All the Web addresses included were checked when we went to press, but some, inevitably, may have moved or changed. Please check the net.wars Web site at http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/netwars.html for updates.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. “Beam Me Up, I’m Covered,” at http://www.ufo2001.com. Partenia is at http://www.partenia.org. The McLibel trial is archived at http://www.mcspotlight.org. Zhu Ling’s page is at http://www.radsci.ucla.edu/telemed/zhuling.
2. ASCII art is pictures made out of the simple characters an ordinary computer keyboard can produce. The original production of HamNet featured an elegant castle made out of characters like |, /, [, and ^.
3. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (Secker and Warburg, 1994), 37.
4. In a confusion of abbreviations, there are two organizations calling themselves CIX. The better-known one in the United States is the Commercial Internet Exchange, a group set up in early 1991 by the then major regional Internet service providers to promote the commercial use of the Internet. As this organization only appears briefly in chapter 14, in general I will use CIX to mean the London conferencing system founded in 1987 whose full name is Compulink Information eXchange.
5. The reason this no longer works is that those joke conferences had no messages in them, since part of the joke was that the unwitting participants had no idea how they got into the conference or who had done it. Live online, you would see you had been joined to the conference, even if it was empty. And it wouldn’t be for long, since someone would inevitably post something of scintillating brilliance like, “Hey! What am I doing in here?” Because offline readers only know how to pick up waiting messages, they don’t see empty conferences, and while you could leave a few seed messages, your user name would be imprinted on them, spoiling the game.
6. The distinction between an online service like America Online and a direct-access ISP is an important one. Essentially, it’s the difference between having your computer connected directly to the Internet and using someone else’s connection by connecting to their computer and using it as an intermediary. There were no consumer-oriented ISPs until the mid-1990s, and services like CompuServe made a lot of money by being able to charge higher prices and sell access to even higher-priced databases of periodicals normally available only to businesses on subscription (the way a retailer buys a case of fruit and sells it to you in small amounts). Dial-up online services had advantages over early Internet access: although they were more expensive, they were easier to set up and use, and they had search facilities when the Internet was still a jumbled mass of data. CompuServe now also sells direct Internet access, and version 3.0 of the information service integrates the service with standard Internet access.
7. Briefly, every Usenet newsgroup name is composed of a series of words or parts of words separated by dots, such as: rec.sport.tennis. The first part, rec in this case, is an abbreviation for “recreation” and gives a broad idea of the kind of newsgroup it is—a recreational topic, rather than a computer science one (comp). The second shows that the topic is a sport; the third identifies which sport. This style of naming newsgroups is easy both for computers to sort and humans to understand.
8. The “Usenet/Culture-FAQ,” maintained by Tom Seidenberg, is reposted regularly to alt.culture.usenet. For more on “MAKE MONEY FAST” see chapter 2.
9. From Part 2 of “Net.Legends FAQ (Noticeable Phenomena of Usenet),” maintained by David DeLaney and archived at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/legend.html.
10. WELL stands for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, and because it’s based in the San Francisco area and was set up as early as 1985, a large percentage of those most responsible for defining the technology and ethos of cyberspace have at one time or another been members, who often style themselves “WELLperns” or, occasionally, “WELLbeings.” Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, the two lawyers who brought small-time marketing to Usenet (see chapter 2), speak of the WELL as if it were the headquarters of some kind of cabal or conspiracy. It’s not, although significant discussions on the WELL have included much of the work of organizing the first and third Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conferences, the 1991 Harper’s magazine forum on hacking, the dissection of Time’s 1995 cover story on “cyberporn” and the flawed study it was based on (see chapter 9), and many board members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation had or have accounts there. The WELL, which originally became known as the Net home for Grateful Dead fans, is an extremely quirky place, but its appeal has been limited in part by the technical demands of its eccentric, text-based interface, which tends to weed out a lot of casual users. If the Net has an online equivalent of the Algonquin Round Table, the WELL might be it.
11. “Freedom from a Strange, New Land,” Daily Telegraph, April 16, 1996.
12. Personal interview conducted just after the 1995 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in early April; it eventually ran in the Guardian as “Hard Link to the Physical World,” on January 11, 1996.
13. “Crime and Puzzlement” circulated widely on the Net. “Decrypting the Puzzle Palace” appeared in Communications of the ACM, July 1992. “Jackboots on the Infobahn” appeared in Wired, April 1994, 40–48. A complete archive of these and Barlow’s other writings are available at http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML.
14. Gilmore notes on his Web page that he is not actually sure when or where he said it, although he agrees, along with everyone else, that it probably was him.
15. Henry Hardy, “The History of the Net,” (master’s thesis, School of Communications, Grand Valley State University, 1993). Available on the Web at http://ginch.dial.umd.edu/users/cerberus.misc/history-net.html.
16. In “Email from Bill,” originally published in the New Yorker and reprinted in The New Science Journalists, edited by Ted Anton and Rick McCourt (Ballantine, 1995).
17. As part of a profile of Dyson, “Esther Dyson: Pattern Recognizer,” by agent and author John Brockman from his book Digerati (Wired Books, 1997), samples of which are archived on the Web at http://www.upside.com/texis/archive/search/article.html?UID=970301106. Dyson is also president of EDventure Holdings, organizer of the annual invitation-only conference PC Forum, and editor of the industry newsletter Release 1.0.
18. John Seabrook, Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace (Simon and Schuster, 1997), 234–35.
19. Slate is published weekly at http://www.slate.com and edited by former New Yorker writer and CNN Cross-Fire commentator Michael Kinsley. The only issue ever published of Stale is at http://www.stale.com. Wired publishes both new material commissioned just for the Net and articles from the magazine on its HotWired site at http://www.hotwired.com. This, too, had a parody site for a couple of years, HowTired, at http://www.howtired.com. ReWired is at http://www.rewired.com. Suck, begun by two Wired employees and sold to Wired in 1996, is at http://www.suck.com.
20. Todd Lappin, “Deja Vu all over Again,” Wired, May 1995, 175.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. A personal prediction: Web-based home shopping will not kill off live shopping, although it may push retailers to make it more interesting, efficient, and fun. Grocery shopping over the Web has its limitations, at least in the early trial I joined in late November 1996. What you got was essentially a list of products from which you compiled a shopping list. You couldn’t look up further information about unfamiliar items, or request labeling information such as ingredients, vital for people with allergies. However, the format is extremely promising, not least because this particular trial includes the facility for adding a note to each item to help the person who assembles your order. If you prefer underripe bananas, or want the labels checked on unfamiliar brands, you can note this. That human element seems most likely to make the project a success, although it raises the strange image of a half-empty store populated largely by staff shopping for other people. But the potential is clear for boring, unpleasant routine shopping for categories like groceries and office supplies, where you’re typically ordering the same heavy or bulky items over and over again.
2. Laurence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel, How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway (HarperCollins 1994).
3. My comments are based on the version archived at http://www.urbanlegends.com/legal/green_card_spam.html. Other versions have slight differences (such as the more common originating email address cslaw@indirect.com).
4. A news server stores all the many news articles, or postings, that make up Usenet at each service provider; to get news, subscribers tap into this server and retrieve new articles from the groups they subscribe to.
5. To read news, you need a newsreader. On the university systems that most of the academic community (a very large percentage of those with access to Usenet at the time) would have been using, there were several in common usage, all of which have facilities to let you choose (“subscribe to”) the newsgroups you want to read and display the messages on the same subject in such a way that you can see at a glance how they interrelate, a technique called “threading.” As you read the messages in a given group (on Usenet, usually called articles, or postings), the newsreader marks them as “read” so that if you stop partway through you can come back and pick up where you left off.
6. An early version is archived at http://beacon-www.asa.utk.edu/archives/iwriter/support/make-money-fast.html. The letter is followed by a list of names and addresses, which vary over time, along with a bunch of testimonials, allegedly from happy participants in the chain, and tells the story of “Dave Rhodes,” who in 1988 was broke but within six months became “RICH!” following these simple instructions.
7. “Net.Legends FAQ (Noticeable Phenomena of Usenet),” maintained by David DeLaney and archived at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/legends.html.
8. More on Rhodes and other early spam is in “The Battle for Usenet,” by Charles A. Gimon, at http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/usewar.html.
9. The original message is archived at http://www.geog.mcgill.ca/other/grassu/2859.html. Medical researchers generally are doubtful that this product can do what’s claimed for it. For more on health claims and their regulation, see chapter 15. A run-down of the evidence (or lack thereof) is at http://www.kron.com/nc4/contact4/stories/thigh.html.
10. Stanton McCandlish, newsletter editor and program director/webmaster for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted in a posting dated October 3, 1995, that he believes the term “spam” was first used in 1993 or even earlier to describe loud, repetitive ranting on the role-playing services known as MUDs (or MOOs, MUSHes, or MUCKs). The posting is archived at http://www.eff.org/pub/Social_responsibility/Spamming_and_net_abuse/archeology_of_spam.article.
11. Personal archive of contemporaneous messages posted by Internet Direct on its gopher server.
12. Canter and Siegel, How to Make a Fortune, 22, 27.
13. Ibid., 200. The rules for posting to Usenet were originally written by net.god Gene Spafford and are now part of the help system at Deja News (http://www.dejanews.com).
14. Mark Harrison, The Usenet Handbook: A User’s Guide to Netnews (O’Reilly and Associates, 1995), 10.
15. Canter and Siegel, How to Make a Fortune, 17.
16. Ibid., 187, 204–5.
17. Ibid., 180.
18. Ibid., 217.
19. These IDs are a mix of letters and numbers that include the name of the machine on which the posting was written and a numerical identifier. The derivation of this varies from system to system, but is usually something like the number of seconds since the machine was turned on or some other non-duplicable number.
20. These appear in the “Better Living Through Forgery FAQ,” posted regularly to news.admin.policy and comp.security.misc.
21. A binary file is any type of computer file that isn’t plain text, such as a program, picture, video, or audio file. There are special newsgroups (alt.binaries.*) just for these files, which are generally not welcome in the rest of Usenet because they tend to consume a lot of space. In addition, because Usenet was designed as a text-based system (like email), binary files must be split into small chunks and converted into text characters for transmission. The user then has to collect all the pieces and use special software to stitch them back together and decode them.
22. On the so-called Big Seven hierarchies of Usenet newsgroups—comp, sci, talk, rec, news, soc, and misc—starting a new newsgroup is a formal procedure that involves proposing the newsgroup, collecting comments, and finally taking a vote and posting the results. The intention is to keep the list of newsgroups orderly and populated with groups for which there is real demand. Other hierarchies work differently, notably the alt hierarchy, which was deliberately created to bypass these formal procedures and allow anyone to start a group on any subject; people are still encouraged to collect comments, but there is no voting procedure as such.
23. More information about how cancelers operate is in the “Cancel Message FAQ,” maintained by Tim Skirvin and available at http://www.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/cancel.html. This also includes useful information on how to proceed if you think one of your own postings was canceled by someone else or if you have reason to believe someone is sending out forged postings in your name.
24. In computing, the asterisk is a “wild card” character that stands for any number of letters. It’s also a useful shorthand for quoting newsgroup names, where saying something like alt.fan.* means any newsgroup whose name begins alt.fan—alt.fan.letterman, alt.fan.jay-leno, and so on. If you just say alt.fan you would be referring to just that newsgroup.
25. Source: “Cancelmoose[tm] Home Page,” http://www.cm.org/.
26. A representative lengthy review appears in Wyn Hilty, “How the Web Was Lost: Business Conquers the Internet and Other Cyber Stories,” OC Weekly, September 20–26, 1996, archived on the Web at http://www.pulpless.com/weblost.html.
27. The letter appeared in Wired, June 1996. For more of Martha Siegel’s views on events, see K. K. Campbell, “A Net.Conspiracy So Immense: Chatting with Martha Siegel of the Internet’s Infamous Canter and Siegel,” dated October 1, 1994, and archived on the Web in Computer Underground Digest issue 6.89 at http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/CUDS6/cud6.89.
28. The original Safety-Net proposals, archived on the Web at http://www.ispa.org.uk/safetypa.html.
29. Cyber Promotions has used, among others, cyberpromo.com, savetrees.com, pleaseread.com, cyberemag.com, and answerme.com.
30. The discussion can be retrieved from the Usenet archiving and search engine Deja News, at http://www.dejanews.com.
31. The Cyber Promotions Web site is at http://www.cyberpromo.com.
32. A killfile essentially filters out all mail (or Usenet postings) from a specific source, be it a whole site or an individual, according to rules set by the user.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. Josh Quittner, “The War between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats,” Wired, May 1994, 46–53.
2. One of the things technology can do is create autoresponders. These are used widely on the Net—for example, if you follow the instructions to join an email discussion list, you’ll get back an autoresponse telling you you’ve been joined to the list and enclosing a help file of information and instructions for using and posting to the list. Similarly, the test newsgroups are monitored by auto-responders that spot new messages and automatically spit out replies to their senders to confirm that their newsreaders are working correctly. Morons who send messages saying only “test” to other newsgroups deserve the flames they get. I mean, why pick rec.sport.tennis for these things?
3. “Net.Legends FAQ (Noticeable Phenomena of Usenet),” maintained by David DeLaney and archived at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/legends.html.
4. The alt.aol-sucks home page is at http://www.aolsucks.org.
5. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, a method for transferring files, be they text, graphics, or computer programs, across the Internet. FTP sites function much like public libraries in the real world in that they maintain archives of files that users can download. When you get a file from a Web site, you’re using FTP to retrieve it whether you know it or not; it’s built into your browser. By 1996, companies like Microsoft and Netscape used this sort of setup to sell software as well as give it away, but in 1994 pretty much all FTP sites were run by universities, and the expectation was that everyone would benefit more or less equally.
6. AOL’s “easy-to-use interface” dubs these offline facilities “flash sessions,” which may be why you never noticed their existence (if you’re an AOLer). Look on the Mail menu.
7. Proxy servers are designed to minimize the duplication of traffic that’s inevitable when millions of users all access the same popular sites. Instead of getting a new copy each time, your host site stores frequently accessed pages on a special machine (the proxy server). Users then pull down the copy, which is theoretically much faster. In practice, it seems to be rare for proxy servers to work out that way: searching through the cache of stored pages takes time. In addition, care has to be taken that the pages stored in the cache are up to date. If the page is stock quotes that are updated every fifteen minutes and the proxy server only requests a new copy of the page once a day, the information is frequently going to be out of date. When, late in 1996, Singapore instituted nationwide proxy servers to block citizens’ access to pornography and other types of controversial material, reports came out very quickly of just this sort of problem.
8. A chat room looks like a small window on your computer screen. One piece of the window shows a list of the people in the discussion, another is a blank space into which you type your comments, and the main section shows the whole conversation scrolling by.
9. The story is archived on the Web at http://www.motley-focus.com/~timber/ccahist.html.
10. Jeff Goodell, “The Fevered Rise of America Online,” Rolling Stone, October 3, 1996, 60–66.
11. “Demo of the AOL browser,” at http://powered.cs.yale.edu:8000/~miller/aol/sim15.html. “AOL’s Secret Dirty Word List,” by Jordanne Holyoak, at http://www.motley-focus.com/~timber/dirtyword.html. “America Online Sucks” is at http://www.hooked.net/users/doorman/antiaol.html.
12. July 1, 1996, settlement announcement on AOL’s Web site, archived at http://www.ag.ohio.gov/PressRel/aol2.htm, and contemporaneous coverage at http://cnnfn.com/news/9607/05/aol_settle/index.htm.
13. Used by permission. “The Now-official ‘AOL is sucks!!!!!’ Bisk Poetry Archive,” at http://www.telepath.com/wma/aolbisk.shtml.
14. BOFH comes from a hilariously funny diary, written by alt.sysadmin.recovery poster Doug McLaren, of a supposedly fictional system administrator who spends his time doing everything he can to discombobulate his users, from rerouting all help desk calls to the off-duty librarian to telling users to type in commands to reformat their hard disks, erasing all their data. The full set of diaries is at http://www.ses.com/~joe/Bofh/bofh-toc.html.
1. According to “Payne-O-the-Web’s Cryptography Timeline” (http://www.ns.net/users/payne-o/timeline.html), which cites David Kahn’s book The Codebreakers (Macmillan, 1972).
2. Herbert Zim, Codes and Secret Writing (William Morrow, 1948).
3. Quotes from personal interviews unless otherwise indicated.
4. W. Diffie and M. E. Hellman, “New Directions in Cryptography,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory IT-22, no. 6 (November 1976): 644–54; R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir and L. M. Adleman, “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems,” Communications of the ACM 21, no. 2 (February 1978): 120–26.
5. Unfortunately, computers don’t speak English, so to tell them what to do you need a programming language that’s designed for the purpose and a program called a compiler that takes the code you write and turns it into the ones and zeros that a machine can read. C is one of the most commonly used programming languages for commercial software for personal computers, though there are others such as BASIC, which is more like English and therefore somewhat easier to learn.
6. The legislation was introduced by Senators Joseph Biden (D-DE) and Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) and Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA); after being removed from S. 266, the clause resurfaced in an omnibus anti-crime bill, from which it was also removed.
7. Email users do have some specific rights under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act; however, how private email and other communications are varies from system to system. Always read a system’s terms of service before assuming your communications are private.
8. The WELL’s eff conference, topic 206.
9. CIX’s crypto/general #294.
10. An operating system is a vital layer between a software program and a computer that incorporates standard functions for controlling the machine. UNIX, because it is free and the source code was available for individual users to modify and improve, is extremely popular in the academic world. Since universities were among the earliest users of the Internet, UNIX is common on the Net, even though personal computers sold for home use typically come with the Microsoft proprietary operating systems DOS and/or Windows.
11. For a discussion of the issues surrounding software patenting, see Simon L. Garfinkel, Richard M. Stallman, and Mitchell Kapor, “Why Patents Are Bad for Software,” and, arguing the case for patents, Paul Heckel, “Debunking the Software Patent Myths,” both reprinted in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, edited by Peter Ludlow (MIT Press, 1996), 35–107.
12. Notably James Love, director of the Washington-based Consumer Project on Technology, and University of California at Berkeley professor Pamela Samuelson.
13. RFC stands for “request for comments.” These collaboratively written documents define the standards on which the Internet operates. The latest version of the RFC relevant to securing email is RFC1421. All RFCs can be retrieved via FTP from ftp.internic.net, as /rfc/rfcxxxx.txt replacing xxxx with the RFC’s number.
14. From the PGP Web site, http://www.pgp.com. More information on where to find PGP is available in the “Where to find PGP” FAQ, which is posted regularly to alt.answers, alt.2600, alt.security.pgp, and comp.security.pgp.resources. It’s also archived on the Web at http://www.well.com/user/ddt/crypto/where_is_pgp.html. Within the United States, the primary site is PGP’s own site, http://www.pgp.com.
15. A personal prediction: when PGP Inc. gets really big and successful, a conspiracy theory will hatch on the Net to the effect that the government knows there is a fundamental weakness in PGP, and that it investigated Zimmerman precisely in order to make PGP look good so people would use it widely.
16. A switch is a single-letter command you type in when you start the program that toggles on or off some particular feature.
17. In a UNIX-based system, a signature is known as .sig because that’s the name of the file. Most Usenet newsreader software lets you specify a signature that will be appended to all the messages you post. People post all kinds of things in their .sigs: their addresses and phone numbers, ASCII art, and favorite quotations. One .sig that was common in the early 1990s that expressed support for the free availability of encryption ran, “If encryption is outlawed, then only outlaws will have encryption.” My favorite, though, has always been, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”
18. See “Why Cryptography is Harder than it Looks,” by Bruce Schneier (http://www.counterpane.com), author of Applied Cryptography, and also the “Snake-Oil Warning Signs: Encryption Software to Avoid” FAQ, maintained by Matt Curtin at http://www.research.megasoft.com/people/cmcurtin/snake-oil-faq.html.
19. Unfortunately, this posting seems to have vanished and is not archived at Deja News. However, the letter from the Special Master, Beth Hamilton, was posted pseudonymously to alt.religion.scientology (message ID 4tb7hr$s4t @nyx10.cs.du.edu) on July 26, 1996, two days after it was written, and said in part, “The computer technicians were not able to decrypt any of the PGP files except the one that contained viruses.” A copy of the Special Master’s letter to the court explaining her failure to decrypt Ward’s PGP-encrypted hard drive is archived on Ron Newman’s Web site, at http://www2.thecia.net/~rnewman/scientology/home.html, and mirrored at http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/rnewman/home.html.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1. John Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
2. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy: Why Clipper is Good for You,” Wired, June 1994, 100. Baker left the NSA in 1995, and became a partner in a Washington, DC, legal firm.
3. Prepared by the Committee to Study National Cryptography Policy, with support from the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, the National Research Council, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. A draft copy of the report dated May 30, 1996, is archived at http://www2.nas.edu/cstbweb/2646.html.
4. More worryingly, the report recommends that Congress “seriously consider legislation that would impose penalties on the use of encrypted communications in interstate commerce with the intent to commit a federal crime.” In other words, using encryption on the email planning a kidnapping attempt would aggravate the crime the way using a gun aggravates the crime of robbery.
5. In personal conversation at CFP’94.
6. See “Why Cryptography is Harder than it Looks,” by Bruce Schneier (http://www.counterpane.com), author of Applied Cryptography, and also the “Snake-Oil Warning Signs: Encryption Software to Avoid” FAQ, maintained by Matt Curtin at http://www.research.megasoft.com/people/cmcurtin/snake-oil-faq.html.
7. Personal interview.
8. On June 2, 1994, in an article by John Markoff.
9. The seven included Ronald L. Rivest (co-inventor of the RSA algorithm), Matt Blaze, Michael Wiener, Bruce Schneier, and Whitfield Diffie (co-inventor of public-key cryptography). The letter is archived at http://www.bsa.org/policy/encryption/cryptographers.html.
10. Leading John Perry Barlow to comment, “It does seem to me that if you’re going to initiate a process that might end freedom in America, you probably need an argument that isn’t classified.” From “Jackboots on the Infobahn,” which appeared in Wired, April, 1994, and is archived at http://www.hotwired.com/Lib/Privacy/privacy.barlow.html.
11. A complete collection of Denning’s writings on the subject are on her “Cryptography Project” Web site at http://guru.cosc.georgetown.edu/~denning/crypto/index.html.
12. Froomkin’s work, along with many useful links, is on his Web site at http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin.
13. Anderson’s Web site is at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/.
14. The algorithms are, of course, already available electronically on the world’s BBSs and FTP sites, though not always all together in one place.
15. A hash function is a process that takes a message of any size and computes a fixed-length digest; if it’s hard to reverse this process the hash function can be used to verify that the attached message hasn’t been tampered with.
16. All of the papers relating to the Bernstein case are available at http://www.mcglashan.com and also at the eff’s site (http://www.eff.org) by following the links to the cryptography archive. At the beginning of 1997, Bernstein’s legal team sought a ruling that the decision would stand in the face of the Clinton administration’s announcement at the end of 1996 that jurisdiction over the export laws will shift to the Department of Commerce. Legal updates are at http://www.crypto.com.
17. These are S. 1726 (Burns) and S. 1587 (Leahy, with support from Burns and several others, including later presidential candidate Bob Dole). A good place to start for information on legislative measures is the Center for Democracy and Technology Web site, at http://www.cdt.org.
18. Matt Blaze, “My Life as an International Arms Courier,” available via FTP from ftp://ftp.research.att.com/dist/mab/export.txt.
19. Chaum’s seminal article on the subject, “Achieving Electronic Privacy,” appeared in Scientific American, August 1992; it is archived on the Web on the Digicash site at http://www.digicash.com/publish/sciam.html. Chaum left Digicash in early 1997.
20. In September 1993, at the European Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in London, a hostile questioner complained to Chaum and the rest of a panel on anonymity that all the smart card systems so far invented had been cracked. John Gilmore’s reply: “It is my understanding that paper has also been cracked.”
21. A. Michael Froomkin, “It Came from Planet Clipper: The Battle over Cryptographic Key ‘Escrow’,” his interpretation of “the Interagency Working Group’s suggestion that access to the PKI might be denied to users of unescrowed cryptography.” Published by University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1996, 15, or at http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin.
22. Draft paper available at ftp://ftp.research.att.com/dist/mab/policy.txt.
23. Timothy C. May, “Introduction to BlackNet,” in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, edited by Peter Ludlow (MIT Press, 1996), 241–43.
24. Timothy C. May, “BlackNet Worries,” in Ludlow, ed., High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, 245–49.
25. From Gilmore’s Web site, at http://www.cygnus.com/~gnu/swan.html.
26. “internet.l@w/europe.96, held February 13, 1996, at the Tropen Institute and hosted by the law firm Trenité Van Doorne.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 6
1. An important caveat here: after my article about Scientology versus the Net appeared in Wired (December 1995), CoS representative Leisa Goodman wrote to the magazine to complain that my article was “an indiscriminate skinful of innuendo and rumor, but highly selective about its facts.” In 1987, I founded a magazine called The Skeptic, a British and Irish publication dedicated to rational examination of paranormal claims; its mission is similar to the much better known American journal Skeptical Inquirer (for which I have also written from time to time) and its parent organization, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Goodman felt that this background inclined me to be biased against the CoS; you will have to judge this point for yourselves in the light of these criticisms (the magazine I founded is on the Web at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/skeptic). When I called Helena Kobrin for comments on some of the court decisions for an update for Wired (November and December issues, 1996), she declined to comment unless Wired was willing to set up a full editorial board meeting with the CoS representatives to discuss matters, saying that they felt my reporting was unfair and one-sided, and that if she granted me an interview I would “just use that to give an aura of legitimacy to slanted reporting.” For a highly critical discussion of the CoS and its practices, see Richard Behar, “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” Time, May 6, 1991. The group has tax-exempt status in the United States as a religion, as well as many celebrity supporters, including actors John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Tom Cruise, and Mimi Rogers, jazz musician Chick Corea, and entertainer-turned-politician Sonny Bono. For more positive material on Scientology, see the group’s own glossy promotional book What Is Scientology? or its Web site, at http://www.scientology.org.
2. What Is Scientology?, 359.
3. “Scientology in the News: Press Office,” on the Web at http://www.scientology.org/p_jpg/scnnews/po1.htm.
4. As mentioned in chapter 2, the alt.* hierarchy was set up to by-pass the formal voting procedures required for the Big Seven hierarchies, so that, in the interests of freedom of speech, anyone could start a newsgroup at any time. This leads to some very silly newsgroup names and a minor amount of abuse, but it also gives Usenet a responsive, timely quality it would not have otherwise. Part of by-passing that formal structure is writing a message to form the new newsgroup, called a “newgroup” message, according to a specified format. More information about how to successfully start a new newsgroup is in the “So You Want to Create an Alt Newsgroup” FAQ, maintained by David Barr and available at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~barr/alt-creation-guide.html, and the “How to Write a Good Newgroup Message” FAQ, maintained by Brian Edmonds and updated regularly on the Web at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/edmonds/usenet/good-newgroup.html.
5. A copy of the original newgroup message is archived at http://remarkable.amazing.com/scientology/history-1.html.
6. Smith gets a brief mention in Part 3 of the “Net Legends FAQ (Noticeable Phenomena of Usenet),” maintained by David Delaney and archived at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/legends.html.
7. A German organization, the Free Zone Association, has a Web page at http://www.freezone.org. The alt.clearing.technology home page is at http://www.clearing.org/doit.cgi.
8. Interview for Wired, March 1995.
9. The full text of Siegel’s letter has been reproduced and circulated extensively on the Net and is archived on the Web at http://remarkable.amazing.com/scientology/history-1.html. However, this copy, like the others archived around the Net, is not dated. My personal copy was forwarded to me in an email message on June 3, 1994. At that time, the newsgroup had already been discussing Siegel’s letter for a several weeks, so a best guess is that it was first posted to alt.religion.scientology in April or May 1994.
10. All quotes from personal interview, April 1995. An interesting sidelight: I read the newsgroup for a long time before picking Farmer to contact to find out what it was like to be an ordinary Scientologist confronting the newsgroup’s anti-CoS atmosphere. Within twenty-four hours of our conversation, which took place on a Saturday evening, I received email from Leisa Goodman, then the CoS’s chief PR person in LA, near where Farmer was based, to inquire about some of the questions I had asked and why.
11. In the “Cancel Messages FAQ,” maintainer Tim Skirvin stresses the importance of accountability in issuing third-party cancels; the three-part FAQ is archived at http://www.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/cancel.html. One of the other most important guidelines is that cancels should not be content- based, carefully delineating the difference between acting in the public net.interest and censorship.
12. The Church of the SubGenius predates the widespread use of the Net by a long way. For more on their beliefs, which focus on getting “Slack” from their deity, J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, see J. R. Dobbs, The Book of the SubGenius (McGraw-Hill, 1983), compiled by Reverend Ivan Stang, who is also the author of High Weirdness by Mail (Simon and Schuster, 1988).
13. This is very easy to do in Netscape, and other methods are detailed in the “Better Living Through Forgery” FAQ, on the Web at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/rogue/forge.html and posted regularly to alt.censorship and news.admin.misc, among others.
14. alt.config is the newsgroup in which the formation and withdrawal of newsgroups in the alt hierarchy is discussed. This message and the systems administrators’ replies are archived at ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/control.
15. Newsgroup names of the formation xxx.yyy.aaa.aaa.aaa are an old Usenet joke that’s only funny the first hundred times you see it. The original was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork, after the poster who signed himself the Swedish Chef.
16. All IDs on Helsingius’s remailer took the form anxxxx@anon.penet.fi. One of the elegances of the system he wrote was that if you wanted to email an anon.penet.fi user but wanted to show your own identity all you had to do was reverse the “an” to “na.”
17. By September 1996, when the remailer closed, its database had reached 716,000. Helsingius won the 1997 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for his work setting up and maintaining the remailer.
18. Contemporaneous statements, and press material available on the Web at http://www.scientology.org.
19. Personal interview, March 1995.
20. The most important archive belongs to Ron Newman, one of the most knowledgeable people about the inner workings of the Net and its technology, and is maintained on his Web site at http://www2.thecia.net/~rnewman/scientology/home.html. For comparison, the CoS’s extensive official pages are at http:.//www.scientology.org. Newman’s page is mirrored at http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/rnewman/home.html.
21. Biased Journalism’s complete run of issues is archived on the Web at http://wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de/~krasel/CoS/biased/.
22. Personal interview, August 1996.
23. Settle made a name for himself in Net-related circles when, at the 1994 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference, he mistakenly identified (and arrested) a young graduate student named Lee Nussbaum thinking he was the hacker Kevin Mitnick, then wanted on probation violations (see chapter 10).
24. Personal interview, March 1995, by email.
25. Daniel Davidson died in 1996.
26. Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (Viking, 1990).
27. A FAQ for Los Angeles–area ISPs on the subject of ARSBOMB and its methods, called “The What is Scientology? (ARSBOMB) Spam Team FAQ for Los Angeles Area ISPs,” is at http://www.panix.com/~tbetz/WIS_Spam_Team_FAQ.html.
28. On the Web at http://home.sol.no/~heldal/CoS/index2.html.
29. On the Web at http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d1dd/cgi-bin/nots-locator.cgi. However, the link was removed after CoS complaints that it encouraged copyright violations.
30. Spaink’s home page is at http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/.
31. Quoted in ARS in Review, January 5, 1997, a weekly digest of significant postings from the newsgroup archived on the Web at http://wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de/~krasel/CoS/ars-summary.html. More detail about Mante’s claims is available on the main Scientology Web site at http://www.scientology.org/p_jpg/scnnews/holl1_1.htm.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7
1. Paulsen’s censorship speech is archived on the Web at http://www.amdest.com/Pat/PatTV.html. It also appeared in Paulsen’s book How to Wage a Successful Campaign for the Presidency (Nash Publishing, 1972).
2. Estimates taken from the text of the court decision on the CDA, dated June 11, 1996. On the Web at http://www.ciec.org/victory.shtml.
3. See Barlow’s January 1992 column for Communications of the ACM, archived on the Web at http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/complete_acm_columns.html. Andrew Brown’s comment appeared in a posting to the WELL’s eff conference in May 1995.
4. The CIEC home page is at http://www.ciec.org.
5. Archived on the Web at http://www.ciec.org/decision_PA/960612_Exon_prs.html.
6. In “The Great Renaming FAQ,” archived at http://www.vrx.net/usenet/history/rename.html.
7. Reposting dated February 8, 1995, to alt.culture.usenet, news.misc, and alt.folklore.computers, of original message posted April 29, 1993, and headed “That’s all, folks” from Gene Spafford.
8. Notes regarding the campaign can be reached from http://www.rt66.com/~nlopez/links.htm along with the “ASG Anti-FAQ,” one of the funnier reads on the Net.
9. Contemporaneous information posted on the WELL (media.1108/eff.730).
10. A list of the banned newsgroups, purportedly obtained from a Compu-Serve staffer, was circulated on the Net. A copy is archived on the Web at http://www.well.com/user/abacard.
11. French’s letter, to a CIX user and dated September 8, 1996, is about “illegal material” on the Net, and says, in part, “Unfortunately, one or more individuals, presumably from within ISP’s, decided to publish the list. In my view a very irresponsible act, and perhaps an indication of the unfortunate attitude that exists in some parts of the industry, who wish to wrongly label this as a censorship debate.” The letter is archived on CIX as message number 186 in censorship/chatter.
12. Archived at gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:5000/00/int/hrw/general.
13. More detailed and up-to-date information about international censorship of the Net is available from the “Plague of Freedom” home page, maintained by Declan McCullagh at http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/.
14. A Web site tracking British censorship issues is http://www.liberty.org.uk/cacib/.
15. In a September 1995 survey I did of blocking software for Britain’s Personal Computer World magazine, I tested Net Nanny, Cyber Patrol, CyberSurfer, and WinWatch, and all were easily defeated.
16. Proposals archived on the Web at http://www.ispa.org.uk/safetypa.html.
17. Media blackouts during criminal trials are common in Canada and Britain; the point is not to censor the information permanently but to avoid undue influence on these countries’ unsequestered juries.
18. In a foreword to the 1964 republication of the book that sparked the debates, The Tailor and Anstey, by Eric Cross (Chapman and Hall, 1964).
19. “Intellectual property,” used loosely to include not only software and literary works of all types but also movies, music, and some types of art—anything that can be digitized into a computer file, however large. Figure quoted in Nicolas S. Gikkas, “International Licensing of Intellectual Property: The Promise and the Peril,” Journal of Law and Technology Policy, Spring 1996, and archived at http://journal.law.ufl.edu/~techlaw/1/gikkas.html.
20. A. Michael Froomkin, “The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage,” presented January 29, 1996, at the Symposium on Information National Policies and International Infrastructure, held at Harvard Law School. Published in Borders in Cyberspace, edited by Brian Kahin and Charles Nesson (MIT Press, 1996). Archived on the Web at http://www.law.miami.edu/.
21. See http://www.eff.org/pub/Alerts/Foreign_and_local for updates.
22. Journalist Brock Meeks, writing for HotWired’s Muckraker Web site, estimated that the passage of the CDA and the subsequent court cases cost taxpayers roughly $2 million. The column is archived at http://wwww.muckraker.com/muckraker/archive. On January 14, the ACLU filed suit against the State of New York over its CDA-like statute, signed into law by Governor George Pataki in September 1996.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 8
1. Personal interview, 1993, and an official CompuServe survey published November 1995.
2. Dee Brown, Wondrous Times on the Frontier (Arrow, 1994), 271–72.
3. Philip Robinson and Nancy Tamosaitis, The Joy of Cybersex (Brady, 1993).
4. Women’s Wire is at http://www.women.com and also runs a forum on CompuServe at GO WWFORUM. AmazonCity is at http://www.amazoncity.com. A search site specializing in women’s topics is at http://www.wwwomen.com.
5. Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand (William Morrow, 1990).
6. Susan Herring, “Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage to the New Frontier,” keynote talk at panel entitled “Making the Net*Work*: Is There a Z39.50 in Gender Communication?” American Library Association Annual Convention, Miami, June 27, 1994. On the Web at http://www.women-online.com/women/women-tech.html.
7. Susan Herring, “Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication” (Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, 1993).
8. Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, Connections (MIT Press, 1991), 61.
9. Judy Anderson, “Not for the Faint of Heart: Contemplations on Usenet,” in Wired Women, edited by Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise (Seal Press, 1996), 138.
10. Independent, December 12, 1996, 11.
11. Newsweek, May 16, 1994.
12. Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman (Touchstone, 1992), 62.
13. Ibid., 290 (emphasis added). She goes on to cite Candace West and Don Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” (Gender and Society, vol.1, 1987, 125–51) as well as linguist Robin Lakoff and psychologists Linda Carli and Laurence D. Cohn.
14. Tavris, Mismeasure of Woman, 299.
15. Ellen Spertus, “Social and Technical Means for Fighting On-Line Harassment,” presented at the Virtue and Virtuality: Gender, Law, and Cyberspace Conference, on April 20–21, 1996, at MIT, archived at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/Gender/glc.
16. Time, July 19, 1993.
17. The original topics are preserved on the WELL as part of the system archives, where they can be read by any WELL member. The women concerned never named the WELL user in the public conference; instead they offered to email his name/user ID privately to anyone who requested it. The “cybercad” is long gone from the WELL; the women are still around.
18. Cherny and Weise, Wired Women, 146.
19. Ellen Balka, “The Accessibility of Computers to Organizations Serving Women in the Province of Newfoundland: Preliminary Study Results,” Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture, vol. 2, no. 3. On the Web at http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/WomensStudies/computing/Articles+ResearchPapers/online-access-feminism.
20. Personal archive.
21. Leslie Regan Shade, “Gender Issues in Computer Networking,” presented at the Community Networking: the International Free-Net Conference, August 17–19, 1993, at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. Archived on the Web at http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/leslie_regan_shade.txt.
22. Amy Bruckman, “Finding One’s Own in Cyberspace,” January 1996, archived at http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena/org/t/techreview/www/articles/jan96/Bruckman.html.
23. Quoted in Shade, “Gender Issues in Computer Networking.”
24. Judy Heim, The Needlecrafter’s Computer Companion (No Starch Press, 1995), 218.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 9
1. Issue 3 of The Media Poll, by John Marcus, January 30, 1997. The Media Poll is available via email from xx609@prairienet.org and is on the Web at http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/TheMediaPoll/.
2. Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words (Harvard University Press, 1993), 11–12.
3. The June 1995 dismissal was upheld by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati on January 31, 1997. Details about the case are at http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/Baker_UMich_case/.
4. Jeff Goodell, “The Fevered Rise of America Online,” Rolling Stone, October 3, 1996, 60–66.
5. “Porn again,” Personal Computer World, March 1995.
6. A binary file is any type of non-text computer file, such as a picture, audio, video, or program file.
7. Shortly after HTML, the Web page formatting language, was modified to allow Web page designers to choose their own background colors, in an effort to boost their page hits some people embedded sexually explicit words in their pages by using the same color for text and backgrounds. The page would get picked up by keyword searches on any of the search engines, but wouldn’t actually contain any sexual material when you got there.
8. Published in the Georgetown Law Journal 83 (June 1995): 1849–1934.
9. These were broken down as follows: 450,620 items downloaded 6.4 million times from sixty-eight adult BBSs; 75,000 items with an unspecified number of downloads from six adult BBSs, 391,790 items with no download information from seven adult BBSs. Rimm looked at many fewer pictures than this, saying he “randomly downloaded” 10,000 “actual images” from adult BBSs, Usenet, or CD-ROM and used these to verify the accuracy of the descriptive listings he had collected.
10. Time, July 24, 1995. The WELL discussion is summarized with extracts on HotWired at http://www.hotwired.com/special/pornscare.
11. Donna Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak, “A Detailed Analysis of the Conceptual, Logical, and Methodological Flaws in the Article ‘Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway,’” July 1, 1995. (Although the cover date of the Time cyberporn issue was July 2, 1995, the magazine actually hit the stands on June 26.) Archived on the Web at http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu.
12. Archived at http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu.
13. Meeks moved on to become chief correspondent for HotWired in December 1995; in November 1996, he resigned and was almost immediately hired by the relatively new MSNBC. His Cyberwire Dispatch e-letter continues to appear irregularly and is available from http://cyberwerks.com:70/cyberwire/.
14. More information on HomeNet is at http://homenet.andrew.cmu.edu/Progress.
15. GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format, a popular format for picture files that was developed by CompuServe. The phrase “Beware of geeks bearing .GIFs” was coined by British hacker-turned-respectable journalist and security consultant Robert Schifreen.
16. Today newspaper, September 29, 1994.
17. McCullagh moved on to Time-Warner’s Netly News in the fall of 1996.
18. “Jacking in from the ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ Port,” Cyberwire Dispatch, July 1996, archived on the Web at http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/Declan_McCullagh/.
19. According to McCullagh, the president of Solid Oak, the manufacturer of CyberSitter, threatened to sue Meeks and McCullagh for infringing his copyright by reverse-engineering his database. A high-school student who did some investigating (apparently on his own) and posted a list of blocked CyberSitter sites on his Web pages was also reportedly threatened.
20. On December 20, 1996, at http://www.netlynews.com. Netly News is Time-Warner’s Web-based news service.
21. At http://www.pathfinder.com/netly/spoofcentral/censored/.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 10
1. Robert Bickford, “Are YOU a Hacker?” in MicroTimes, January 1989, and also on the Web at http://www.well.com/user/rab/ayah.html. The article was also reprinted in Tricks of the Internet Gurus, edited by Philip Baczewski (SAMS, 1994).
2. Takedown, by New York Times reporter John Markoff and security expert Tsutomu Shimomura (Hyperion 1996); Jonathan Littman, The Fugitive Game (Little, Brown, 1996); Jeff Goodell, The Cyberthief and the Samurai (Dell, 1996). Mitnick also occupied about a third of Katie Hafner and John Markoff’s Cyberpunk (Simon and Schuster, 1991); Writing in 2600, Mitnick characterized the section about him as “ 20 percent fabricated and libelous.”
3. Personal interview, July 1996.
4. At http://www.2600.com.
5. John Perry Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement,” 1990, archived on the Web at http://www.eff.org/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML.
6. EEPROM stands for Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory and is a programmable memory chip that allows you to update a device’s internal workings without having to take it apart and physically replace the chip.
7. On the Web at http://www.fish.com/satan/. The program runs only under UNIX and only tests UNIX networks.
8. Markoff and Shimomura, Takedown, 105–6.
9. A script is a small program that essentially automates a series of commands that would otherwise have to be typed manually.
10. Forging email addresses is ridiculously easy to do, but doing so doesn’t mean the forger has access to your email box.
11. In 1996, Prince Philip became the third member of the Royal Family to get caught with his signals down in embarrassing circumstances.
12. The hacked versions of the pages are archived on the 2600 Web site, http://www.2600.com.
13. More details on this hoax are in the “AOL’s ‘Child Fun’ UCE FAQ,” posted at the time to alt.aol-sucks and news.admin.net-abuse.misc, among others. Retrievable through Deja News (http://www.dejanews.com).
14. Available on Usenet as comp.risks, or via email. To subscribe send email to risks-request@csl.sri.com with the word “subscribe” in the message body. Old issues are archived at http://www.CSL.sri/risksinfo.html.
15. In a March 1993 interview for Personal Computer World, reprinted in Wendy Grossman, Remembering the Future (Springer Verlag, 1997).
16. At Access All Areas Conference, July 1996, London.
17. “Information Security: Computer Attacks at Department of Defense Pose Increasing Risks,” dated May 22, 1996, and designated GAO/AIMD-96-84. The report can be accessed on the Web at http://www.access.gpo.gov.
18. Paul A. Strassman and William Marlow, “Risk-Free Access into the Global Information Infrastructure via Anonymous Remailers,” presented at the Symposium on the Global Information Infrastructure: Information Policy and International Infrastructure, January 28–30, 1996, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
19. Interview for Wired UK, September 1996.
20. Ivars Peterson, Fatal Defect (Random House, 1995).
21. A write-up of how this works is at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 11
1. Banning someone from a CompuServe forum is a matter of assigning a software setting, known as a “flag,” to that member’s numbered user ID that tells the forum software not to let him or her in. Forum sysops have fairly wide discretion in these matters, but you are expected to consult with the product managers assigned to your forum, who can advise against it if they feel the member’s behavior isn’t egregious enough. Ultimately, though, it’s up to the sysops: CompuServe seen close up is more like a collection of tiny kingdoms than it is the seamless monolith it appears to be at first.
2. “Net.Legends FAQ (Noticeable Phenomena of Usenet),” maintained by David DeLaney and archived at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/legends.
3. There’s a well-known sophisticated UNIX command called grep that allows you to search files for specific text strings; a couple of Usenet legends have used this to scan an entire Usenet feed and collect all the articles using a particular word. An entire religion, kibology, was created this way by a Usenet poster named James Kibo; he used to grep all of Usenet for his name, and then would answer postings unexpectedly. For more see alt.religion.kibology.
4. Maintained by M. Legare and archived at http://www.wetware.com/mlegare/kotm/.
5. At http://www.demon.co.uk/castle/helena/.
6. Deja News (http://www.dejanews.com) is a Usenet search service that holds archives of all of Usenet since early 1995. Many people are concerned about the loss of privacy involved in allowing permanent archiving of messages written in the expectation that they would be ephemeral. The X-no-archive header is easily inserted by typing in “X-no-archive:yes” at the top of Usenet postings before they’re sent out, but too few people know about it and some new archiving services don’t honor it.
7. Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society,” Village Voice, December 21, 1993. Reprinted with other related material in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, edited by Peter Ludlow (MIT Press, 1996), 376–95.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 12
1. Donna L. Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak, “Wanted: Net.Census,” Wired, November 1994, 93–94.
2. All of Hoffman’s and Novak’s papers, plus a comprehensive set of links to other, related research and source material is at the Project 2000 Web site, http://www.2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu.
3. Peter Lewis, “Doubts Are Raised on Actual Number of Internet Users,” by New York Times, August 10, 1994, 1.
4. At http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/top.html.
5. At gopher://gopher.tic.com:70/00/matrix/news/v4/faq.406.old.
6. The Executive Summary of the CommerceNet/Nielsen study is available on the Web at http://www.nielsenmedia.com.
7. Donna L. Hoffman, William D. Kalsbeek, and Thomas P. Novak, “Internet Use in the United States: 1995 Baseline Estimates and Preliminary Market Segments,” Communications of the ACM, December 1996, special issue on “The Internet@Home.” Draft dated April 12, 1996, available on the Web at http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu.
8. Nielsen’s rebuttal is on its Web site at http://www.nielsenmedia.com.
9. A comparative study of the various surveys is on Stanford Research International’s Web site at http://www.sri.com.
10. Archived at http://future.sri.com/vals/trends.
11. Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics (Penguin, 1954), 121.
12. Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak, “New Metrics for New Media: Toward the Development of Web Measurement Standards,” World Wide Web Journal 2, no.1 (winter 1997): 213–46, available on the Web at http://www.2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu.
13. Estimates quoted by Hoffman and Novak from research organizations Bear Sterns and Jupiter.
14. According to market research specialist Jupiter; on the Web at http://www.jup.com.
15. The Anonymizer is at http://www.anonymizer.com. Internet Fast Forward belongs to Privnet, which in 1996 was bought up by PGP, Inc., and is available at http://www.pgp.com.
16. You, too, can become an alien abductee by signing up at http://www.slime.org/aliens.
17. GVU’s Sixth WWW User Survey was conducted via a series of questionnaires available at their Web site from October 10 to November 10, 1996; the results were made available on December 10, 1996. The semiannual surveys began in January 1994, shortly after forms and scripts became available on the Web for the first time.
18. Cynthia Crossen, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America (Simon and Schuster, 1994), 112.
19. GVU’s definitions of these terms came from the Advocates for Self-Government.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 13
1. Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (Macmillan, 1995).
2. For an example of such an argument, see John Browning, “Universal Service (An Idea Whose Time Is Past),” Wired, September 1994, 102ff.
3. “Presidential Campaigning from 1960–1996: From Televised Debates to the Internet and Beyond,” with The Honorable Edward M. Kennedy, John Perry Barlow, Kiki Moore, Sander Vanocur, Lisa McCormack, and John F. Kennedy, Jr. (Moderator), held at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University on July 2, 1996. The panel discussion is archived on the Web at http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/~ksgpress/jfkforum.htm.
4. Robert W. McChesney, “Telecon! US Communications Law: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Headed,” reprinted in the Radio Resistor’s Bulletin 13 (winter 1996), archived on the Web at http://www.hear.com/rw/feature/rrb13.html.
5. Malamud’s Town Hall site was at http://www.town.hall.org (it was taken down in April 1996).
6. As an example, a copy of the 1994 report on Computer Pornography cost £15.60 (about $23).
7. Personal interview for the Guardian, March 1993.
8. Department of Commerce, “Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America,” archived on the Web at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fallingthru.html.
9. “Future Planning Document,” at http://www/efi.org.ie/forfas/latestFPD.html (but currently unavailable).
10. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “Information Infrastructure Convergence and Pricing the Internet,” archived on the Web at http://www.oecd.org/dsti/gd_docs/s96_xxe.html.
11. At http://www2.echo.lu/archive/parliament/en/resoluti.html.
12. In fact, Pizza Hut (http://www.pizzahut.com) began accepting orders electronically in 1995 (orders are forwarded to your nearest franchise), and there is also a Pizza server (information is at http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~pizza), which given your instructions (in rather obscure command-line language) will email you a picture (or rather, a .GIF file) of a pizza built to specifications.
13. For some examples of this, see Pamela Samuelson, “The Copyright Grab,” Wired, January 1996, 135ff.
14. EFFector 9, no. 14 (December 10, 1996), archived at http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Newsletters/EFFector/.
15. Further analysis of the treaty by the Digital Future Coalition, including comments from the EFF, is at http://www.dfc.org.
16. After press coverage raised questions about privacy, Nabil blocked off access to the plates database; in early 1997 the entire site was gone.
17. Survey.net is at http://www.survey.net.
18. At http://www.dejanews.com.
19. At http://www.reference.com.
20. GVU’s sixth survey showed that as many as 25 percent of Web users browse at least some of the time without graphics; the percentage is higher in Europe, where connections are slower and more expensive.
21. The W3 Consortium’s Disabilities page is at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Disabilities/Activity.html. There is more information at the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation’s “Universal Access to the National Information Infrastructure” Web page at http://www.yuri.org/webable/univ-acc.html.
22. Nicolas S. Gikkas, “International Licensing of Intellectual Property: The Promise and the Peril,” Journal of Law and Technology Policy, Spring 1996, archived at http://journal.law.ufl.edu/~techlaw/1/gikkas.html.
23. Zielinski moved on to the London-based Author’s Licensing and Collection Society in mid-1996.
24. W. Wayt Gibbs, “Lost Science in the Third World,” Scientific American, August 1995, 76–83.
25. Access to Africa Index Medicus is available via the WHO’s Web site at http://www-pll.who.ch/programmes/pll/hlt/countrye.htm.
26. Andrew M. Odlyzko, “Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals” July 16, 1994, on the Web at http://mosaic.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/document_vault.html.
27. Christopher Zielinski, “The Electronic Age and the Information Poor: Threats and Opportunities,” Online Information Proceedings, 1996, 507–21.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 14
1. Public letters to AOL members from CEO Steve Case (August 7, 1996) and U.K. managing director Jonathan Bulkeley (August 9, 1996).
2. Sharon Eisner Gillett and Mitchell Kapor, “The Self-Governing Internet: Coordination by Design,” presented at the Coordination and Administration of the Internet Workshop, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, September 8–10, 1996. Archived on the Web at http://ccs.mit.edu/ccswp197.html.
3. Ibid.
4. Transcription of the FCC Bandwidth Forum, held January 23, 1997, in Washington, D.C. Both the transcript and the audio broadcast of the day’s proceedings are archived on the FCC’s Web site at http://www.fcc.gov.
5. Shabbir Safdar, “Is the Phone System Broken?” VTW Billwatch, Issue 72, January 25, 1997. Archived on the Web at http://www.vtw.org/archive/970125_090725.html.
6. Personal interview, March 1996, which appeared in the Independent as “Father to the Ethernet,” June 10, 1996.
7. “The Economics of the Internet: Too Cheap to Meter?” Economist, October 19, 1996.
8. Ibid.
9. Neal Stephenson, “Mother Earth Mother Board,” Wired, December 1996, 95–161.
10. There have already been cases where poorly designed spiders and Web crawlers—automated indexing agents—have caused problems by hogging resources. See David Eichmann, “Ethical Web Agents,” at http://rbse.jsc.nasa.gov/eichmann/www-f94/ethics/ethics.html; Martin Koster, “Guidelines for Robot Writers,” at http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/guidelines.html; and Koster, “WWW Robot FAQ,” at http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/faq.html.
11. For a fuller discussion of the players in providing broadband access, see Steven E. Miller, Civilizing Cyberspace (ACM Press, 1996).
12. Derneval, “The Brazilian Phone System,” 2600 Magazine, autumn 1996, 11–13.
13. In a presentation to the Internet Economics Workshop held at MIT, March 9 and 10, 1995. Notes from the workshop are archived on the Web at http://rpcp.mit.edu/Workshops/cfp.html.
14. Personal interview, November 1996.
15. Stephenson, “Mother Earth Mother Board,” 103.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 15
1. Personal interview, July 1996.
2. A. Michael Froomkin, “The Essential Role of Trusted Third Parties in Electronic Commerce,” Oregon Law Review 75, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 75–115. Archived on Froomkin’s Web site, at http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin.
3. The development of Java, a programming language created at Sun Microsystems in which programs may be written once but run on any computer using special emulator software inside a Web browser, is expected to open up precisely this type of “out-sourced” application. Instead of buying a big, fat word processor with every feature under the sun, you might instead pay for special features only when you need them, running them by accessing the appropriate Web site.
4. Archived at http://www.forrester.com.
5. The draft proposal is at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-mptp.
6. A summary of proposed electronic payment mechanisms with links to the relevant organizations is at http://www2.echo.lu./oii/en/payment.html.
7. VeriSign’s Web site is at http://www.verisign.com.
8. At http://www.doubleclick.net.
9. In November 1996, Privnet was bought by PGP, Inc.
10. An explanation of cookies and what they do is available at Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak’s Project 2000 site, http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu. In fact, they’re more easily defeated than most Net users realize. Instead of setting your browser to alert you every time a site asks to write a cookie, which turns browsing into a continually interrupted experience, open an empty file in a text editor and save it as cookies.txt in the same directory as your existing file and set it to read-only.
11. Personal interview, September 1996.
12. Burst! Media is at http://www.burstmedia.com.
13. The Advertising Standards Authority passed its first judgment against a claim made on a Web site in 1996; the records of its judgments are at http://www.asa.org.uk.
14. The FDA held a forum on October 16–17, 1996, “FDA and the Internet: Advertising and Promotion of Medical Products.” Transcripts and audio recordings of the sessions are at http://www.fda.gov/opacom/morechoices/transcript1096/fdainet.html.
15. HumanSearch is at http://www.humansearch.w1.com; a write-up of the service appeared in the Netly News on February 7, 1997.
16. From the eTrust Web site, at http://etrust.org.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 16
1. Archived on Barlow’s Web site, at http://www.eff.org/~barlow.
2. John Perry Barlow, “Coming into the Country,” Communications of the ACM, January 1991; and Barlow, “Bill o’ Rights Lite,” Communications of the ACM, March 1993. The complete set of Barlow’s Electronic Frontier columns through March 1995 is on the Web at http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/complete_acm_columns.html.
3. Personal interview for “Freedom from a Strange, New Land,” Daily Telegraph, April 16, 1996.
4. Ibid.
5. Paulina Borsook, “The Memoirs of a Token: An Aging Berkeley Feminist Examines Wired,” in Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, edited by Elizabeth Reba Weise and Lynn Cherny (Seal Press, 1996), 40.
6. Paulina Borsook, “Cyberselfish,” Mother Jones, July 1996. Archived on the Web at http://www.mojones.com/.
7. Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the book (Harmony Books, 1979), the BBC Radio series, the BBC TV series, and the record set.
8. In a spring 1995, speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, quoted in Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates, “Law and Order Comes to Cyberspace,” Tech Review, October 1995. Archived on the Web at http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena/org/t/techreview/www/articles/oct95/Diamond.html.
9. Based on examples from the Australia-based Lantana International Agency catalogue at http://www.kineticmedia.com.au/lantana.
10. Amy Bruckman, “‘Democracy’ in Cyberspace: Lessons from a Failed Political Experiment,” presented at the Virtue and Virtuality Conference, MIT, April 20–21, 1996. Archived on the Web at http://web.mit.edu/womens-studies/www/bruckman.html.