Kapor was concerned about government invasion in this newly forming world.

He and Barlow got together via computers, naturally. Later Kapor, on the way to the West Coast from his home on the East Coast, dropped into Wyoming in his private jet to talk with Barlow.

As Barlow tells it, "Here we are two very different guys- one from Long Island, who has been a leader in this field for years and me, a small town Wyoming rancher who just figured out how to turn these things on. I felt like I'd known Mitch all my life."

In a few hours at a kitchen table in Wyoming, the two men conceived the first civil rights group for high-tech's new age.

EFF, now headquartered in Washington, D.C., raises money for lobbying and provides funds for the defense of so-called "computer criminals." Their first projects were helping with the legal defense of hackers who the founders don't think deserved such harsh treatment by the feds.

"Oh, hell, these were kids mostly," said Barlow. "Just fooling around. They were being treated like major criminals. This hacking is a lot like boys going out to abandoned buildings and looking around. Yeah, the property owners don't like it, but it's part of a boy's life as far as I can tell."

Barlow and Kapor have been bitterly criticized for their support of what many in corporate America- the software and telephone companies, in particular- say are serious criminals.

Barlow takes that into consideration: "Crimes should be prosecuted. There are some real bad things being done on these machines. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be watching out for misuse of (government) power and helping to protect the innocent. We're into educating people about this stuff, as much as anything."

-----------

Barlow doesn't fit, by nature or training, into either the techno-wonk category or the big money elite that has developed around the technology. Nonetheless, both factions of the computer culture listen to him.

He's preaching the sermon of change, from his high-tech pulpit: the computer bulletin board. Barlow can be read on The WELL (one of the first and largest bulletin boards) as well as in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the slick computer-lifestyle magazines, Wired and Mondo 2000.

He's been profiled in the New York Times and quoted as an expert on the computer culture in scores of newspapers and newsmagazines. Remarkably, Barlow had never used a computer until four years ago. He caught on fast.

"Oh, Jesus," he said, rolling his eyes, impatient with ordinary definitions of jobs. "I'm a techno-crank. I've got all kinds of hats on and most of them don't fit exactly. But let's just say I came into computers late, but I was able to see fairly quickly some of the possibilities and problems of this new reality.

"I got my first computer to do some of the accounting work for the ranch (The Bar Cross, outside Pinedale), in the late '80's. I discovered that you could talk to people on it. I got fascinated."

"Fascinated," for most of us, constitutes a hobby.

For Barlow, fascination turned into a new career. Caught in the double bind of rising taxes and expenses and lower prices for cattle, Barlow had to sell the Bar Cross, which had been in the family for three generations. Just as that part of his life was ending, he was catapulted into cyberspace. And his future.

Barlow is one of the few nontechnoids who has caught the attention of the citizenry of cyberspace. In fact, he was the first to co-opt the word "cyberspace" from sci-fi novelist William Gibson and use it in everyday language.

According to Bruce Sterling, a journalist, novelist and accomplished chronicler of computer culture, "Barlow saw that the world of electronic communications, now made visible through the computer screen, could no longer be regarded as just a tangle of high-tech wiring. Instead it had become a place, cyberspace, which demanded a new set of metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors."

Sitting in his mothers home in Pinedale, wearing a short kimono over jeans and boots, Barlow had been on the phone, fax and modem all morning. Mim Barlow, from whom he inherited his conversational skills, was decked out in bright red lipstick and matching rhinestone earrings.

She has no problem, pointing out that although her son "was a brilliant child- quite interesting to raise- I thought for sure he was doomed.

"His father and grandfather were alcoholics, and he was going down the same road."

Barlow no longer drinks.

"Hell, he was headed for juvenile delinquency," said Mim Barlow. "No question.

"We got him out of town. Sent him to Fountain Valley, a prep school outside of Colorado Springs. Best thing that ever happened to this town."

The best thing that happened to her son, too, he freely admitted:

"I'm forever in debt to that school. It saved me. I hope my three girls will be able to go there, if I can afford it."

(Barlow is divorced from his wife Elaine, who remains in Pinedale with their three children. Barlow commutes between Wyoming and New York City. He serves on the board of Fountain Valley.)

Barlow met his fate at prep school: Bob Weir, a co-founder of the Grateful Dead and life-long friend. Barlow has been writing for the Grateful Dead since 1970, including the lyrics for "Hell In a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," and "I need a Miracle." The royalties kept the family ranch afloat for years and pay Barlow's bills now.

"There's a resurgence in interest in the band and I'm actually picking up the pace a little," said Barlow.

"You know I saw Bobby Weir last year," interjected Barlow's eighty something mother. "He didn't look so good.

"This one," she nodded at her son like he's a questionable head of beef, "looks better."

Barlow shot his mother a look of mild disgust. "Hell, Ma, Bob's had a *life*. It shows, that's all."

Barlow has had quite a life, too.

After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, he was swept into the counterculture. He went to India. Rode motorcycles around Europe and was in and out of Haight-Ashbury. He wandered back to the United States, in the early '70's, and was headed to Hollywood for a job, when he stopped at the family ranch on the way to Glamourville. He didn't get out of Wyoming.

"The ranch was in a mess. My dad had been sick. We were in debt. I found something I could put my hand to. I was a hippie that was running cattle and trying to keep the land. I got married and had kids."

Along the way, true to his deep Republican roots, he became an activist. Two generations of Barlows were in the Wyoming Senate. John Perry may have gotten there too, but he narrowly missed winning a Senate seat in 1987 running as a Republican.

Instead, he became involved in the small town life. He set out to protect that way of life by becoming an environmentalist- rancher, which is considered a bit of an oxymoron in the West. But environmentalism is, in Barlow's estimation, "inevitable. You've got to conserve the land."

The loss of his land still rankles. Driving through the Bar Cross acreage, now owned, as many ranches around Pinedale are, by a wealthy "weekend rancher," Barlow tightens up a little: "I did the best I could. I just couldn't make a go of it."

Barlow sold his land at, "about break-even."

He's been living mostly in New York for the past several years, writing for various magazines and becoming more and more famous on the electronic grapevine. He travels constantly and is as provocative a speaker as he is writer. While his income is still largely from royalties, he's commanding more attention and fees as a speaker. He's spoken in China to a scientific congress and has been asked to help explain the future of information to the CIA.

Barlow doesn't find that such an odd task for a social activist: "Like so many organizations, the CIA is waking up to the fact that they know nothing about this technology. And, they are realizing that if they don't know about the revolution in information, they will be left behind.

"People who don't accept this change are going to be left behind. What we once thought of as power and wealth is changing. Who's in charge is changing."

Barlow's business card may say it all: There are nine phone, fax, modem, and beeper numbers. Under his name, his title reads, "cognitive dissident."

In a new book, "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier" (Bantam $23), Sterling calls Barlow, "a computer networker of truly stellar brilliance. He has a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing. He also has a journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self deprecating wit and a phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm."

Sterling adds that Barlow is "a gifted critic...who coins the catchphrases and the terms of debate that become the common currency of the period."

John Perry Barlow has become the poet laureate of technologies new age.

He's the hackers' hero- patrolling the borders of the newly discovered frontiers of technology. If anyone is going to explain the social, legal and personal implications of all the megachange coming down the high-tech pike, it's Barlow.

As he has written in the latest edition of Wired: "In the little hick town I come from, they don't give you much credit for just having ideas. You are judged by what you make of them."

Using that criterion, Barlow may just have a future in cyberspace.

*** Maureen Harrington is a Denver Post staff writer. ***

A MESSAGE FROM THE VICE PRESIDENT

ON NETWORK ACCESS REFORM

By Al Gore (vice.president@whitehouse.gov)

Greetings. I'll leave it to others to carry on the important work former president Clinton started in health care reform after discovering that 37 million Americans have no health insurance.

Now that Clinton has magnanimously stepped down, rather than embroil the US in lengthy Whitewater hearings, and I'm president, I plan to make it my top priority to deal with a really serious problem. As horrifying and unthinkable as it is in this day and age, 212 million Americans don't have network access.

The current network situation is an intolerable and inefficient hodgepodge of private, university, and government access providers. People in different parts of the country pay different amounts for network access. Different providers give different levels of service. There's no excuse for this. Access to the net -- *equal* access to the net -- is a fundamental human right.

Tipper and I have developed a program which will guarantee equal access to the information superhighway to all Americans, tall or poor, rich or thin, white or non-smokers.

All access to the net will be through one's employer. Employers will deal only with large centralized network access providers. There will be only one provider in each area of the country, cutting down on wasteful duplication. All providers will be heavily regulated, and will be required to offer the exact same services for the exact same prices. All employers will be required to participate, and to pay the full costs.

Unemployed people's access will be paid for by the government. This is not expected to require any tax increase. At least, not a very large tax increase. At least, not before the next election.

Since individuals will not be charged for the services, some may be tempted to abuse the privilege. Especially because many newsgroups are known to be highly addictive. To prevent this, newsgroup access will be available only by prescription.

For instance, if someone wants access to alt.sex, they would schedule an appointment with their Primary Network Consultant. In a few weeks, when the appointment comes up, they'd come in at 8 am and get to speak briefly with their Consultant at some time that day or evening. The Consultant would refer them to a sex consulatant or other specialist, as appropriate. After a few weeks, they'd have a similar appointment with the specialist, who would then prescribe alt.sex or some other newsgroup as appropriate. They would take the prescription to their Network Access Provider to get the prescribed newsgroup added to their .newsrc. To prevent fraud and corruption, all prescriptions will be carefully tracked by the government in large databases, closely secured against everyone who doesn't have the carefully guarded top secret phone number for modem access (202-456-1414). Also, all prescriptions automatically expire after 30 days. They can be renewed only after another appointment with one's Primary Network Consultant and the specialist he refers one to.

FTP, IRC, Gopher, WAIS, World Wide Web, Archie, telnet, rlogin, finger, and e-mail, may also be made available by prescription, if they are approved by the Federal Data Administration (FDA). For reasons of public safety, network services and newsgroups not approved by the FDA will be strictly banned. Anyone caught owning, using, producing, providing, or advocating unapproved services, mailing lists, or newsgroups, will be subject to zero tolerance -- everything they own will be forfeited to the government, without a trial.

Also, anyone who rents an apartment or gives a job to a suspected network abuser will be subject to zero tolerance. Of course, this being a free country, nobody will actually be sent to prison without a fair trial. Since nobody who's accused will be able to afford an attorney, the government will provide them with an attorney of our choice without charge. And anyone guilty of three offenses will serve a mandatory life sentence without parole.

Similarly with anyone who writes, posesses, distributes, manufactures, sells, uses, posts, backs up, saves, promulgates, perpetrates, forwards, or laughs at, a spoof that makes official government policies or proposals look ridiculous.

LEGION OF DOOM T-SHIRTS!!

By Chris Goggans <phrack@well.sf.ca.us>

After a complete sellout at HoHo Con 1993 in Austin, TX this past December, the official Legion of Doom t-shirts are available once again. Join the net luminaries world-wide in owning one of these amazing shirts. Impress members of the opposite sex, increase your IQ, annoy system administrators, get raided by the government and lose your wardrobe!

Can a t-shirt really do all this? Of course it can!

------------

"THE HACKER WAR -- LOD vs MOD"

This t-shirt chronicles the infamous "Hacker War" between rival groups The Legion of Doom and The Masters of Destruction. The front of the shirt displays a flight map of the various battle-sites hit by MOD and tracked by LOD. The back of the shirt has a detailed timeline of the key dates in the conflict, and a rather ironic quote from an MOD member.

(For a limited time, the original is back!)

"LEGION OF DOOM -- INTERNET WORLD TOUR"

The front of this classic shirt displays "Legion of Doom Internet World Tour" as well as a sword and telephone intersecting the planet earth, skull-and-crossbones style. The back displays the words "Hacking for Jesus" as well as a substantial list of "tour-stops" (internet sites) and a quote from Aleister Crowley.

All t-shirts are sized XL, and are 100% cotton.

Cost is $15.00 (US) per shirt. International orders add $5.00 per shirt for postage.

Send checks or money orders. Please, no credit cards, even if it's really your card.

  Name:       __________________________________________________
 
  Address:    __________________________________________________
 
  City, State, Zip:   __________________________________________
 
 
  I want ____ "Hacker War" shirt(s)
 
  I want ____ "Internet World Tour" shirt(s)
 
  Enclosed is $______ for the total cost.
 
 
     Mail to:   Chris Goggans
                603 W. 13th #1A-278
                Austin, TX 78701

These T-shirts are sold only as a novelty items, and are in no way attempting to glorify computer crime.

Computers and the Second Amendment: An Opening Volley

By Carl Guderian (bjacques@cypher.com)

A friend and I were talking the other night about needing to defend oneself against one's own government. He was talking about guns; I was talking about encryption. We were talking about the same thing. I read a lot of debates in which the arguments for restricting computing are strikingly similar to those for gun control. Am I the only one who sees the parallels? It's certainly forced me to take another look at the gun issue.

The last few years have given us all an appreciation for the Constitution, or what's left of it. Most of the action in the personal computer user community is centered around the First Amendment, particularly the rights to free expression and peaceable assembly. We've also had our noses rubbed in official disregard for the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. All of this has been (and is still being) discussed elsewhere. Tonight's topic is the Second Amendment, the people's right to keep and bear arms (a well regulated militia being essential to the security of a free state), in relation to personal computers and private networks.

Until recently, I didn't give much thought to the gun issue, since I don't own a gun and probably won't be getting one anytime soon. Unless I move to Arizona, I can't pack heat everywhere I go, so I probably won't have a shooting iron handy when I really need it to shoo away a mugger if I run into one. The best way for me to win such an encounter is to prevent it from ever taking place. According to Sun Tzu, a battle is won or lost before it is ever fought. I don't hide out in the suburbs, but I don't stroll down Main at midnight with my wallet hanging around my neck, either. Weapons are better than nakedness, but wits are better than both. The existence of priests and businessmen proves it. So much for that.

Freedom of computing, it now turns out, has a lot in common with the citizen's right to own a gun. Both rights are being attacked in a similar manner.

Proponents of restrictions love to wave a bogeyman in our faces to get us to blindly go along with their hastily cooked-up bills. George Hennard helped a bill restricting "assault" weapons get more attention than it deserved. Likewise, Sen. Joe Biden touts Senate Bill 266 as protection from crazed hackers who might trigger World War III or, worse, steal corporate secrets and sell them to the Japanese. And let's not forget the drug kingpins who might keep their communications secret from the Law. As a law- abiding citizen, you've got nothing to hide so this doesn't affect you <grin>.

S.B. 266 essentially mandates a government backdoor into any encryption scheme marketed for public use. Secrecy becomes the exclusive domain of the government and its partners, such as corporations doing work of vital military or economic importance. The rest of us have to endure possible casual surveillance or be proscribed for daring to keep secrets from Uncle Sam.

Not just no, but No, Goddammit! Privacy is scarce enough as it is. Every day my file gets passed around the federal and corporate nets like a cheerleader at a frat party. Cheap, widespread encryption is one of the few physical methods available for enforcing privacy, just as in the private ownership of guns kept the government honest in the past. Encryption is a window blind pulled down in the face of the hotel dick.

"A well-regulated militia necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Historically, citizen ownership of guns has been useful for repelling invaders, enforcing Manifest Destiny, and keeping central government from getting too many ideas about control. There have been some problems in the past. The Whiskey Rebellion, Shays' Rebellion, and Quantrill's Raiders spring to mind, but no one has seriously considered disposing of the Second Amendment. The last real invasion was in 1815 and we've killed off most of the Indians, so what does that leave?

Guns in the house are no match for a government determined to do you ill (though they may slow down a death squad). That's probably why Republicans can lust for control over everyone else yet fight gun control. Even the Tuff-On-Crime bill making it's way through the pipeline has no real provision for gun control (it may, however, okay warrantless searches made in "good faith" and further weaken habeas corpus). Republicans know as well as anyone else that guns are small potatoes when someone else has all the money and information.

Rights, even those guaranteed by the Constitution, are really guaranteed only to the extent that they are hard for a government to violate. Early Americans were either well-armed or westward bo und, qualities needed in citizens opening a new frontier. However, the 1900 census found America with no more frontiers; there was no more West to go to. The previous census, in 1890, was the first automated census, using punched Hollerith cards to perform a ten-year job in six weeks. For the first time, the government could use machines to track its citizens' movements. Control began where the frontier ended. Modern American history has been a running battle between individual rights and government control.

Cheap, widely available data encryption is one of two new developments that are tipping the scales in the citizen's favor. Explosive growth of computer network use (the number of Internet users grew by 90% last year) is the other, enabling small groups to get the political jump on big ones by getting vital information over the wire quickly to just about anyone who needs it. Data encryption enforces privacy by keeping your e-mail from prying eyes. It represents the first physical means of keeping the Fed's nose out of your private business.

It's too bad encryption is not widely used outside of businesses. Because so few people use encryption, agencies such as the NSA have an easy job of spying on American citizens. I'm not giving away any secrets, but here is how I would do it. Though it's theoretically possible to parse every phone conversation and data transmission, doing so is a waste of resources. Profiling and other tools tell an agency which 10% of the

population is the real threat (90% of the threat comes from 10% of the population). Encryption used by other than corporations and government agencies is considered suspect and bears cracking by agency supercomputers. Fortunately for the NSA, unofficial secure traffic is not very large. However, this could change if, say , companies marketed secure communications as an alternative to the postal system (Feds can't open your e-mail, but you can't fax drugs eitherDlife is full of tradeoffs), or

Americans started using encryption as a matter of course just because it's s imply none of the government's damned business what a private citizen does if he or she is not the subject of an actual criminal investigation (instead of a fishing expedition). Either or both of these developments would severely tax the government's ability to casually spy on its own people. It might even force the Feds to wonder if it's really worth it. Maybe.

A problem with encryption is that there are very few good schemes out there. The DES algorithm is best known, but it was created by the NSA. No comment. The RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adelman) algorithm is superior to DES, but MIT owns it and licenses cost money (DES is free). There is supposed to be a freeware package based on or comparable to RSA, but it could also be NSA suckerware. It's easy to get paranoid about this. A bigger problem with encryption is that most Americans don't value privacy enough to make the extra effort to secure their communications.

The government may or may not be systematically running small networks and bbs's out of business by busting them right and left. That's open to debate. The No Such Agency is almost certainly tapping their lines, though. In the short term, it would be stupid not to. That is its job. In the long run, though, this speeds the collapse of the Republic by dangerously concentrating power.

Power tends to accumulate. The more power one group has, the more it can get. Eventually, one group gets too much of it and spends most of its time securing it at the expense of others, whether it needs to or not (eventually it needs to). The firs t impulse of one of the other groups is to usurp the power from the first group, all with the highest of motives, of course. This leads to exactly the same problems. The only way to prevent an endless succession of power grabs is to disperse power as widely as possible, among people interested in limiting it for everyone. This is where checks and balances come in. "All power to the people (soviets)" is a disastrous substitute, as (thankfully) other people learned in 1798 and 1917. All of this is explained at length and more clearly in On Power: Its Nature and the History of its Growth, by Bertrand de Jouvenel (Viking Press, New York, 1949). The book is long out of print, but it's well worth your while to check it out and photocopy it somewhere. Other good references include Democracy in America (1835) and The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), both written by Alexis de Tocqueville. You can find those at a used bookstore.

Theory aside, it can be shown that a people completely dependent on their government for security lose their ability to come to that government's aid in times of external danger. At that time, the people further drain those resources by requiring protection from themselves. The less capable a people become, the more fearful they get, eventually voting in a police state. Hitler was elected.

Computer users face similar dangers. Additionally, economics play a large role. A person with a computer is a nearly self-sufficient engine of wealth. Economic competition is constant. Denial of personal rights to privacy of information removes the individual's ability to protect an idea before bringing it to the market. Computer users are thus unable to create. All they can do is consume or, at best, labor for someone else. Entrepreneurs and small business owners, both key agents of pr ogress , are effectively locked out. A nation of employees economically dependent on bosses is an economic nonstarter. Freedom of computer use and the right to privacy are thus essential to the economic security of a free state.

The kind of power bestowed by guns, personal computers and absolute data privacy implies a need for a personal sense of responsibility. Both viruses and encryption programs are far easier to make and distribute than plastic Glock-11 automatic pistols. Some sort of regulation is required. This is where the "well-regulated militia" part of the Second Amendment comes in and this is the most difficult part of the issue.

My definition of a "well-regulated militia" falls somewhere between the NRA and the National Guard. If there were an NRA for computer network users I'd probably be in it. I think the stakes are higher with computers than they are with guns. I want to see more people with computers and modems, to ensure the widest possible dispersal of computing power. For this to work, all users should be made aware of the power and responsibility of owning a computer ("Only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot"DFredric Brown). If there are kids in the house, they must be taught to respect guns and computers as early as possible. In a well-defended, well-connected house, one can live without fear. Only then can a citizen look past the distracting horrorshows put on by the politicians and pundits to hide the real issues. Who will see to it that responsibilities accompany rights? Part of the answer, believe it or not comes from the government. Laws already exist to cover most serious crimes committed with a computer.

Where the law is insufficient, professional/lobbying groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the Association for Computing Machinery are helping to draw up new laws to deal with new kinds of crimes. It's early in the game, but the above organizations seem to be working for fairness.

For the control addicts in government, this may not be enough. Tough. Computer user organizations are working hard to approach government the way we all were taught to do it in high school civics, and they seem to be making it work. Can the EFF, CPSR, or the ACM control hackers? Of course not. That's what the law is for (demographics suggest that the rapid growth of network use will not be accompanied by an equally rapid rise in hacking incidents. The hacking scene is maturing with the rest of the population. Most hacker heroes are born-again capitalists who might make even better role models as long as they don't forget where they came from).

Computer user groups educate while seeking to disperse power, which the NRA also does to some extent. The EFF especially tries to reach out to potential allies by demystifying computer technology for nonusers and even the cops. Let's face itDthe nervous man with the gun is not going to go away, so we might as well try to calm him down a little.

Finally, computer network users have their talents to use as negotiating chips. A government that refuses to respect their rights will lose their economic cooperation. The network-based economy makes an Atlas Shrugged-style withdrawal very feasible. The government will have its illusion of control while computer users work ordinary jobs while moonlighting in the Netherlands and piling up ones and zeroes (Swiss francs) in Brunei, all in the comfort of one's suburban home. The result will be an Italian-style economyDlackluster on the surface and lively underground. Germany lost the A-bomb by chasing out a half-dozen geniuses in the Thirties. If America wants to be a player in the global economic contest, it needs to treat its citizens with respect.

HOW TO SURVIVE THE FIRST YEAR OF LAW SCHOOL

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

by Mike Godwin (mnemonic@eff.org)

(Copyright 1988,1992. This article may be freely distributed on any computer forum, including commercial online services. To reproduce it in print or in any other non-computer medium, please seek permission from the author.)

You went to a decent college, you scored well on your Law School Admission Test, and you ranked in the top 10 percent of your class. So, now that you're here at The University of Texas School of Law, you can look forward to an unbroken string of acadernic successes, right?

Not so fast. No matter how easy you found undergraduate school to be, law school is a different story. And the sooner you learn that, the better your chances of coming out of the law-school game a winner.

First, disabuse yourself of any notions about your natural academic superiority. Sure, you're good, but so is everyone else in your class. And since everyone is graded against everyone else on a curve, the chances are nine out of 10 that you'll be in the bottom 90 percent of your class, regardless of your undergraduate performance.

This means that law-school success doesn't come merely from knowing the law; you have to know it better than most of your peers. So you can't be complacent.

If you start heeding the following hints early in your first semester, they'll improve your chances of hot job offers...and maybe even an editorship on the law review.

Class Participation

If you saw the movie "The Paper Chase" (and odds are that you did, or you wouldn't be here), you probably know that large classes in law school normally are run by "the Socratic method." Rather than lecturing, the professor will assign some reading for the day and conduct the class by asking students questions about the material.

Watching the movie, you probably got the impression that the best law students are those who are eager and able to answer the professor's questions. Don't be fooled. Glibness and self-possession in class are only roughly correlated to exam performance, and your grades are based almost entirely on final exams, not on your quickness in the classroom. Because the finals are graded anonymously, the professor won't even be able to link your classroom participation with the exam.

It's far wiser to spend your time mastering the principles behind each case you read rather than memorizing its facts. If you try the latter tactic, your brain will be too muddled with facts at exam time to allow you to apply the law. Don't worry about the inevitable instances in which a professor tries to embarass you for knowing less than he does. (I refer to the professor as "he" because almost all UT law professors are male. Most are white, too). You can get your revenge by earning an honors grade in the course.

Class Preparation

Keep up with the assigned reading. Onerous though the reading may be, it's easier to keep up than to catch up. And reading the cases for the day will enable you to answer most of the questions any professor tries to throw at you.

If for some reason you do get behind on the reading, however, don't panic. This happens to some of the best law students. Attend class anyway, even if you haven't read that day's class materials. The professor's Socratic questions will clue you in to the issues he expects you to know for the exam.

Professors

Some law professors are frightening; others are charming. Ultimately, however, their personalities don't matter very much. Whether he likes you or not, each professor will grade your exam according to the curve. There's no such thing as an "easy" law course, although you may find some lectures more tolerable than oothers. If the material is easy for you, it may well be easy for everybody, so the curve can get you anyway.

While some law professors make a pretense of keeping office hours, most of them don't really want to see you outside the classroom, a milieu they prefer because that's where they have all the control. Any question you want to ask a professor probably can be answered by a "hornbook" (legal treatise) anyway, and library is full of hornbooks.

Don't expect too much sympathy from your professors. After all, law school is a game they've *won.* They may have some sort of abstract pity for the poor contracts student who's agonizing over Sec. 2-207 of the Uniform Commercial Code, but under no cirumstances will you be able to persuade them to change your grade.

Briefing your cases

The rule here is "Condense, condense, condense." Nothing's more pathetic than the law nerd whose brief is longer than the case excerpt in the casebook. Remember this rule: Each case has one or two main ideas. Find them, and you'll have what you need to know for the exam.

And good, *brief* briefs can be easily incorporated in your study outline.

Some professors like to ask tricky questions about the fact pattern of a case during the lecture, but don't write these details down.

Instead, make notes in the margin or highlight key facts of your casebook. If you've read the case, you should be able to remember the facts long enough to get through the class period. And if the professor stresses a particular type of fact pattern in the lecture, he's signalling to you a possible exam issue. Note the issue, not the facts of the particular case.

Buying study aids

Basically, there are two types of study aids you can buy for first- year courses: commercial outlines and hornbooks. A commercial outline is a prepackaged, detailed skeleton of the material you need to know for a particular course. There are several brands of outlines, and each has something to recommend it. The Legalines outlines track particular casebooks, while the Emanuel Law Outlines and Gilbert Law Summaries are more general, although they will include many of the cases in your casebook.

You may find it best to buy Legalines outlines for each of your courses except contracts. (The UT professors who wrote the contracts casebook designed it in a way that makes it difficult to produce a commercial outline for it.) Then you can supplement the Legalines with general-purpose outlines like Emanuel's and Gilbert's for courses you're having trouble with. Be aware that occasionally the case summaries and discussions in the commercial outlines are *mistaken*-- let your professor and your classmates supplement your take on a given case or issue.

Some students buy "hornbooks" for particular subjects, but for a first-year student the treatises often go into too much unnecessary detail. Theyre also very expensive, and in general it's best not to buy them; but you may want to make an exception for contracts, which many students find a particularly subtle and difficult branch of law. The Calamari and Perillo hornbook is good for general contract law, while the White and Summers hornbook is necessary for a thorough understanding of the parts of your contracts course that deal with the Uniform Commercial Code. You may also want to consult UT Professor Charles Alan Wright's treatise on the law of federal courts for your civil-procedure class. Finally, if you signed up early for a bar-review course (believe it or not, some people do this during their first year), some bar-review courses will allow you to "check out" their reviews of black-letter law.

Study Groups

Try to get into one. When you find a likely group, make sure that most of the people in the group are dedicated enough to stick with it. Discussing difficult ideas with other law students is a good way of making sure you understand them. In general, study groups work best with about five people, with each person concentrating on one of the five first-year courses you'll be taking each semester. If you have a choice about which course to concentrate on, choose the course you think you'll find most difficult; your responsibility to your friends in the study group will give you an added incentive to master that material.

Computers

Buy a computer--you can purchase them at near-wholesale cost at the Texas Union MicroCenter on 21st Street. Only if you own a computer will you be able to produce and edit a legible course outline in a hurry. You'll need two types of software: a good word processing program to help you with the briefs and memos you have to produce for your legal research and writing seminar, and an outline program to produce the course outlines you'll need for exams. (Some word processors include outlining capability--in general, those word processors are not as good at outlining as programs designed for just that purpose.)

If you buy a Macintosh, the outlining software of choice is MORE; if you own an IBM PC, buy Thinktank or Grandview.. Both products are available at local computer stores.

Exam-taking strategy

Your heart's beating rapidly, your palms are sweaty, and your mind is a blank. Yes, you're taking your first law-school exam. How on earth do you handle those exam questions?

The first thing to remember is that all law-exam questions are more or less alike. Each describes an invented and often quite complex situation that, had it occurred in real life, would probably generate one or more lawsuits. Following the fact situation is usually a question or instruction such as "Describe the potential legal claims and liabilities of each party."

Your best strategy, when you outline your answer, is to pretend you're the lawyer for each party in turn. Pretending to be Smith's lawyer, quickly list all the legal principles from your course outline that could advance Smith's case against Jones. Now play the part of Jones' lawyer how would you answer each of these legal arguments or claims? What counterclaims could you use against Smith? What will Smith say in response to your responses? What other parties in the fact situation could sue or be sued? And so on.

Inevitably, you'll see some obvious legal issues in the fact pattern. You have to deal with them, of course, but don't make the fatal mistake of assuming that by handling the obvious or major issues you've written a good exam answer. After all, your peers probably share your gift for seeing the obvious.

So, how do you make sure you catch the subtle issues as well as the straightforward ones? When you're preparing for the exam, condense your outline into a checklist of one- or two-word shorthand expressions for legal principles. Memorize the checklist, and recite it in your head each time you pretend to be the attorney for one of the parties. (Better yet--write it down on your scratch paper at the beginning of your exam as soon as you're allowed to start writing, before you even read the first question. The checklist will remind you of issues you'd otherwise overlook.

Practice Exams

Besides creating a legal-issues outline, the best way to prepare for exams is to take practice exams. Almost all professors keep their old exams on file in the lbirary. After you've done the bulk of your study outlines, photocopy your professors' exams from the last couple of years. Then sit down with a friend and practice outlining exams answers based on the old questions. Don't bother writing a full exam answer! Time yourself, and give yourself about as much time to outline each answer as you would during a real exam. YOu should budget about a third of the time you're given to answer an essay question for outlining your answer (e.g., 20 minutes for a 60-minute question).

After each question, compare your outlined answer with your friend's. He or she will have seen some points you missed, and vice versa. This pinpoints issues you may tend to overlook during the real exam.

Other matters

Four of your first-year law courses -- contracts, torts, civil procedure, and property -- will last your entire first year. You'll also take two semester-long courses: criminal law in the fall and constitutional law in the spring.

Thus, if you have to concentrate on any particular exam during winter midterms, concentrate on criminal law; that's the only exam you'll take in your first semester that counts as a grade for an entire course. Conversely, the exam for the three-hour constitutional-law course in the spring will count less toward your average than the exams for your year-long courses, which are each worth five or six hours' credit.

Don't get too competitive. It's the friends you make during your first few months as a law student who'll help you get through the year. Don't be deluded into thinking that other students are the enemy; they're not. It's the system you've got to beat, and you can do it with the right attitude. A vicious competitive streak, however, tends to undermine your karma in the long run.

Finally, try to enjoy yourself. The law really can be fun to learn if you let yourself relax. Most people who make it through the first year look back at it as a time of rapid intellectual growth and the building of mental discipline. Don't regard law school as just the stepping-stone to a career. A law-school education has value in itself -- it will teach you a lot about what makes our society tick.

NOTES FROM CYBERSPACE

2nd Edition

Notes From Cyberspace will be a feature of every issue of this publication. They are little tidbits, notes, comments, etc... from people like you. If you have any comments, we certainly encourage you to send them in. (comments@fennec.com)

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 NOTES FROM CYBERSPACE - ARTICLE 1
 By Rodney Perkins
 Subject: THEY ARE OUT TO GET YOU!  A piece of POST-LOGIC.

Is that tuna fish I smell? No, its the CONSPIRACY. As avid readers of this magazine probably already know, the conspiracy has tried to use its poison tentacles to steal eggs from our snake pit. For now, our eggs are safe. One day, however, they might try it again. We will be there, knife in hand, ready to chop off their offending appendages. Yes, they will probably try to squirt their government ink in our eyes but we will continue to fight with the weapons given to us by (insert savior here). We must take a stand against the pervasive eye of the conspiracy's octopi (yes, it rhymes). You must ask yourself "What can I do to help stop this reign of tyranny from the unseens and the who-whats-its?" You must continue to fight against the shickelgrubers, the boot boys and the LOGIC-WEAVERS! You must never fall for LOGIC, you must always use POST-LOGIC (real men always think in POST- LOGIC). Confusion and ambiguity are the weapons in this war. Turn their MEDIASPEAK, GOOBLEDYGOOK and BAFFLEGAB against them! Weave great webs of Orwellian nightmare language! Master the art of circular logic! When they ask you what you believe, tell them "I believe what you believe. Just don't practice it". Are you confused yet? Good! You get "it"!

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 NOTES FROM CYBERSPACE - ARTICLE 2
 By John Logan (ice9@bga.com)
 Subject: ON THE SUBJECT OF GOVERNMENT...

Welcome to a new age! Yes this is a world where technology has hit an all time high. It seems there is no other way to go but up. Funny, that includes taxes, cost of living, and trouble in government. Yes, this is the day and age that we are subjected to, by our wonderful president Mr. William Jefferson Clinton, successor to the New World Order... Most Americans are probably still wondering "Just what is this 'New World Order?'" Well, lets talk about that:

The New World Order is a product of the Trilateral Committee, made up of the World's key leaders. In this form of government, the entire world will be broken up into 3 'Nation States': Europe, The Asias, and The Americas. The worlds decisions will be made by the 'elected' presidents of each nation state. The entire world will be on a common market with a universal currency. I'm sure we have all heard of - the 'credit.' Yes for years we have been getting oriented to this system, whether in movies, or by our banking system. Well, in the near future, there will be very few private banks, we will store our credits (for a small fee) in the World Bank. We will be forced to carry around credit chips that, when inserted into a machine, will access our account number, list what is to be purchased, and the price. Forget about tax evasion!! It will all be AUTOMATICALLY DEDUCTED from out accounts. Yes, the new government will be a cross between Capitalism and Communism. They will know our every move. Business owners will still be allowed to keep their businesses but they will have to pay exorbitant taxes. State security will be at an all time high. There will be no middle class. Citizens will be either very rich or very poor. The machine has already started. Our wonderful government does not want a car on the road that is over 10 years old. A bill has already been passed limiting parts for the cars that fit in this 'danger zone.' It is now impossible to get manufacturer parts for these cars. If you have a problem, you must use after-market parts and hope that it fits specifications. Todays cars are built to last 10 years or less. Its a sad thing that more people do not understand what is coming down the proverbial 'road.' The governing machine is going to run right over the common people like a steam roller. People won't even know what happened. Take a look around! The New World Order is not nearly as wonderful as our government would like us to think. Don't worry, it won't be long and we won't have to worry about what they want us to think. They will soon control that too! WE HAVE BEEN WARNED. NOW ITS TIME TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

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 NOTES FROM CYBERSPACE - ARTICLE 3
 By Dan Wilson
 Subject: Fight the Power!

As I sit here writing this, I can't help wondering what the hell is going on. Why is it that every time a group a people find some new freedom or form of expression, the government steps in to suffocate it? Just look at the National Endowment for the Arts controversy or the PMRC. Why must a small group of paranoid people try to force their fears down all of our throats? I must admit that when these things first began happening, I just sat by thinking to myself that it was a crock of sh*t without doing anything about it. It didn't strike close enough to home for me to get involved. Recently, however, there's been a series of events that have struck close to home and have forced me to take action. The events to which I'm referring are none other than the government's recent attempts at bringing the computer world to justice (as they define it, of course).

It's really disturbing to hear about the methods the feds used to crack down on "dangerous" users. Unsigned search warrants have been used to gain entry to homes where all sorts of equipment, computer related or not, was confiscated while no charges were specified. There have also been cases of holding guns to children's heads while a raid was going on. What kind of gestapo tactics are these? Have these guys never heard of the Bill of Rights? This isn't the America I was told about as a kid; it sounds a helluva lot more like those "evil" communist countries that I was taught to hate. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn here is that the government is very afraid. Why else would they dedicate so much effort to something they know so little about? These guys don't have a clue as to what's going on out here in cyberspace. That's the source of the problem. Here we sit with these marvelous machines in front of us. Touch a few keys and any information that we want to exchange can be sent anywhere in minutes. This must seem like a pretty major threat to a government that so often relies on misinformation and cover-ups in order to scam the public into believing what it wants them to believe. We can't be controlled like the media bozos who drone bullsh*t through the idiot box at us. We can't be censored like the newspaper or the radio. In fact, this is probably the truest form of information exchange we have available today. That alone is worth fighting for.

It could also be that they are afraid of a society where people are judged solely on their thoughts and ideas. We have no style whores here. Race, creed, color and religion are insignificant and pointless in cyberspace; they serve no purpose. There can be no discrimination, there can only be disagreement with someone's opinions. To me, this is pretty close to a perfect society. It is refreshing to judged on what I think and how I express myself rather than by the color of my skin or the origin of my birth. In a society like this, the government cannot play people off against one another. They have no ground on which to stand. Perhaps it's this lack of footing that makes them nervous. Whatever it is, it's got them thinking that they need to put a stop to it and "bring it under control". We are a far too dangerous force for them to just ignore. This fact should be remembered and taken advantage of, information is the key! Less than an hour ago, I posted issue number six of this magazine on Internet along with messages urging others to read it. In a matter of minutes it was all over the world. Maybe this will draw others into the fold, maybe not. Regardless, it'll force them to think and maybe to take action themselves. @-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@-==-@

 NOTES FROM CYBERSPACE - ARTICLE 4
 By Anonymous Attorney
 Subject: POCKET LAW...Quick Reference Card

Hey, copy this down and keep it in your wallet for those situations where you might be suppressed by the power-hungry infidels of humanity.

My lawyer has instructed me not to talk to anyone about my case or anything else, and not to answer any questions or reply to accusations. On advice of counsel and on the ground of my rights under the State and Federal Constitutions, I shall talk to no one in the absence of counsel. I shall not give any consents or make any waivers of my legal rights. Any request for information or for consent to conduct searches, papers, property, or effects should be addressed to my lawyer. I request that my lawyer be notified and allowed to be present if any identification, confrontations, tests, examinations, or investigations of any sort are conducted in my case, and I do not consent to any such identification, confrontations, tests, examinations, or investigations.

EDITORIAL OF THE MONTH

By Marco Landin

[This article is fiction/humor] (Excerpt from INdigest, Feb 1994, Interview with the Elusive and Unintelligible Mfactor)

INd: In your most recent book, "I Don't Want My Children To Grow Up Around Those Filthy UNIX", you seemed to display a sense of farce that isn't too commonly seen amongst the Great Internet Poets of the Apocalypse. Tell us, why do you see the 21st century as the Golden Age of Lunacy?

Mf: [wearing pajamas and Mickey Mouse ears] Well, it's like this. In the early 80's we perfected the concept of an international communications database. It was populated solely by research personnel. MIT grads, military, Elvis. Purely serious study going on. Then, in the late 80's and mid-90's, there was a practical applications boom, where savvy businessfolk rolled up their sleeves and sank their elbows into the datastream. Now, as we near the End Times, we find that the greatest structure ever created by man -the Internet- is being vacated by its corporate and research personnel and a whole buttload of social misfits and weirdos are moving in by the droves. Look at me for instance. No, you better not. Wanna jawbreaker?

INd: No, thank you. Are you saying that the new computer literacy is making this once rich and fertile forest of intellect and commerce into a vast mental wasteland where the only thing that stirs is an occasional, barbed, tumbleweed of a pun based on bathroom jokes?

Mf: Well, yes, and I'm thankful for it! I mean, have you SEEN what happens to the human body when the brain is used too much? Glasses, unsocial behavior, a goofy voice, and insatiable masturbatory compulsions become the trademark of the computer genius. Why if I had to choose between looks and brains, I'd sure as hell pick looks, cause looks can get you brains, and the corollary is not as true. I feel very lucky to have both.

INd: In the book, you mention a few extreme cases of individuals who have no business on UNIX and who yet not only live in it, they can't do without it.

Mf: Indeed, there seem to be many odd cases. Take for example Cherry, the erotic dancer from Norway who has an Internet Address. She works out 36 hours a day, dances every night, goes out with friends, HAS FRIENDS!!! And yet she still finds time to moderate a newsgroup, cherry.pop.tart, I mean, how does she do that? Then there's the Internet node for the Eskimo Len Terrorist With Teret's Syndrome Association. What does THAT have to do with worldwide communications? Then of course, there's the newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.bestiality. Need more be said??? The freaks are moving in as the contractors and architects move out. Isn't it beautiful?

INd: What's your plan in life, Mr. Mfactor?

Mf: In this day and age, making plans is dangerous. That's why I have several.

INd: Please, share with us your most visionary.

Mf: Moving to Norway and finding Cherry. Soon. Like NOW.

WHITE HOUSE ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS AND PUBLIC ACCESS EMAIL

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

By Stanton McCandlish (mech@eff.org)

                         Updated April 2, 1994
                           Table Of Contents

  I.   Searching and Retrieving White House documents.
          -  Publications@WhiteHouse.GOV
          -  WAIS
          -  GOPHER
          -  FedWorld BBS
  
  II.  Signing up for Daily Electronic Publications.
          A.  Widely Available Sources.
          B.  Notes on Widely Available Sources.
          C.  Direct Email Distribution.
          D.  Email Summary Service.
  
  III. Sending Email to the White House.
          -  Internet Direct
  
  IV.  Sending Email to Congress
          -  Internet Direct
  
  V.   Submitting Updates to the FAQs.

I. HOW DO I SEARCH AND RETRIEVE WHITE HOUSE ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS?

The White House is pleased to announce the establishment of an Internet address for retrieving White House publications. We have set up an Almanac server to process requests by email. To receive instructions on using this server, send a message to:

Publications@WhiteHouse.GOV

In the body of the message, type:

send info

Various additional sites are archiving the press releases as distributed. What follows is an incomplete list of some of the sites containing the documents that have been released to date. This FAQ will be updated to reflect new sites as they become known.

           SITE                   DIRECTORY
  
  SUNSITE.UNC.EDU      pub/academic/political-science/whitehouse-papers
  FTP.CCO.CALTECH.EDU        /PUB/BJMCCALL
  FTP MARISTB.MARIST.EDU
  CPSR.ORG                   /CPSR/CLINTON
  FedWorld Online System     703-321-8020  8-N-1  or:
                                Telnet fedworld.doc.gov
  GOPHER.TAMU.EDU            11/.dir/president.dir

Notes: The following are notes on how to log in and get information from the above sites.

Office for Information Technology at the University of North Carolina maintains the full collection of White House electronic releases available for search with WAIS and also accessible via Gopher and FTP. a) WAIS
```
          (:source
          :version 3
          :database-name "/home3/wais/White-House-Papers" :ip-
                  address "152.2.22.81"
          :ip-name "sunsite.unc.edu"
          :tcp-port 210
          :cost 0.00
          :cost-unit :free
          :maintainer "pjones@sunsite.unc.edu"
  
```
:description "Server created with WAIS release 8 b5 on Feb 27 15:16:16 1993 by pjones@sunsite.unc.edu These are the White House Press Briefings and other postings dealing with William Jefferson Clinton and Albert Gore as well as members of the President's Cabinet and the first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Chelsea, Socks and others in Washington DC. Dee Dee Meyers and George Stephanopoulos. Other good words: United States of America, Bill Al Tipper Democrats USA US These files are also available via anonymous ftp from sunsite.unc.edu The files of type filename used in the index were: /home3/ftp/pub/academic/political-science/whitehouse- papers/1993 ")
Folks without WAIS clients or gophers that act as WAIS clients may telnet to sunsite.unc.edu and login as swais to access this information via WAIS. b) GOPHER is a distributed menu system for information access on the Internet developed at the University of Minnesota. gophers are client-server implementations and various gopher clients are available for nearly any computing platform. You may now use gopher clients to access the White House Papers and other political information on SunSITE.unc.edu's new gopher server. You may also add links from your local gopher server to SunSITE for access to the White House Papers.
For gopher server keepers and adventurous clients to access SunSITE you need only know that we use the standard gopher port 70 and that our internet address is SunSITE.unc.edu (152.2.22.81). Point there and you'll see the references to the Politics areas.
For folks without gopher clients can telnet to sunsite.unc.edu to try out gopher access. You need to have access to internet telnet and:
```
 
                          telnet sunsite.unc.edu
                          login: gopher 
```
The rest is very straight forward. Browsing options end with a directory mark (/), searching options end with an question mark (?). There's plenty of on-line help available.
No special instructions.
The CLINTON@MARIST log files which contain all the official administration releases distributed through the MIT servers are available via anonymous FTP. These logs contain in addition to the official releases, the posts that comprise the ongoing discussion conducted by the list subscribers. To obtain the logs: FTP MARISTB.MARIST.EDU - the logs are in the CLINTON directory and are named CLINTON LOG9208 thru CLINTON LOGyymm where yymm stands for the current year and month. Problems should be directed to my attention: URLS@MARISTC.BITNET or URLS@VM.MARIST.EDU. Posted by Lee Sakkas - owner, CLINTON@MARIST
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is providing all Clinton documents on technology and privacy at the CPSR Internet Library, available via FTP/WAIS/Gopher at cpsr.org /cpsr/clinton (and in other folders as relevant). For email access, send a message with the word "help" at the 1st line of text to listserv@cpsr.org.
The FedWorld Computer System, operated by the National Technical Information Service, archives White House papers in a traditional BBS type file library. Connect to FedWorld by calling (703) 321-8020. No parity, eight data bits and one stop bit (N-8-1). FedWorld accommodates baud speeds of up to 9,600. It is also possible to Telnet to FedWorld at FedWorld.doc.gov. White House papers are located in the W-House library of files. To access this library from the main FedWorld menu, enter <f s w-house>. Files are named with the first four digits being the release month and day (e.g. 0323XXX.txt). Some standard abbreviations after the date include:
```
  
                  rem - Remarks by the President
                  pc  - Press Conference transcript
                  pr  - Press Release
                  AM  - AM Press Briefing
                  PM  - PM Press Briefing
                  sch - The President's public schedule
                  spch- Text of major speeches.
 
```
These files are saved in ASCII format. Files can be viewed online by requesting to download a file and then selecting (L)ist as the download protocol. This will display the file a screen at a time. White House papers are kept in the above format for up to two months. Papers more than two months old are compressed using Pkzip into a single file that contains all of the files for that month (e.g. 0193.zip contains all papers released during January 1993). In addition to White Documents, FedWorld also provides a gateway to more than 100 government funded BBSs and computer systems.
Texas A&M University GOPHER Server makes available White House press releases and other documents. This archive includes information from 1992 until the present time and is updated as new documents are released. Gopher users can reach the Texas A&M server by choosing it from their local server's list of other gophers, or by pointing their gopher clients to GOPHER.TAMU.EDU.
After connecting to the A&M server, take the following path to reach the White House menus:
```
   
          "Browse Information by Subject" --> 
          "Political Science"  -->
                  "Information from the White House"
```
Gopher maintainers and other intrepid souls are welcome to point directly to the A&M White House archive. The server is GOPHER.TAMU.EDU and the path is 11/.dir/president.dir.

II. HOW DO I SIGN UP FOR ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS BY THE WHITE HOUSE?

The White House Communications office is distributing press releases over an experimental system developed during the campaign at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

You can obtain copies of all the press releases from a wide variety of on-line services or discussion groups devoted to either national politics in general or President Clinton in particular. These are listed in sections I and II.

Section IIc explains how you can sign up to receive press releases directly from the experimental MIT system by using an automated email server. The present system was not designed to handle high levels of message traffic. A more powerful system will become available in due course, and in the meantime, it would be appreciated if you used this service sparingly. One appropriate current use is secondary redistribution and archiving. If you use it, you will be carried forward when the more powerful system that replaces it.

IIa. WIDELY AVAILABLE SOURCES

1. On USENET/NETNEWS, electronic publications are found on a variety of groups:

  
          Direct Distribution
  
                  alt.politics.clinton
                  alt.politics.org.misc
                  alt.politics.reform
                  alt.politics.usa.misc
                  alt.news-media
                  alt.activism
                  talk.politics.misc
  
          Indirect Distribution
  
                  misc.activism.progressive
                  cmu.soc.politics
                  assocs.clinton-gore-92 
  
  2.  On CompuServe: GO WHITEHOUSE
  3.  On America Online: keyword WHITEHOUSE or THE WHITEHOUSE or CLINTON
  4.  On The WELL: type whitehouse
  5.  On MCI: type VIEW WHITE HOUSE
  6.  On Fidonet: See Echomail WHITEHOUSE
  7.  On Peacenet or Econet: See pol.govinfo.usa.
  8.  On The Meta Network: Go Whitehouse
  9.  On GEnie: Type WHITEHOUSE or WHRT,  or MOVE 1600
  10. On CompuServe, see the Democratic Forum: Go Democrats

IIb. NOTES ON WIDELY AVAILABLE SOURCES

CompuServe's White House Forum (GO WHITEHOUSE) is devoted to discussion of the Clinton administration's policies and activities. The forum's library consists of news releases and twice daily media briefings from the White House Office of Media Affairs. CompuServe members can exchange information and opinions with each other in the 17 sections in the forum's message area. The message board spans a broad range of topics, including international and United Nations activities, defense, health care, the economy and the deficit, housing and urban development, the environment, and education and national service.
On America Online, the posts are sent to the White House Forum, located in the News & Finance Department of the service or accessible via keywords: "white house" or "clinton". The White House Forum on America Online contains the press releases from the White House, divided into the categories "Appointments", "Budget", "Congress", "Education", "Economy", "Foreign Policy", "Health Care", "Housing", "Labor", "Law and Order", "Meetings & Speeches", "Proclamations", "Technology", and "Vice President". The area features a message board so you can discuss the releases with other AOL members, a searchable database for easy retrieval of releases that interest you, a Library for longer releases from the White House, and a library that members can upload files of interest for other members.
MCI Mail users access daily information on the administration's programs provided by the White House through MCI Mail bulletin boards. The available boards are: WHITE HOUSE ECONOMIC, WHITE HOUSE FOREIGN, WHITE HOUSE SOCIAL, WHITE HOUSE SPEECHES and WHITE HOUSE NEWS. A listing of these boards can also be obtained by simply typing VIEW WHITE HOUSE at the COMMAND prompt.
On The Meta Network, material is posted in the White house conference and is accessible via keywords (matching on document titles and subject categories) as well as full text search. Discussions on specific initiatives take place in special interest forums, e.g. health, technology, and reinventing government.
GEnie's White House RoundTable has been established to distribute and discuss the official press releases and files relating to the White House and the Clinton Administration. The files library holds all of the press releases on the official mailing list, and the Bulletin Board has Categories set up with topics relating to all aspects of the Administration and Executive Branch of government. Letters to the White House can be entered easily online with a menu option on the WHITEHOUSE page.
CompuServe's Democratic Forum (GO DEMOCRATS) is the Democratic Party's online information service covering the activities of the Clinton administration. The sysops of the Democratic Forum work for the Democratic National Committee, and are directly involved in managing the forum and responding to online questions. The Democratic Forum provides access to documents from the White House Office of Media Affairs, with vigorous discussion and debate in the message sections about the impact of the Clinton Administration's policies and proposals. The Democratic Forum also holds a regular weekly online conference with special guests on current topics.

IIc. DIRECT EMAIL DISTRIBUTION

If you don't have access to the these accounts or if you would prefer to receive the releases via email, then this section details how to sign up for this service. The server is not set up to answer email letters, comments or requests for specific information. To reach this MIT server, send email:

                  To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
                  Subject: Help

The server works by reading the subject line of the incoming message and taking whatever action that line calls for. If you want to sign up to automatically receive press releases, then your subject line would begin with the word RECEIVE. You can then specify what kind of information you are interested in receiving. The categories of information are:

ECONOMY: Get releases related to the economy such as budget news, technology policy review, etc.
FOREIGN: Get releases related to foreign policy such as statements on Bosnian airdrop, Haitian refugee status, etc.
HEALTH: Get releases related to health care policy, without receiving any other social issues. Use this instead of social.
SOCIAL: Get releases related to social issues like National Service (Student Loan) program, abortion, welfare reform, etc.
SPEECHES: All speeches made by the President and important speeches made by other Administration officials.
NEWS: Transcripts of press conferences released by the White House Communications office, as well as the President's remarks in photo ops and other Q&A sessions.
ALL: All of the above

So, if you wanted to sign up to get releases related to the economy your email message would look like this:

          To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
          Subject: RECEIVE ECONOMY

When you send a signup message to the clinton-info server, it sends you back a status message letting you know what distribution streams you are signed up for. If you ever want to check on what groups you are signed up for send the following message:

          To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
          Subject: STATUS

*****You can stop receiving email releases by sending a REMOVE message to the clinton-info server. The word REMOVE would be followed by whatever distribution stream you wanted to drop. If you wanted to stop receiving message about the ECONOMY then your mail would look like this:

          To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org 
          Subject: REMOVE ECONOMY

You could substitute SOCIAL, FOREIGN, HEALTH, SPEECHES, NEWS or ALL for ECONOMY in the above message and you would be dropped from that distribution list. If you send the subject line REMOVE ALL, then you will be taken off the email distribution system all together and will not receive further releases of any kind.

You can also ask for help from the automated server. Send an email query as follows:

          To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
          Subject: HELP

The server will respond by sending you a detailed form that will guide you through the process of signing up for the various distribution streams. As you will quickly discover, there is a automatic form processing interface that parallel the quick and easy subject line commands discussed here. More detailed help is available by sending an email query as follows:

          To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
          Subject: Please Help!

Finally, if you want to search and retrieve documents, but you do not have access to the retrieval methods discussed in section II, you can do this via email through the MIT server. You can obtain the WAIS query form by sending an email query as follows:

          To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
          Subject: WAIS

Once you have identified the documents that you want, be careful not to request them all at once, because you may be sent a message containing all the documents and this message may be too big for some mail delivery systems between the email server and you.

D. EMAIL SUMMARY SERVICE

The Extension Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides a daily summary of White House electronic publications.

Subscriptions
To subscribe to the USDA Extension Service White House Summary service, send a message to:
almanac@ESUSDA.GOV

In the body of the message, type:
subscribe wh-summary
To Unsubscribe from the USDA Extension Service White House Summary service, send a message to:
almanac@ESUSDA.GOV

In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe wh-summary
Document Retrieval
To request a specific document from the daily summaries, send a message to: almanac@ESUSDA.GOV
In the body of the message, type:
```
          send white-house #####
          (where ##### is the request number for the document)
  
```
Document Search
A user-friendly search facility is also available to search the white-house documents archived at ESUSDA.GOV. To search, send a message to:
almanac@ESUSDA.GOV

In the body of the message, type:
search white-house keyword1 keyword2
Catalogue of Summaries and Documents
Back issues and the catalog of the summaries or the documents contained at ESUSDA.GOV can also be retrieved through our almanac server. To get the summary catalog, send a message
To: almanac@ESUSDA.GOV
In the body of the message, type:
send wh-summary catalog
Further Information

If you have any questions about Almanac, please contact:

wh-admin@ESUSDA.GOV

III. HOW DO I SEND EMAIL TO THE WHITE HOUSE?

We are pleased to introduce this new form of communication with the White House for the first time in history. As we work to reinvent government and streamline our processes, this electronic mail project will help put us on the leading edge of progress. Please remember, though, this project is still very much under construction. The Office of Correspondence is currently working on defining what this system will do, as well as addressing equipment and staffing needs.

When you send a message to the White House you will receive an immediate acknowledgment that your message has been received. This is the only electronic response you will receive at this stage of development; if you include your street address in your message, you may receive a response by U.S. Mail. Please be assured that every electronic mail message received is read and analyzed by staff. Your concerns, your praise, your suggestions, and your ideas are carefully recorded and reported to the President and Vice President weekly.

You can send email to the following addresses:

  Internet Direct:        President@WhiteHouse.GOV
                          Vice.President@WhiteHouse.GOV

IV. HOW DO I SEND EMAIL TO CONGRESS?

The House and the Senate are conducting electronic communications projects. You can access Congressional information via the protocols listed below. For additional information, please contact the offices of your Representative or Senators.

  
  Site            Protocol        Host/connection
  
  House
  
                  Email           Congress@hr.House.GOV
                  Gopher          Gopher.House.GOV
                                  [URL: "Gopher://Gopher.House.GOV/11"]
  
  Senate
  
                  Gopher          Gopher.Senate.GOV
                                  [URL: "Gopher://Gopher.Senate.GOV/11"]
                  FTP             FTP.Senate.GOV
  
  Library of Congress
  
                  Gopher          Marvel.LOC.GOV
                                  [URL: "Gopher://Marvel.LOC.GOV/11"]
                  FTP             seq1.LOC.GOV
                  Telnet          LOCIS.LOC.GOV

Please note that these are not connected in any way to any White House online projects, so if you have any problems with Congressional systems, you will need to contact their system administrators for assistance.

V. HOW DO I SUBMIT UPDATES FOR THIS FAQ?

Please send corrections, deletion and additions to this FAQ to:

Publications-Comments@WhiteHouse.GOV

REDEFINING THE MODEM USER:

HOW THE MEDIA TOOK TWO PERFECTLY HARMLESS WORDS AND RUINED THEM

By Ed Cavazos

Computer telecommunication hobbyists always seem to find themselves being labeled by the media in ways which help spread fear and misunderstanding. For some reason, there is no term in the vernacular to describe someone who uses their computer and modem not as a tool to perpetrate illegal activities, but as an electronic link to the world. Whenever one comes along, it gets used in a way which always implies illicit behavior.

"Hacker": From Computer Guru to Computer Terrorist

The word "hacker" is already lost. When Stephen Levy's 1984 book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" was published, the word was used in a way that was devoid of the negative associations prevalent today.

In fact, the blurb on the back cover of the paperback described hackers as:

: "Spellbound explorers totally committed to experimenting with the infinite new possibilities of the computer.."

And Levy himself (in the Preface) described his subjects as "those computer programmers and designers who regard computing as the most important thing in the world." Levy was concerned that some were using the term as a derogatory one to describe someone who wrote bad code. This innocent definition of the word could be traced back to the days when MIT Model Railroad enthusiasts were described that way.

But those days are gone. Listen to what the National Law Journal (September 16, 1991) noticed:

: "...there is a widespread public perception that so-called computer hackers get their kicks out of breaking into top-secret government computer systems and wreaking havoc with destructive programs called computer viruses."

And Katie Hafner a computer crime journalist was quoted in Waldensoftware's Computer Newslink,( Autumn 1991, Vol. 6, Issue 1) as remarking:

: "With the release of the movie "War Games" in 1983, in which a teenager almost triggers World War III from his little home computer, the definition of hacker changed overnight. Suddenly, hacker took on a very negative connotation. Now it's defined in Webster's as somebody who tries to break into computers."

The media has helped turn what was at one time considered a complimentary term into something that connotes violence, illegality and destruction. To be called a hacker today is an accusation. Through misuse, the media is warping the word even further. When Geraldo Rivera interviewed Craig Neidorf for his television show "Now it Can Be Told" he referred to Craig (an electronic publisher) as "The Mad Hacker." Geraldo's loose usage of the term ignores the fact that Craig was never accused of breaking into a system, or gaining illegal access anywhere.

Cyberpunk: From Science Fiction to Sensationalism

When William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and other science fiction writers began writing a new type of science fiction in the 1980's, critics searched for a way to describe it. They settled (to the disappointment of some of the very writers they were describing) on "Cyberpunk." The term still refers to a genre of science fiction. "Science fiction with an attitude," is how the April 20, 1990 Washington Post described it. At the stretches of its usage, it describes a new world view which is composed of a collage of computers and information, of countercultural electronic expression.

But, as happened before, the media decided that definition wasn't good enough. When Katie Hafner and John Markoff decided to write a book on computer crime, they stole the term for their cover. "Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier" was the result. Now, all of a sudden, Cyberpunk doesn't refer to a sci-fi or cultural movement, it refers to a cynical hacker. When asked to describe a "typical Cyberpunk" Hafner explains:

: "They are typically alienated suburban teenage boys who find an alternative world in computers. Pengo, who we wrote about in the book, is a pretty good example. He lives in Berlin and dresses in black. Then again, who in Berlin doesn't? But he was almost a caricature of himself. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. When he worked at his computer, he had his headphones on all the time listening to synthesized music. He started hacking when he was fifteen and by seventeen he started spying for the KGB by hacking over the networks." (Waldensoftware's Computer Newslink, August 1991)

Even William Gibson, Cyberpunk's founding father, who wrote of cyberspace and a new society noticed it. "I've been credited of inspiring a whole new generation of techno-delinquents," he remarks in the February 19, 1989 Boston Globe. If only we could hear Gibson's reaction two years later, when the term which once described his writing style is now being used to describe computer criminals.

The word "Cyberpunk" had a real mystique to it. To turn it into a term to describe the "alienated suburban teenage boy" is to ruin some of that feel. Moreover, it serves to confuse and concern a public which is already paranoid and somewhat hysterical about anybody who admits to using a computer and modem for long periods of time. Responsible journalists should shy away from sensationalistic tactics like misusing an already well defined term like this.

The Need for A New Word

What is needed is new terminology. There are a myriad of totally legal and legitimate uses for modems and personal computers. People do everything online from perusing library card catalogs to meeting their perfect romantic match. On BBS's there are livid discussions of issues ranging from politics to religion -- from art to science. And online services like Prodigy and Compuserve are watching their user base swell annually. Soon, perhaps the media will accept a word that describes a person interested in communicating electronically without implying illegal activity. "Hacker" and "Cyberpunk" are ruined. "Modem Enthusiast" sounds too much like a term fresh from the pages of Reader's Digest. Hopefully, someone will provide us with a new term which truly describes the millions of modem users who "live, play and thrive" in cyberspace. Until that time, we can only sit and watch as the mainstream media stumbles along trying to understand and describe a phenomenon one gets the feeling it knows very little about.

PUBLIC UTILITY COMMISSION OF TEXAS

REQUESTS COMMENTS ON INTEGRATED SERVICES DIGITAL NETWORK (ISDN)

The Public Utility Commission of Texas (the Commission) has established a project (Project No. 12756) to examine Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) issues. The Commission seeks comments from interested parties in response to the following questions. If your answers would differ depending upon time-frame considerations, please provide answers for each time-frame. Parties are requested to organize their comments to address the specific questions asked in the order asked and are encouraged to include an executive summary emphasizing the main points of their comments to each question.

Comments (13 paper copies) should contain a reference to Project No. 12756 and should be submitted to John M. Renfrow, Secretary of the Commission, Public Utility Commission of Texas, 7800 Shoal Creek Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78757, no later than April 30, 1994.

Informal comments may be sent to Ms. Pam Whittington at the Commission via e-mail addressed to:

pam.tel@email.puc.texas.gov

Or you may call her at (512) 458-0100.

To which local exchange carriers (LECs) should a rule on ISDN apply? Why?
Should ISDN-based services be considered to be a replacement of or successor for "plain old telephone service"? Why?
Should all Texas customers and customer classes have access to ISDN? Why? If not, why not? What policies should be adopted by the Commission regarding customer access to ISDN? Why?
What are the policies which the Commission should adopt regarding the determination of costs and the pricing of ISDN and ISDN-based services? Explain why. Provide detailed cost information for each position if available.
Should the manner in which ISDN is deployed affect the price? How?
Should the Commission grant regulatory incentives, penalties, or flexibility in exchange for a LEC's provision of ISDN? Why? If yes, describe the incentives, penalties, or flexibility.
Does the Commission have jurisdiction to compel the provision of ISDN? Why? Explain the legal basis for your position.
Should the LECs be required to provide ISDN services in a manner that is conducive to competition in the provision of ISDN? Why? If so, how?
What policies should the Commission adopt regarding the deployment of ISDN? Should the Commission directly mandate deployment, require deployment to be driven by customer demand, or require deployment in some other manner? Why? Describe in detail how.
Describe in detail how these policies regarding deployment should be implemented and enforced.
If customer driven demand deployment was ordered by the Commission, should the trigger for deployment be thirty customer requests for ISDN per central office? Why? If not, why not, and provide evidence to support your position. If thirty requests is not the appropriate number, explain what is.
Should LEC compliance with deployment requirements be monitored on a periodic basis by the Commission? If so, explain in detail how and why.
What are the appropriate time frames for completion of deployment of ISDN in a LEC's service territory and in the entire state respectively? Why?
What are the technological options of the LECs with respect to the system upgrades necessary to deploy ISDN within their service areas? Explain in detail how the costs should be determined and reported to the Commission.
Are there any other policies, aspects, technical characteristics, costs, or obstacles (e.g. switch architecture, software, or SS7) regarding deployment that the Commission should consider? If yes, list and describe each and explain why. Provide detailed cost information for each item if available.
What policies regarding ISDN standards should be adopted by the Commission? Why?
To what standards (e.g. National ISDN, ITU-T standards, etc.) should the Commission require ISDN be deployed and provided? Why?
What specific service capabilities (e.g. bearer services, teleservices, supplementary services, etc.) should be required to be provided to customers? Why?
How should the policies regarding ISDN be implemented by the Commission? Why? If tariff filings were required, what should they contain? Why?
What end-user applications (e.g. telemedicine, distance learning, telecommuting, and video conferencing) using ISDN are available? Will these applications be available using technology other than ISDN? Should the Commission consider this in its rulemaking? Why?
Does Texas need ISDN to compete with other states? Why?
Would the widespread availability of ISDN have a beneficial impact (e.g., through telecommuting, video conferencing, etc.) on Texas' compliance with the Clean Air Act? Explain how.
Are there any other aspects or characteristics of providing ISDN that should be considered by the Commission? If yes, describe each and explain why.

Parties interested in providing additional comments are welcome to do so. The Commission also welcomes data and documentation supporting the parties' comments. General Counsel and staff will review the comments and use them in preparing a recommendation to the Commission.

Informal comments may be sent to Ms. Pam Whittington at the Commission via e-mail addressed to:

pam.tel@email.puc.texas.gov

Or you may call her at (512) 458-0100.

EXAM PAPERS

[Editor's Note: These are supposed to be actual answers from the tests of some students. There were no indications as to which grade-level they were in...but just between me and you, I hope that they weren't college kids. If so, ...I weep for the future.]

ACTUAL EXCERPTS FROM STUDENT EXAM PAPERS:

- Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the organ of the species.
- Benjamin Franklin produced electricity by rubbing cats backwards
- The theory of evolution was greatly objected to because it made man think.
- Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes, and caterpillars.
- The dodo is a bird that is almost decent by now.
- To remove air from a flask, fill it with water, tip the water out, and
  put the cork in quick before the air can get back in.
- The process of turning steam back into water again is called conversation.
- A magnet is something you find crawling over a dead cat.
- The Earth makes one resolution every 24 hours.
- The cuckoo bird does not lay his own eggs.
- To prevent conception when having intercourse, the male wears a
  condominium.
- To collect fumes of sulfur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube.
- Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.
- Algebraical symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking
  about.
- Geometry teaches us to bisex angles.
- A circle is a line which meets its other end without ending.
- The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects.
- The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader.
- Artificial insemination is when the farmer does it to the cow instead of
  the bull.
- An example of animal breeding is the farmer who mated a bull that gave a
  great deal of milk with a bull with good meat.
- We believe that the reptiles came from the amphibians by spontaneous
- generation and the study of rocks.
- English sparrows and starlings eat the farmers grain and soil his corpse.
- By self-pollination, the farmer may get a flock of long-haired sheep.
- If conditions are not favorable, bacteria go into a period of adolescence.
- Dew is formed on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them
  perspire.
- Vegetative propagation is the process by which one individual manufactures
  another individual by accident.
- A super-saturated solution is one that holds more than it can hold.
- A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene
  triangle.
- Blood flows down one leg and up the other.
- A person should take a bath once in the summer, and not quite so often in
  the winter.
- The hookworm larvae enters the human body through the soul.
- When you haven't got enough iodine in your blood you get a glacier.
- It is a well-known fact that a deceased body harms the mind.
- Humans are more intelligent than beasts because human branes have more
  convulsions.
- For fainting:  rub the person's chest, or if a lady, rub her arm above the
  hand, instead.
- For fractures:  to see if the limb is broken, wiggle it gently back and
  forth.
- For a dog bite:  put the dog away for several days.  If he has not
  recovered, then kill it.
- For a nosebleed:  put the nose much lower than the body.
- For drowning:  climb on top of the person and move up and down to make
  artificial perspiration.
- To remove dust from the eye, pull the eye down over the nose.
- For head colds:  use an agonizer to spray the nose until it drops into
  your throat.
- For snakebites:  bleed the wound and rape the victim in a blanket for shock.
- For asphixiation:  apply artificial respiration until the patient is dead.
- Before giving a blood transfusion, find out if the blood is affirmative or
  negative.
- Bar magnets have north and south poles, horseshoe magnets have east and west
  poles.
- When water freezes you can walk on it.  That is what Christ did long ago in
  wintertime.
- When you smell an odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide.

Interview with Tom Jennings

                     by Jon Lebkowsky, jonl@io.com
                       reprinted with permission
 
     Originally published in Fringe Ware Review #1, ISSN 1069-5656.
         Copyright (c)1993 by the author.  All rights reserved.
              For more details, contact: fringeware@io.com

Our FWI prez recently had a chance to chat with Tom Jennings, who commented afterwards: "Think you can mention somewhere that I'm a fag anarcho nerd troublemaker/activist? It is important, and to me as well. It always gets buried. Lots of people like to know, especially scared people with no images of people who are gay and reasonably functional in some way." Tis our pleasure to honor Tom, whose work has been so brilliant and so far out on the Fringe, that when the US gov't precluded computer technology exports during the Cold War, they basically forgot/ignored a certain fag anarcho nerd from the Bay Area... As a result, Tom's FidoNet now provides the basis for computer networking in Eastern Europe, former USSR and most of the Third World, as well as a extraordinary conduit throughout the rest of the world.

Tom: This people tracking stuff... what little I know of it sounds very creepy. I don't want a box that reports where the hell I am all the time, when I walk in the room, it can tell some local machine I'm there. It's none of anyone's goddamn business. It's the corporate culture invasion on real life, like the top 1% who make all the money, and think everyone's gonna live like them.

Jon: Well, if you're living in an ivory tower, after you live there for a while, you start to think, not that it's YOUR environment, but it's THE environment.

T: Yeah, it is reality, but it's a local one. Everyone they know is like that... well, they don't know everybody.

J: In a conversation I had the other day with Allucquere Rosanne Stone, she talked about ubiquitous computing, that computers or computing will be invisible, it will be so omnipresent...

T: That's what Alan Kay pointed out years ago, that when technology gets done right, you don't even see it. When you walk in a room, your hand flicks a switch... how much thought do you give to that stupid light switch? Hopefully very little. The light comes on, and... Telephones are getting close to that.

J: Even better, there's some rooms you walk into and the light switches on automatically, because there's motion detectors.

T: Yeah.

Anarchy In The A-C-K

J: Tell me about FidoNet. As I said, I'm sorta ignorant on the subject...

T: I have a weird point of view on it, of course, having designed it... February or March of '94 will be it's tenth year. It is a network, a collection of bulletin boards. It is a loose confederation, and it is completely and thoroughly and utterly decentralized. There is literally no top. Most of it's members have a narrow view of it because they have this particular reality filter on all the time from living amongst hierarchy addicts. But FidoNet's most basic element is a bulletin board. What FidoNet is, is a set of protocols that lets the bulletin boards communicate. FidoNet started as a bunch of bulletin boards, running my Fido software. FidoNet was added later, to allow point-to-point email between Fido boards.

J: Did you start with just a single BBS?

T: It started with my system. I was writing software for Phoenix Software, which is now Phoenix Technologies. I was their first employee. I did all their portable MS-DOS stuff prior to the ROM BIOS they did, which was partly based on my previous work with "portable" MS-DOS... we were doing MS-DOS installations in three days, and charging exorbitant sums... and delivering really good stuff, people got their money's worth, and got it damn fast! We had it down to an art of just totally portable stuff. So I had this portable attitude toward hardware, and wrote a bulletin board sort of based on it.

FidoNet is more importantly a social mechanism. It was pretty obvious from the start that it was going to be a social monster, almost more so than a technical thing. And it had to do with the original environment of bulletin boards, which were around for quite a while by the time I got around to doing Fido. Every bulletin board was completely different, run by some cantankerous person who ran their board the way that they saw fit, period. So FidoNet had to fit in that environment.

J: A very anarchic environment.

T: Yes, explicitly anarchic. Most people just ran them for their own reasons, and they were just separated by large distances of time and space, so they remained locally oriented. I just ran across old interviews and old documentation from '83 - '84, and we were saying it then. It was just... people didn't hear it, it just went in one ear and out the other. They think 'Oh, anarchism, that means throwing rocks at the cops!' Well sometimes, I suppose, but that's mostly a cop's definition of it.

The Revolution Will Be Packetized

J: The sense of the bomb throwing anarchist, I guess, is sort of in the sense of political disorder...

T: ...which was a specific event in the 20's in San Francisco having to do with union labor busts. And blackmail... this guy Tom Mooney, a bomb was planted and blame arranged to fall on Tom Mooney, tossing his ass in jail, putting the blame squarely on the anarchists.

J: Anarchy has this sorta bad connotation, but anarchy itself is not unlike what so many seem to want to embrace now. I think the libertarian philosophy is fairly anarchic, and you find it widespread throughout the net. It's basically a hands-off philosophy.

T: I think people often take it too seriously, like various anarchist camps that have more rules than not. I consider it a personal philosophy, not a political thing at all. It has nothing to do with party-type politics.

J: If it becomes overtly political, it ceases to be anarchy...

T: Yeah, more or less, and I don't really care about what's considered politics per se, it's personal interaction, how I treat other people and how they treat me, and my relations to other people, it's anarchism... I always call it Paul Goodman style, which is the principle that people work together better if they're cooperating than if they're coerced. Very simple, nothing to do with goddamn party politics. It has to do with how you treat people that you have to work with. And that's what FidoNet was based on, very explicitly. It was sort of laid over the top of a lot of Fido bulletin boards, and let them talk to each other in a straightforward point-to-point manner.

Just How Big Is It?

J: Was it just Fido boards?

T: Just Fido at the time, because it required a fairly low-level of restructuring of the innards, message bases and stuff. And Fido is a pretty good bulletin board, has been for years, though now it's definitely old fashioned. I haven't done a revision to Fido for over two years.

J: Are you thinking about doing that?

T: No, I'm thinking about dropping it. <laughter> I've thought about it, and it's over. So FidoNet started up in spring of '84 with two systems, me and my friend John Madill and within four months there were twenty or fifty... by the end of the year, it was approaching 100 by the next February, in nine months. It started growing really fast. And every single one was run by somebody for their own reasons in their own manner for their own purposes, so FidoNet had to accommodate this. And this is nothing unusual, in one sense. All computer networks are essentially run this way. The Internet is. There's no central Internet authority where you go to get a system in Internet, you just put it online, and find people to help you, register with the NIC [Network Information Center] which is just a convention for handling names.

J: Sort of ideally cooperative.

T: Yeah, it's quite cooperative, and you don't really get kicked out unless you technically screw up, or do something massively illegal or glaringly obvious. Most likely technical, like don't answer mail for a long time. Most electronic things are like that. It didn't start to take off until Echomail came by, which was done by this guy named Jeff Rush in Dallas as a way to talk among Dallas sysops about organizing pizza parties. It's a fully distributed, redundant database using FidoNet netmail to transport the records in the distributed database. It's functionally equivalent to Usenet, they gate back and forth very easily.

J: Can you link FidoNet very easily to Internet or UUCP Mail?

T: There's gateways between [FidoNet and UUCP] operating. You can just set up the UFGate package... [FidoNet and the Internet] they have totally different paradigms. IP, the Internet stuff, is fully connected all the time. When you want to connect to a system in Finland, you just rub packets with them and they come back in generally under a second. FidoNet is all store and forward, offline processing...

J: How big is it now?

T: Just short of 20,000 systems.

J: Wow, that's a lot...

T: It's doubled in a year... I think more than doubled in a year. It's been doubling every year for a long time <laughs>.

QQBEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCKQQ

J: There's a lot of discussion today of encryption schemes, are you involved in that?

T: Actually, yeah, I use it routinely.

J: Using PGP?

T: Yeah. FidoNet was pretty intentionally involved in getting PGP ubiquitous the first time around... an intentional, conscious quick-dump of about 10,000 copies in a week, starting on a Monday, just to be sure that it was unstoppable, and it spread very quickly. Now there's all kinds of arguments over whether it's legal, or whether it's going to incriminate me to use PGP, and the traffic into the network itself...

J: It wouldn't be a criminal issue...

T: People believe all kinds of crazy nonsense.

J: Somebody has a patent on the algorithm, is that it?

T: Yeah, and some people are afraid that if they send or pass encrypted data, that the police will bust into the house and steal the computer, all this kind of stuff... FidoNet sprung up fully-formed out of seeming nowhere into the rest of the computer world. Most people on the Internet have access to it through schools or industry. They went to school, then they got a job, and they grew up with maintained Internet connectivity... they were brought up into the sort of Internet-hood.

J: I think that's changing a bit...

T: Oh, it is changing, it will continue to change, and someday it will be incomprehensible that it was this way, but as of today, it's sort of how it is. FidoNet did not come from that direction at all. It came from... the usual white guys who could afford a computer :-), but in the best tradition of radio and astronomy, they were at least amateurs, it's truly an amateur network. It is not professional, as in "profession"... "professional" is frequently used to mean legitimate, as opposed to amateur...

J: You mean "hobbyist?"

T: Yeah, amateur as a word became disparaging, but we mean it actually in the older sense, like the radio amateur sense. We don't do it for money, it's done for the sake of itself. So for the most part, FidoNet members never had that traditional kind of connectivity, and also didn't have the corporate culture, and didn't have the computer network culture, so it basically formed in the dark, on its own.

550 Flavors of Culture

J: Speaking of the word "culture," do you find that within the FidoNet universe, there's a particular set of cultural predilections? Does there tend to be a general kind of group or community that uses FidoNet?

T: Well, it's like any of those things, it's really subjective. But, yeah, there do seem to be, in my travels on Internet and FidoNet, distinct flavors. One is not better than the other, I can tell you that, culturally speaking. The Internet people say, "Oh, but the flame level on FidoNet is so awful." Bullshit. The flame level on the Internet is just as high. It's in loftier language, five line signatures, and all that kind of crap... but I'm sorry, it's not any better, it's just different. What it is, is less alien to them, more comfortable... and vice-versa from the FidoNet side. It's more comfortable, it's more familiar, the language used and the acronyms and the smiley faces, all of that junk.

There is a FidoNet flavor, through the usual sociological things. The people who originally populated it defined this vague common set, and people who come onto it self-select ("Oh, I like that!") and join it, and then enhance it, or they're sort of neutral and they come in and they just absorb it because... you know, you start hanging out with people, and you pick up their manner of speaking. And there are people, of course, who are utterly opposed to this, and want to make it professional and some just don't care, and live in a corner of it.

But yeah, there are things in common, and I have a hard time putting my finger on what they are. It is fiercely independent, utterly, fiercely independent. It is viciously anti-commercialization. It has a long history of some nasty politics, some really enlightened politics, and I think in a lot of ways they have more pragmatic view, and a better view Q better meaning more functional in today's world Q than people who haven't had to pay their own phone bills.

J: Some people argue that you can't have strictly online community, and others believe that you can. Some feel that there has to be some kind of face-to-face interaction. In the Internet there has not been as much of that until it began to become more broadly accessible to regular people...

T: The Internet is still completely and thoroughly inaccessible... I'm sorry, it is simply not accessible. You have to have a large amount of hardware or an intimate relationship with someone who does, like you have to go to school or something. Otherwise you're paying money... and there are people who fall through the cracks...

J: How about public access Internet?

T: Yeah, but if there's more than 100 terminals in the U.S. that any average person could walk up to and figure out how to use in less than a week, I would be surprised. It still takes huge amounts of specialized knowledge.

J: But the technical side is fairly dense...

T: Oh, yeah... I've been an SWTP, CP/M, DOS hacker and hardware hacker for fifteen fucking years, twenty years, and UNIX is so intimidating, arbitrarily difficult to use... a lot of the users have this macho attitude that "Well, you should have to plow through it, I did." The whole priesthood nonsense. It's stupid. And the argument whether online culture is possible or not, that ain't where it's gonna get decided. It either gets made or it doesn't. I think there are online communities. The people who are doing it aren't asking themselves, "Are we an online community?" They're just going about their business. They're not tangible enough to really get documented except in hindsight, you look back and say "Oh, yeah, those people are" or "No, they really weren't, when push came to shove, they didn't stay together."

J: At EFF-Austin we've been a little more self-conscious about it, we've actually been trying to do some community-building, to try to structure an online community in Austin where we'd have some force to get things done, various projects. One of the things we're doing that other EFF-related groups haven't been doing is arts projects, and in doing those things, in talking to some of the people who are interested in doing that, I realized that there are a lot of writers and artists who are hungry to get online. They know it's there, they'd like to be using it, but they can't get access to it because they can't, unless they stumble into it, find a system that'll give them an account. It's kind of like what you were saying about barriers... but I wonder if, in the FidoNet world, you find writers and artists using FidoNet to share information and to form arts communities?

T: Well, there's a lot more less-technical people involved, because you can put a $300 system together, line cord to phone jack. That just means that the entry level is a lot lower. And it's functional as hell! I mean, So what if it's slow? 5 seconds or 100 milliseconds, what's the difference to most people?

All Look Completely Different

J: The link, the network, is strictly for email? Or do you have some other stuff, file transfer... ?

T: Oh, there's lots of file transfer stuff. In some ways it's a lot more sophisticated than the FTP stuff from the user's point of view. There's this thing called the SDN, the Software Distribution Network, which looks like a conference for files, where the objects are not messages, but files. And they're stored in a redundant manner, some locally concentrated, some far away and scattered. It's kind of nebulous, like most network things are. They do monthly announcements of new files, and most of it's shareware, or free. You can do things like file attach (send with a message), and file requests (file fetch via message).

FidoNet doesn't have the problem that a lot of older networks have, with seven bit channels and all that crap. We have eight bit channels with 32 bit CRCs. We do run into the alien system problems... ASCII character sets vs. the cyrillic alphabets and all that kinda stuff. Those problems are about as chaotic as they are anywhere else.

J: How about remote login?

T: No... the systems in FidoNet are radically different. There's Radio Shack color computers, there's CP/M machines, Apple IIs, giant DOS machines, giant LANs of UNIX boxes, all running common protocols in a far broader hardware base than most, even UNIX boxes. There's no unified operating system, there's a set of protocols, there's 40 or 50 different mailers, and FidoNet interfaces in bulletin boards, and they all look completely different. So it's at a much higher level of abstraction than the FidoNet gets defined at. I bet a lot of the Internet, some huge proportion, is UNIX...

J: You certainly need some kind of standard to be interoperable to the extent that the Internet is, don't you?

T: No, where the real compatibility is is the TCP/IP layer, and that's rock solid, and that's the thing in common. All the rlogin, telnet, and ftp stuff partly user paradigm, rather than just a set of protocols. It's well, and fine, and wonderful, and I love it, but it does put a real crimp on style.

[Ed Cavazos, almost-attorney and vice-prez of EFF-Austin, shows up and settles in to listen. The conversation continues.]

The Color Of Money

T: A lot of FidoNet is so radically different, you can't get people to either hear it or understand what's going on, because it's NOT like any of the others, and it was intentionally not made like the others, and some of the really basic principles that seem random are intentional... they're in writing, and have been in writing for seven years. The strictly American anarchist principles that it's based on are written into the policy documents.

We actually had in '85, '86, '87 an attempted takeover by a corporation that was formed from within, it was like a cancer that became a giant boil on the surface, called IFNA, the International FidoNet Association, that was sort of a good idea, or a potentially good idea, when we started it at the 200 node level. By the time it got around to being implemented, at 500 nodes, the world had utterly changed. With 200 people, you can run it like a club. It was 90% U.S., 90% white guys with computers, and at the 500 node level, it was about 20% European and definitely, obviously growing. It hopped the puddle, with systems appearing in South America, scattered, but you know how that goes... when you get one, then you get two, and then four, and they start to grow.

We were very naive, and I was right in the middle of it. Some of us learned quickly, this isn't going to work! But this corporation grew, and became a 501(c)(3), and like all of those things, they get power-hungry, and they get grabby of territory, and we had to fight it off, and it was fought off by the constituents of the network... and it was killed off. They had gained control of the copyright and the trademarks, and they were fought off. The network, instead of dying, like everyone predicted, thrived.

J: So how did this fight go?

T: It was fought by lawyers and proxy votes and all the usual crap, in a goddamn hotel in San Jose, was the final straw...

J: Were you a part of this corporation at all?

T: Well, a bunch of us started it... at first, we were brainstorming what we could do... deals on modems, some obvious stuff. And we'd have a spokesperson from FidoNet who'd attend the EMA meetings once a year and represent bulletin board operators and FidoNet members in electronic privacy things and the technical trade stuff and the obvious things. And those are still lacking, we still need them. But it was established really early that everyone not only retains control of their system, but they're expected to do their part to run it, because there is no one else to run it. And as simple as it sounds, it's a really radical act to get that across, so that people don't just sit on their butts. And of course, the usual 10% does the work, and 90% sits on their butts, but that's fine, too.

Double Plus Plus Good

T: FidoNet's a little odd, unlike the Internet, which has a domain name system... you say "Connect to toad.com," it says, ".com, okay, over there, toad... here's the address," and you go after it. FidoNet has what appears to be a centralized database that every system in the net has, a copy of this at the moment 2 megabyte long ASCII database, with 20,000 records in it. And it's updated every week, it contains the full physical and logical information about the entire network... phone number, system name, restrictions on use, protocols supported, some ASCII text, like system name, and city, all that kind of junk. It contains the hierarchical addressing scheme of the network, and it contains a lot of redundancy.

J: Given that there's no central authority, who maintains this database?

T: A local autonomous unit in FidoNet... First... the terminology in FidoNet is point-node-net-zone. Points aren't really part of FidoNet, they're a peculiar thing... a node is the basic unit, it is a bulletin board or a mail-only site, generally a phone number with a modem on it. A net is a cluster of Fidos, a cluster of nodes, like San Francisco has Net 125, SFBay Net, 75-80 systems. A node in a net is the basic social organizational unit. It was designed to be small enough to comprehend in regular old terms, like we all know and love, clubs and that kind of group... when they get too big they tend to fragment into pieces, which become autonomous units, then nets are collected into the real-life geography of continents.

The North American phone system is alien to the Western European ones, and they have lots of mutually-alien phone systems. The North Americans tend to be a lot less political... Zone 1 encompasses Mexico, U.S., and Canada, and nobody ever batted an eye over it. It's like, "Oh, okay, that makes sense." In Europe, they're fiercely defensive of the political boundaries, and it's really silly. Local autonomy was the critical thing to make it work, because who's going to allow somebody in New Jersey to dictate how they're going to run their system? There'd be no way to exert any kind of control, and once you start getting into control wars, you spend all your time doing that.

So the way the node list is made is that every net fragment makes its own chunk of the node list, which is a very straightforward task, even though it ends up being work. They're passed up through regional coordinators who take these fragments, and everybody gets a copy of everybody else's weekly list, and each of them compiles a giant list, then they do a difference, this week from last week, and mail out that difference back down the tree. So if you chopped off half the network and smashed it flat, it would regenerate itself. It's a balance of terror, that's what it is. It's a genuine balance of terror in responsibility and power. What you get for that redundancy is that no one can cut you out of the network, no one can declare that you can't communicate.

In the UUCP world none of this happens because the social environment is much more substantial... universities, Hewlett Packard... Your neighbors, in theory, can cut you off, and you disappear, no one knows about you, if you're eliminated from the bang path, no one can talk to you, and that's it, you don't exist, it's as simple as that.

In FidoNet, and this has happened recently in England... a bunch of religious fundamentalists by just hammering away gained control of large chunks of the FidoNet in the U.K., and they started having fits... "Why, there's perverts on this board, and we're not gonna have 'em in FidoNet!" <laughter> And they clipped them out of the goddamn list, they removed the entries from the U.K. list. You sort of noticed they disappeared, but those people can still communicate, they can mail you their fragment, hand-generated if necessary, and all the node list processors let you incorporate private lists, and you can reply back, just like that. No one can be cut out of the network.

If you start thinking about it, you realize that there are a number of good and bad side effects from this. Like, if you have some real asshole troublemaker, there's nothing you can do about it. Like, unless somebody comes in and pulls out a gun or something, it's kinda hard to get someone kicked out of a more or less public place... well, [here in] the hotel would be relatively easy, but out in the street, you've just gotta live with your neighbors. And the same is true in the FidoNet. You have to learn to live with your neighbors, and vice versa. The flaming assholes have to learn how to behave well enough to not be utterly censured. Which is what generally happens to them... people just ignore them.

There was one guy, he was another fundamentalist Christian nut case. He was amusing, actually. He was a "true Bible" believer, this was called pre-rapture, or something or other, some pre-rapture network... he was persecuted by all sides, and he loved it. He was mailing everybody this gibberish, pages and pages of gibberish. And there's programs that just filter out mail, and you say, I don't wanna see mail from this address...

J: A bozofilter.

T: Yeah, basically, it's a bozofilter, we've had 'em for a long time. And there's also another one that's called bounce... whenever you get anything from this guy, bounce it back. It appends a bit of text that says "This message is refused at site so-and-so, have it back," which IRRITATES people! But it just works out that people, even the crazy ones are social organisms. We don't really like to be disliked too widely, we like to have an audience, if nothing else. So that's the underpinnings...

FidoNet has been very flexible technically. When technological changes or opportunities come by, within a year half the net supports them. In about '85 U.S.JRobotics very smartly discovered bulletin boards, and they realized the way it works is, even though there's a relatively small number of bulletin board sysops, if you're bulletin board caller, who do you look to to see what hardware to buy? The sysop. And they ask, "What kind of modem do you have... oh, it must be pretty good if you use it," because when it's bad, they mouth off to hundreds of people about it.

So USR basically courted the FidoNet, and said "What do you want to see in a modem?" The first modem they did this with was the Courier 2400, which was 600 bucks new at the time, or 700 bucks. They offered a 50% off deal, down to about 300 or 400 dollars, which was a bargain, relatively speaking. We wanted true flow control, and a symmetrical modem with basic AT command set, and they did it. It was an instant success. And then they did the HST, much to most of the industry's annoyance, they did this kludgey proprietary asymmetrical protocol 9600 one way, 300 baud the other way... they came to us again, and we worked out more handshake stuff, and started changing protocols on our side.

FidoNet was originally based on xmodem, which is amazingly similar to X.25's packet ack, like Kermit, only much more efficient than Kermit, and very much like UUCP-G, only it's not windowed... block ack block ack block ack... it's fine at 2400 baud and below, above 2400 baud it was not good. We had asymmetrical modems that collapsed. So there had been another protocol called Wazoo around, and it instantly became hot, because it did protocol negotiation when you started a session, and it could pick ZMODEM [trademark Chuck Forseberg], which is fully-windowed, screaming fast, you can run it ackless. You could work the hell out of an HST in ways that other protocols couldn't. Internet protocols and UUCP-G were just useless, in other words, the modem was useless for existing protocols. So FidoNet's historically been very flexible, technology-wise.

McLuhanites: Myopy, My Opium

Ed: Are you familiar with John Quarterman? Have you seen his maps of FidoNet?

T: No, I haven't seen his maps of FidoNet. [Quarterman did show 'em off later in the conference.] I talk to him occasionally, I republished one of his articles in FidoNews a while ago... FidoNews is a weird phenomenon in itself... a 20,000 circulation weekly newsletter in its tenth year. It sort of goes unacknowledged... FidoNet has a giant credibility problem, because it sprang forth fully-formed 'way outside all traditional computer things, and because it works on PCs and Radio Shack Color Computers (which actually turns out to be a nice processor, it runs OS9 on a 6809... you can run multiusers on a $99 packaged machine). It's really some amazing software.

FidoNews was designed in '84 in the first year as the meta-net, to discuss the net itself, to discuss the social end of the net. In the first issue was a retired Air Force colonel or something, whining about the military retirement process, and people instantly said, "This is supposed to be a technical newsletter, this is FidoNet..." and I said, "No, bullshit, it's not. I'm tired of just this techie crap. Do you talk on the phone about your telephone all the time? 'Gee, I've got a great new phone, it's got all these pushbuttons...' and you get bored very quickly. It's like radio amateurs talking about their goddamn antennas." Who wants to put up with that stuff?

J: We've been talking about that a lot. There's three or four magazines devoted to online cultures, cultures of the Matrix, that focus on the Internet a lot. Wired is one, Mondo in a real different way, and bOING-bOING, of course, in a REAL different way. And we realized that a lot of the articles are preoccupied with the carrier, with the technology for carrying messages, and not so much with the messages themselves or the cultures themselves, the sorts of cultures that are evolving.

T: Yeah, they forget that what we're making is a goddamn conduit; it's a medium, it's not content! A content comes with it, because they're brand new mediums, they fail a lot, and they need to be developed... all software sucks, and all hardware sucks, so you end up talking about it a lot, but yeah, that's not the point.

J: What's really more fascinating is what's at either end of the conduit...

T: Yeah, the telephone proved that. It's actually a way to convey social information, emotion, that's why telephones worked, you can talk over them. How many ways can you say "No" with a keyboard? Not very many. 25 or 50 if you're incredibly ingenious. Smiley faces and uppercase... All the cultural information is stripped. And a lot of it has simply been access. Those at the gates determine who comes in. If you own the $5,000 PC...

J: Is that what brings you here [to the fourth conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy), access issues?

T: Yeah, that's why I'm always skeptical of large-scale networks. While I'm on the Internet, I don't have any pretensions of being... "Why, the world is connected!" No, one percent of one percent is connected, barely, and the tools really suck. Through no fault of the authors, they're incredible works, the foundation to a world. But they're hardly accessible to everyone in the world.

J: I had to buy my access to the Internet, at first. The WELL...

T: Mine I get because I'm managing a small IP cooperative, and I get it sort of as a perk to my $400 to $500 salary for what is essentially a full-time job.

J: Actually, I've been able to pick up other accounts since, but the only way that I could have got in in the first place was by buying access, because I'm not really very technical. My interests are more sociopolitical, I guess...

T: I don't really have any serious problems with the way things exist. For better or worse, that's the way that all complicated things have been developed in our little Western history timeline. It takes resources and effort and energy, and they do spread out, eventually. And they get defined along the way, they definitely have basic cultural assumptions glued into them at the very base.

J: It allows a more distributed way of organizing and doing things...

T: We'll see if it's ever as good as the telephone is. It doesn't get much better than the telephone, when you think about its position in society. Like Bruce said in his Hacker Crackdown, you notice them when you don't have one, they're so ubiquitous, they're like light switches. You don't think of a telephone, it's not an exciting object.

J: I can remember when there was a single phone in the house, and it was a big deal to have a second phone, which was usually on the same line. And now I have three phone lines, and one is a dedicated data line. I don't think I know many people who don't have at least two or three phones in their house.

T: I'm down to two, and I consider that rarefied... I only need two lines now, after having six at one point, all these bulletin boards and data lines, now it's like, oh, a voice line, and a data line...

J: I prefer asynchronous text swapping, but I'm not sure why, maybe a personal idiosyncrasy. It seems funny to me, because Matisse Enzer, the support guy on the WELL... when we're having a problem, and we can't quite figure out how to communicate about it, he always says, "Well look, why don't I call you up, and we'll talk about it." And I always say, "No, wait, I don't wanna talk, I just wanna text!" <laughter> ----

pannier@cs.tu-berlin.de

THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN UNDERGROUND COMPUTING / Published Periodically