From - Wed Jan 14 17:26:11 1998 Return-Path: Received: from relay2.UU.NET by mrco.carleton.ca (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA07681; Fri, 26 Feb 93 21:14:58 EST Received: from nyx.cs.du.edu by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA14399; Fri, 26 Feb 93 20:52:43 -0500 Received: by nyx.cs.du.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA11859; Fri, 26 Feb 93 17:30:23 MST From: ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu (andy) Message-Id: <9302270030.AA11859@nyx.cs.du.edu> X-Disclaimer: Nyx is a public access Unix system run by the University of Denver. The University has neither control over nor responsibility for the opinions or correct identity of users. Subject: FutureCulture Digest #261 To: future-digest@nyx.cs.du.edu Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 17:30:22 MST X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Content-Length: 55348 X-Lines: 1206 X-Mozilla-Status: 8001 ______________________________________________________________________ |______________ / | | / | | u t u r e <___________ u l t u r e | _______________________________________________________________________| Issue #261 Friday, February 26th 1993 Today's Topics: --------------- another hard look... Bury Usenet, but make sure you remember where you put it Complete Internet History by B. Sterling (long) conspiracy e-zines in .ps or .fm On love and affection Re: Admins & Gateway Sites, please read Re: Bury Usenet, but make sure you remember where you put it Re: Conspiracies re: the death (derth) of Use(less)net re: Usenet grep'ers Re:Bury Usenet & re:east vs. west (vs.the world) Usenet greppers who knows __________________________________________________________________________ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 13:25:31 EST From: CYBERPUNK@pembvax1.pembroke.edu Subject: Complete Internet History by B. Sterling (long) Ok here by popular demand is the complete history of Internet. There is some suggested reading at the bottom for more information and I suggest _The_Matrix_ by Quarterman. Remember this is literary freeware and can be freely distributed but never sold. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use ______________________________ From: THE! F&SF Science Column #5 "Internet" Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? Postnuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. But no matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable network to tatters. And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The center of the network would be the very first place to go. RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal (the brainchild of RAND staffer Paul Baran) was made public in 1964. In the first place, the network would *have no central authority.* Furthermore, it would be *designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters.* The principles were simple. The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis. The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant. Only final results would count. Basically, the packet would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn't matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateralled wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This rather haphazard delivery system might be "inefficient" in the usual sense (especially compared to, say, the telephone system) -- but it would be extremely rugged. During the 60s, this intriguing concept of a decentralized, blastproof, packet-switching network was kicked around by RAND, MIT and UCLA. The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set up the first test network on these principles in 1968. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency decided to fund a larger, more ambitious project in the USA. The nodes of the network were to be high-speed supercomputers (or what passed for supercomputers at the time). These were rare and valuable machines which were in real need of good solid networking, for the sake of national research-and-development projects. In fall 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high- speed transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance. This was a very handy service, for computer-time was precious in the early '70s. In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972, thirty-seven nodes. And it was good. By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became clear. ARPANET's users had warped the computer-sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post- office. The main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal messages. Researchers were using ARPANET to collaborate on projects, to trade notes on work, and eventually, to downright gossip and schmooze. People had their own personal user accounts on the ARPANET computers, and their own personal addresses for electronic mail. Not only were they using ARPANET for person-to-person communication, but they were very enthusiastic about this particular service -- far more enthusiastic than they were about long-distance computation. It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message could be sent automatically to large numbers of network subscribers. Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-lists was "SF- LOVERS," for science fiction fans. Discussing science fiction on the network was not work-related and was frowned upon by many ARPANET computer administrators, but this didn't stop it from happening. Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized structure made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer networks, the ARPA network could accommodate many different kinds of machine. As long as individual machines could speak the packet-switching lingua franca of the new, anarchic network, their brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were irrelevant. The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as NCP, "Network Control Protocol," but as time passed and the technique advanced, NCP was superceded by a higher-level, more sophisticated standard known as TCP/IP. TCP, or "Transmission Control Protocol," converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then reassembles them back into messages at the destination. IP, or "Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple standards -- not only ARPA's pioneering NCP standard, but others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25. As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to link to ARPANET. ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled, at least until 1983, when its military segment broke off and became MILNET. But TCP/IP linked them all. And ARPANET itself, though it was growing, became a smaller and smaller neighborhood amid the vastly growing galaxy of other linked machines. As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different social groups found themselves in possession of powerful computers. It was fairly easy to link these computers to the growing network-of- networks. As the use of TCP/IP became more common, entire other networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet, and messily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public-domain, and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very nature, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact, nobody *wanted* to stop them from joining this branching complex of networks, which came to be known as the "Internet." Connecting to the Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing, since each node was independent, and had to handle its own financing and its own technical requirements. The more, the merrier. Like the phone network, the computer network became steadily more valuable as it embraced larger and larger territories of people and resources. A fax machine is only valuable if *everybody else* has a fax machine. Until they do, a fax machine is just a curiosity. ARPANET, too, was a curiosity for a while. Then computer-networking became an utter necessity. In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, through its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. The new NSFNET set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990. And other government agencies leapt in: NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, each of them maintaining a digital satrapy in the Internet confederation. The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divvied up into basic varieties. Foreign computers, and a few American ones, chose to be denoted by their geographical locations. The others were grouped by the six basic Internet "domains": gov, mil, edu, com, org and net. (Graceless abbreviations such as this are a standard feature of the TCP/IP protocols.) Gov, Mil, and Edu denoted governmental, military and educational institutions, which were, of course, the pioneers, since ARPANET had begun as a high-tech research exercise in national security. Com, however, stood for "commercial" institutions, which were soon bursting into the network like rodeo bulls, surrounded by a dust-cloud of eager nonprofit "orgs." (The "net" computers served as gateways between networks.) ARPANET itself formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its own overwhelming success. Its users scarcely noticed, for ARPANET's functions not only continued but steadily improved. The use of TCP/IP standards for computer networking is now global. In 1971, a mere twenty-one years ago, there were only four nodes in the ARPANET network. Today there are tens of thousands of nodes in the Internet, scattered over forty-two countries, with more coming on-line every day. Three million, possibly four million people use this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks. The Internet is especially popular among scientists, and is probably the most important scientific instrument of the late twentieth century. The powerful, sophisticated access that it provides to specialized data and personal communication has sped up the pace of scientific research enormously. The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s is spectacular, almost ferocious. It is spreading faster than cellular phones, faster than fax machines. Last year the Internet was growing at a rate of twenty percent a *month.* The number of "host" machines with direct connection to TCP/IP has been doubling every year since 1988. The Internet is moving out of its original base in military and research institutions, into elementary and high schools, as well as into public libraries and the commercial sector. Why do people want to be "on the Internet?" One of the main reasons is simple freedom. The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy. There is no "Internet Inc." There are no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders. In principle, any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as long as it obeys the rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly technical, not social or political. (There has been some struggle over commercial use of the Internet, but that situation is changing as businesses supply their own links). The Internet is also a bargain. The Internet as a whole, unlike the phone system, doesn't charge for long-distance service. And unlike most commercial computer networks, it doesn't charge for access time, either. In fact the "Internet" itself, which doesn't even officially exist as an entity, never "charges" for anything. Each group of people accessing the Internet is responsible for their own machine and their own section of line. The Internet's "anarchy" may seem strange or even unnatural, but it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It's rather like the "anarchy" of the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English. As an English-speaking person, it's up to you to learn how to speak English properly and make whatever use you please of it (though the government provides certain subsidies to help you learn to read and write a bit). Otherwise, everybody just sort of pitches in, and somehow the thing evolves on its own, and somehow turns out workable. And interesting. Fascinating, even. Though a lot of people earn their living from using and exploiting and teaching English, "English" as an institution is public property, a public good. Much the same goes for the Internet. Would English be improved if the "The English Language, Inc." had a board of directors and a chief executive officer, or a President and a Congress? There'd probably be a lot fewer new words in English, and a lot fewer new ideas. People on the Internet feel much the same way about their own institution. It's an institution that resists institutionalization. The Internet belongs to everyone and no one. Still, its various interest groups all have a claim. Business people want the Internet put on a sounder financial footing. Government people want the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it spy-proof and secure. And so on and so on. All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance today, and the Internet, so far, remains in a thrivingly anarchical condition. Once upon a time, the NSFnet's high-speed, high-capacity lines were known as the "Internet Backbone," and their owners could rather lord it over the rest of the Internet; but today there are "backbones" in Canada, Japan, and Europe, and even privately owned commercial Internet backbones specially created for carrying business traffic. Today, even privately owned desktop computers can become Internet nodes. You can carry one under your arm. Soon, perhaps, on your wrist. But what does one *do* with the Internet? Four things, basically: mail, discussion groups, long-distance computing, and file transfers. Internet mail is "e-mail," electronic mail, faster by several orders of magnitude than the US Mail, which is scornfully known by Internet regulars as "snailmail." Internet mail is somewhat like fax. It's electronic text. But you don't have to pay for it (at least not directly), and it's global in scope. E-mail can also send software and certain forms of compressed digital imagery. New forms of mail are in the works. The discussion groups, or "newsgroups," are a world of their own. This world of news, debate and argument is generally known as "USENET. " USENET is, in point of fact, quite different from the Internet. USENET is rather like an enormous billowing crowd of gossipy, news-hungry people, wandering in and through the Internet on their way to various private backyard barbecues. USENET is not so much a physical network as a set of social conventions. In any case, at the moment there are some 2,500 separate newsgroups on USENET, and their discussions generate about 7 million words of typed commentary every single day. Naturally there is a vast amount of talk about computers on USENET, but the variety of subjects discussed is enormous, and it's growing larger all the time. USENET also distributes various free electronic journals and publications. Both netnews and e-mail are very widely available, even outside the high-speed core of the Internet itself. News and e-mail are easily available over common phone-lines, from Internet fringe- realms like BITnet, UUCP and Fidonet. The last two Internet services, long-distance computing and file transfer, require what is known as "direct Internet access" -- using TCP/IP. Long-distance computing was an original inspiration for ARPANET and is still a very useful service, at least for some. Programmers can maintain accounts on distant, powerful computers, run programs there or write their own. Scientists can make use of powerful supercomputers a continent away. Libraries offer their electronic card catalogs for free search. Enormous CD-ROM catalogs are increasingly available through this service. And there are fantastic amounts of free software available. File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines and retrieve programs or text. Many Internet computers -- some two thousand of them, so far -- allow any person to access them anonymously, and to simply copy their public files, free of charge. This is no small deal, since entire books can be transferred through direct Internet access in a matter of minutes. Today, in 1992, there are over a million such public files available to anyone who asks for them (and many more millions of files are available to people with accounts). Internet file-transfers are becoming a new form of publishing, in which the reader simply electronically copies the work on demand, in any quantity he or she wants, for free. New Internet programs, such as "archie," "gopher," and "WAIS," have been developed to catalog and explore these enormous archives of material. The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like bread-mold. Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore for the Internet, and today such computers sell for less than $2,000 and are in the hands of people all over the world. ARPA's network, designed to assure control of a ravaged society after a nuclear holocaust, has been superceded by its mutant child the Internet, which is thoroughly out of control, and spreading exponentially through the post-Cold War electronic global village. The spread of the Internet in the 90s resembles the spread of personal computing in the 1970s, though it is even faster and perhaps more important. More important, perhaps, because it may give those personal computers a means of cheap, easy storage and access that is truly planetary in scale. The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and exponentially faster. Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot topic today, with every manner of wild new commercial information- service promised. The federal government, pleased with an unsought success, is also still very much in the act. NREN, the National Research and Education Network, was approved by the US Congress in fall 1991, as a five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the Internet "backbone." NREN will be some fifty times faster than the fastest network available today, allowing the electronic transfer of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one hot second. Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high- definition television. A multimedia global circus! Or so it's hoped -- and planned. The real Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance to today's plans. Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet. After all, today's Internet bears little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND's post- holocaust command grid. It's a fine and happy irony. How does one get access to the Internet? Well -- if you don't have a computer and a modem, get one. Your computer can act as a terminal, and you can use an ordinary telephone line to connect to an Internet-linked machine. These slower and simpler adjuncts to the Internet can provide you with the netnews discussion groups and your own e-mail address. These are services worth having -- though if you only have mail and news, you're not actually "on the Internet" proper. If you're on a campus, your university may have direct "dedicated access" to high-speed Internet TCP/IP lines. Apply for an Internet account on a dedicated campus machine, and you may be able to get those hot-dog long-distance computing and file-transfer functions. Some cities, such as Cleveland, supply "freenet" community access. Businesses increasingly have Internet access, and are willing to sell it to subscribers. The standard fee is about $40 a month -- about the same as TV cable service. As the Nineties proceed, finding a link to the Internet will become much cheaper and easier. Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness. Learning the Internet now, or at least learning about it, is wise. By the turn of the century, "network literacy," like "computer literacy" before it, will be forcing itself into the very texture of your life. For Further Reading: The Whole Internet Catalog & User's Guide by Ed Krol. (1992) O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. A clear, non-jargonized introduction to the intimidating business of network literacy. Many computer- documentation manuals attempt to be funny. Mr. Krol's book is *actually* funny. The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide. by John Quarterman. Digital Press: Bedford, MA. (1990) Massive and highly technical compendium detailing the mind-boggling scope and complexity of our newly networked planet. The Internet Companion by Tracy LaQuey with Jeanne C. Ryer (1992) Addison Wesley. Evangelical etiquette guide to the Internet featuring anecdotal tales of life-changing Internet experiences. Foreword by Senator Al Gore. Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide by Brendan P. Kehoe (1992) Prentice Hall. Brief but useful Internet guide with plenty of good advice on useful machines to paw over for data. Mr Kehoe's guide bears the singularly wonderful distinction of being available in electronic form free of charge. I'm doing the same with all my F&SF Science articles, including, of course, this one. My own Internet address is bruces@well.sf.ca.us.  ______________________________ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 11:04:16 -0800 From: mirage@leland.stanford.edu (Dean Joseph Sanvitale) I was just reading the book "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon \ and I got to wondering: does anyone "out there" know of any real conspiracies. I mean I've read Robert Anton Wilson and heard reams of stories amounting to "the Illuminati really do exist", but is there anyone AT ALL who has any reason to beleive (tangible reason) that a\ real conspiracy is happening right now?!? Respond coherently please mirage@leland.stanford.edu ______________________________ From: scotta@rpi.edu Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 14:07:39 -0500 Subject: e-zines in .ps or .fm Are there any e-zines that are going around in postscript or maybe framemaker form these days? ...in particular, e-zines related to future culture type stuff. I guess it would take s-loads more memory relatively speaking and depend on how widespread postscript previewers (e.g. ghostscript) are. Any in particular that you'd recommend? ProteinMan ______________________________ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 15:04:59 -0500 From: Subject: another hard look... ahawks writes on Fri, 26 Feb 93 9:59:07 MST (a massive infospeakspew; I've picked out a few of the more interesting chunks to polish up and remount): >rather i think post-post-industrial society as an infoculture would, >as it evolves, solve some of industrial society's problems, or at >least allow us to analyze them in a completely different context which >is something Americans never want to do - we just whine and bitch and >add a new couple of strokes to the canvas we've created - why not turn >the painting upside down, punch a hole in the middle, or do >*something* drastic rather than say "hey everyone, look at this >wonderful painting we've made - it can be yours for only $19.95". What I was trying to suggest is that we all have to work pretty hard to keep the net from becoming one of those new strokes on the canvas. I'm not sure there's anything inherently radical going on in cyberspace; in fact, one of the reasons I started reading this list was because of the level of inanity on newsgroups like alt.cyberpunk and alt.postmodern. However, that kind of move--to a more "limited" forum--seems to be double-edged. One the one hand, you can expect a better signal: noise ratio, but at the price of commodifying yrself. When you start charging for yr new improved service (WELL/MindVox), it's already all over, because you've bought into the restricted economy that dominates western society. >why asre we limiting our resources, limiting our medium to just paint, >when we live in a Mac-Art world.....(Mac-Art, Macintosh computer art, >being a metaphor here for an infoculture)...Mac-Art world allows us to >share, more quickly, easily, and more *interactively* with the rest of >the world compared to a world where we just sell a painting.... ...once again: where does Mac-Art slip over into McArt? In order to "share" that art "freely" with the rest of the world, someone is going to make a whole shitload of money selling the rest of the world computer terminals... and judging from past debacles like the mass selloff of Beta technology to countries like the Phillipines, the technology they're gonna get sold is our castoffs. Just another form of imperialism: don't give 'em the good stuff, and we can control them better. >and regards to the wanky thing about, umm, what was it, oh yeah - the >escapism aspect, that's crud. love, touch, physical interaction is >practically necessary for survival. i think we all realize that - you >need love and belonging [people are going to flame, i feel my toes >getting warm] just as much as you need food and water and shelter. > >yep, the "cyberpunk" crowd is gonna hang me by my heels for saying you >*need* love and belonging to survive..... You know that it's wank. I know that it's wank. But there are an awful lot of people out there that think transcendence via machine is a pretty neat idea, including Tim Leary, William Burroughs, and Hans Moravec. As long as the exchange of information is a means rather than an end, I think everything works fairly well. But when you let dying old men set the agenda, once again... it's all over. >anyway, i got on this tangent because, we seem to think of infoculture >as an individualistic thing - that's why the inane comparison with >pre-industrial society, imho. but it's not, it's the exact opposite, >but people still move towards the individual, towards The Edge..... Let's just be clear about where the inanity lies. The comparison of post-post-industrial info-driven societies to pre-industrial culture comes from Mcluhan et al--the old "global village" cliche. But that metaphor assumes an equality between people where there are always power differentials. Some of us get to enhance our individuality, but for a lot of people (for example offshore data processors) infoculture means a return to the sweatshop system of the Dickensian industrial age. ---------- Darren Wershler-Henry grad3057@writer.yorku.ca ______________________________ From: ahawks (perpetually living) Subject: Bury Usenet, but make sure you remember where you put it Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 13:21:51 MST Is usenet worth it? How do people feel regarding Usenet as it relates to E-lists, MUDs, IRC, and Internet BBSes? I have just figured out the analogy that I have blocked myself from knowinf for about 2 years now. The Internet is a house. [bear with me, it gets wo5rse]. you're at it's House-Warming party. You walk in, you figure out ho to send emailto your friends and maybe post a couple messages to the World on Usenet. This is akin to someone taking your coat from ya, giving you a beer or glass of wine, or hehe, whatever suits ya. So, ya talk, socialize, get comfortable, maybe to the point of becoming a "regular" on a newsgroup or two, people looking forward to your posts, etc. And yer still drinking it in. Then, lo and behold, maybe you decide to go take a pee, and on the way you discover another room you hadn't seen ebfore where people are also talking and seem to be even more relaxed. Rooms like this are E-lists, IRC, MUDs, and Internet BBSes. So, you hang out in these rooms, and you can hear the chatter in the big family room or wherever it is (Usenet), but not much seems to be going on oveer there, even tho you pop your head in every so often. Well, anyway, some of us have been in this state for awhile, I know I have. Usenet is a misnomre, me thinks -- Usenet, Use Net, Use the Whole Net. Uset, tho, for what it's worth, is that invitation to other parts of the net (not just what I've mentioned but also stuph like telnet services,ftp, gopher, wais, whatever). Anyway, is it worth abandoning Usenet *altogether*? forgetting about kill files and .newsrc's?? I can't make up my mind, because I can't figure out the criteria I would use to differentiate the acceptability of popping my head back in Usenet every so often and abandoning it ptooey-style. I'm certainly no "net.jester" like Kibo, juggling in every room, popping my head in just enough for people to look back and say "who the hell was that?", making all the rounds. Hmmm.....You know what I do want, tho....I want a little kid to follow me around, and every so often I'd say "go see what's oing on over there" and he'd do it. That's completely different from the consistent in-out wanderings of people between rooms tho, passing information along, because the kid would be a constant. my theory, as i've said before, goes like: Usenet ---> E-lists ---> IRC so e-lists are the inbetween, the safe common ground, the nest, the home. [note to rez, i think this is some true psychology] because they are the middle of the teeter-totter, the balance. at the same time, tho, my net activities in those 3 areas is like this: Usenet -> E-Lists --> IRC see, I spend at least 2/3 of the time in this 3 forums grokking the lists, maybe 2/9 in IRC, 1/9 in Usenet. is the 1/9 ditchable....i could easily replace it with more lists... crap, YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT: I just put the pieces altogether -- i'm trying to make a new communitek out of the old ones on the net. i've been doing it subconsciously for awhile... i mentioned to some people on #leri in IRC one time, re: a Leri-Mud, that there should be a room in the MUD that is connected to an irc server, constantly, and that was always focused on channel #leri, or #circle, or #ao....[different mud rooms for different channels].... i want to gate the best of everything together as 1. the real-time aspects of IRC, the community that's there, the almost-perfect structures of some MUDsofts, the community and balanced interaction of e-lists, and the persistance of information on Usenet. that's what I want to do. bring the best parts altogether. hmmm.... damn i want to restructure the infrastructures of the internet. goddamnit, where's 3d realtime networked vr when you need it.... communiteks should be the basis of the net, not Unix shell.... MUD framework, in the meantime, might provide a good solid foundation from which to build. and specializable MUD frameworks, on a network, node-wide and individual level. different from now in that it's oriented towards the masses, not comp. sci undergrads, programmers, and teachers. i'm beginning to see in my mind, in detail, the process by which the Internet could morph now in preparation for reaching a goal of 3d networked vr with clarity and understanding and simplicity of information exchange. my head is too crowded....aargh.... anyway, if anyone wants to continue this babble - "the future of the net" would make a good topic methinks....start from scratch..... -- andy ______________________________ From: pfly (juxlus.) Subject: conspiracy Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 13:32:10 MST > does anyone "out there" know of any > real conspiracies. I mean I've read Robert Anton Wilson and heard reams > of stories amounting to "the Illuminati really do exist", but is there > anyone AT ALL who has any reason to beleive (tangible reason) that a\ > real conspiracy is happening right now?!? If one looks at complex dynamic systems, and the way they are organized, one might discover an interesting little piece of information: they Ride The Edge Of Chaos. A dynamic system, capable of adoptation, if it is to survive, needs to be able to repsond to pushes and pulls with an appropriate response, *plus*, if it is to adapt, it will need to come up with *creative* responses. And if one looks at dynamic complex systems, from organisms to government/societies, to the Net, one finds the Edge of Chaos. Some writer in Scientific American whose name I don't remember right now called this AntiChaos, but I think terms like negentropy mean about the same, and the Edge of Chaos sounds better anyway. If a system is too chaotic, then even small pushes will cause the whole system to shake. Its a gas, unstable, cannot hold a shape or form. If a system is too ordered, then even large pushes will not have much effect. Its a solid, it holds a shape, but only one, and can only be changed by shattering it. Between these two extremes we have systems that are unpredictable and creative in their repsonses. Such a system *might* take a large impact with little net effect, but it *might* take a small push with an avalanche response, cascading throughout the system. It can be argued that system that ride the Edge are more capable to evolve, best designed for change, creative, unpredictable. In fact, an evolving system *should* end up evolving into the best state for evolution: the Edge. When we look up into the upper tower of Control (tm) in society, where it seems like the conspiracy should be (and sometimes its painfully obvious that *something* is going on), and we find the control rooms eerily silent, perhaps it points to an even more impersonal conspiracy: The Edge. A virtual conspiracy. Real thought control. Real fnords. Real *direction*. Real guidance. Virtual conspiracy. The Edge. > Respond coherently please Oh, my apologies, let me rephrase: dhargu threw ui t duipts gheu sho fhds dfdf df d df ...better? Paul ______________________________ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 12:34:38 -0800 (PST) From: Al Billings Subject: Re: Bury Usenet, but make sure you remember where you put it On Fri, 26 Feb 1993, perpetually living wrote: > How do people feel regarding Usenet as it relates to E-lists, MUDs, > IRC, and Internet BBSes? None of these are part of Usenet. Usenet is the newsgroups. E-lists are on mail, which goes across UUCP or the Internet, Internet BBSs and MUDs are on the Internet, usenet is not involved with them. > Anyway, is it worth abandoning Usenet *altogether*? forgetting about > kill files and .newsrc's?? Not until e-mail is compressed before it is sent. If I get a 40k message in talk.whatever, it is compressed first and uses less resources (my resources for my BBS) to send but if I get mail, I get the whole 40K plus headers. ______________________________ From: ahawks (freud is my mother) Subject: Usenet greppers Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 13:44:50 MST does anyone have any Usenet grepper scripts or programs? right now I'm hacking out my own, and it's decent, but maybe somebody's already perfected one.... -- andy ______________________________ From: pfly (juxlus.) Subject: Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 13:46:31 MST > and regards to the wanky thing about, umm, what was it, oh yeah - the > escapism aspect, that's crud. love, touch, physical interaction is > practically necessary for survival. i think we all realize that - you > need love and belonging [people are going to flame, i feel my toes > getting warm] just as much as you need food and water and shelter. Today I drove up into the mountains and saw a smallish mountain town. I had a sudden image of me, doing night stock in Safeway or working behind the counter of the 7-11 of some such inane thing, living in a small cheap house, with the towering cliffs all around. Interaction with the locals would be fine, they seemed kinda rural... or a weird combination of rural and ski-buff, snowboarders. The town had enough necessities that anything important could be had, and a major city was only 45 minutes away or so, which would have all the other necessities, raves, drugs, people, all that. But I had an image of me... what the hell do I want to do with my next "span-of-time"? Perhaps its not long-distance to the major city and a major free Unix site. First step of a sort? Not far enough away that there's no touch, far enough away that one can be surrounded by towering awesome cliffs, and a meme-space with passion, with potential, energy---a place where one cannot help but join and run and be passionate and find direction and reason---a place where one can write and read and talk. I spent huge amounts of time here now as it is, why not an hour away from the city? My lease runs out in August. The city is good, but its like irc. Easy to waste lots of time on inanities. Where does the time go on irc? Where does the time go at Muddy's? Better to forsake irc for a while and solidify some of those memes, put them into words, give them life, give myself life, give them direction, give myself direction. Better to forsake the city for a while, or at least put a little distance there, better for direction, for passion, for Creation. Too many distractions... > but people still move towards the individual, towards The Edge..... The Edge....... towering cliffs.............. juxlus. ______________________________ From: StevenJ Subject: re: the death (derth) of Use(less)net Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 16:06:57 CST ______________________________ From: the! This is totally subjective to the user's perspective. ->So, you hang out in these rooms, and you can hear the chatter in the ->big family room or wherever it is (Usenet), but not much seems to be ->going on oveer there, even tho you pop your head in every so often. See, I TOLD you we're grokking the same memes ... or did I say that we were doing the same drugs? Is there a difference? Anyway, for the past few months the ONLY thing I've been using Usenet for is to throw specific questions out for some replies. People are generlly nice enough to just reply via e-mail so I don't have to wade through the miasma (there's that word again) of misINFORMation and waste oodles of time. Par example: a friend of mine has carpal tunnel syndrome. It sucks for those compu-geeky people like us, dontcha know. So, she has gone back to typing for a living and needed info on alternative keyboards. BOP - WAMMO - ZIIING. I go to the hardware newsgroup(s) and I get this e-mail reply from someone with a 1300+ line FAQ thingy with EVERYthing one would ever want to know about CTS, kybds. and sources of info for those suffering from this ailment. So, thus my point (which was?). ->Well, anyway, some of us have been in this state for awhile, I know I ->have. Usenet is a misnomre, me thinks -- Usenet, Use Net, Use the ->Whole Net. Uset, tho, for what it's worth, is that invitation to ->other parts of the net (not just what I've mentioned but also stuph ->like telnet services,ftp, gopher, wais, whatever). Or the World-Wide-Web ... a very cool net thingy. ->Anyway, is it worth abandoning Usenet *altogether*? forgetting about ->kill files and .newsrc's?? No, I think some people still live for the flame wars. Just read ANY of the politically oriented newsgroups. Pah. What shite. ->Hmmm.....You know what I do want, tho....I want a little kid to follow ->me around, and every so often I'd say "go see what's oing on over ->there" and he'd do it. That's completely different from the ->consistent in-out wanderings of people between rooms tho, passing ->information along, because the kid would be a constant. Now if *THIS* doesn't sound like a MAIA I don't know what does. ->goddamnit, where's 3d realtime networked vr when you need it.... Maybe in that neat-o pocket 80686-99Mhz/128Mb-RAM/1GB-HD system hanging off of my belt loop with the goggles snapped on my glasses. "Now Andy, do you REALLY look like that, or is that just your construct that's morphing into a small bird in my paw?" Steve J. White homoNuevo ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The goal of science is the destruction aragorn@convex.csd.uwm.edu of all mystery." - B.F. Skinner aragorn@csd4.csd.uwm.edu ______________________________ From: StevenJ Subject: re: Usenet grep'ers Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 16:18:43 CST ______________________________ From: the! Yea, ditto. I'd like one, too. Steve J. White homoNuevo ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The goal of science is the destruction aragorn@convex.csd.uwm.edu of all mystery." - B.F. Skinner aragorn@csd4.csd.uwm.edu ______________________________ From: StevenJ Subject: Re: Admins & Gateway Sites, please read Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 16:21:17 CST ______________________________ From: the! Actually, it's perl doing something with elm, not the other way around. I was unclear. ->anyway, if it's a significant number, like, more than 5 or so on a ->weekly basis, let me know... message received and understood Steve J. White homoNuevo ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The goal of science is the destruction aragorn@convex.csd.uwm.edu of all mystery." - B.F. Skinner aragorn@csd4.csd.uwm.edu ______________________________ From: ahawks (freud is my mother) Subject: Re: Bury Usenet, but make sure you remember where you put it Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 15:27:42 MST Welcome to the Beautiful World of Al Billings: | |On Fri, 26 Feb 1993, perpetually living wrote: | |> How do people feel regarding Usenet as it relates to E-lists, MUDs, |> IRC, and Internet BBSes? | | None of these are part of Usenet. Usenet is the newsgroups. E-lists are |on mail, which goes across UUCP or the Internet, Internet BBSs and MUDs |are on the Internet, usenet is not involved with them. I know. Umm, hehe, I guess I meant in terms of the *communication*, the *community* aspects, without resorting to discussions of signal/noise ratios. Oh well. |> Anyway, is it worth abandoning Usenet *altogether*? forgetting about |> kill files and .newsrc's?? | | Not until e-mail is compressed before it is sent. If I get a 40k message |in talk.whatever, it is compressed first and uses less resources (my |resources for my BBS) to send but if I get mail, I get the whole 40K plus |headers. well, that's cool. -- andy ______________________________ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 17:27:52 EST From: bhd0@Lehigh.EDU (-heather) Subject: On love and affection Being a student of Animal behavior, let me state the scientific view on this: "Parental affection is necessary for proper development" I.E. to grow up being well adjusted, at least your parents have to love you. There have been studies on this. Baby monkeys raised with artificial steel mesh mothers were completely antisocial when they matured. A boy in Asutria (I think) was raised in a closet, with no contact with people. Once released, he was unable to learn. Thus, for emotional and mental stability, love and affection, on some basic level, are needed. I hope that keeps the flames down, andy -h *******WARNING-reading all my quotes could take a long time.****** **************** newest ones are at the top **************** "If it wasn't for disappointment, I wouldn't have any appointments" -They Might Be Giants "You shouldn't bow to _anyone_" -Henry Rollins "Cold is God's way of telling us to burn more Catholics" -City Gardens' wall, Trenton, NJ "I shall not fail, nor falter, I shall succeed. My perception is altered I do beileve. I feel no fear, to be here is oh so fine, shining brightly like sunlight inside my mind... I can move, move, move any mountain." -The Shamen "Spread peanut butter, not AIDS" -Cynthia Nelson "Fear is a little darkroom where negatives are developed." "Closets Are For Clothes." -seen at "From All Walks of Life", a Boston walk-a-thon to benefit AIDS research "The other day I was...oh, wait a minute, that wasn't me..." -Steven Wright "If all of the ignorance in the world passed a second ago, what would you say, and who would you obey?" -Live "If I don't know what's cool, will they call me a loser? If I don't bend the rules, will I stay a loser?" -Ned's Atomic Dustbin "When we are alone, you are the cat, you are the phone, you are an animal. Words I'm sayin' now mean nothing more than meow to an animal. Wake up! Smell the catfood in your bank account. Don't try to stop the tail that wags the hound." -They Might Be Giants "Stop yawning. Start yearning" -Ned's "Ninety-nine percent of the people in this world are fools. The rest of us are in danger of contagion." -Thorton Wilder "Sometimes the light's all shining on me...other times I can barely see...lately it occurrs to me... what a long, strange trip it's been" -The Dead "It's 106 miles to Chicago, we have a full tank of gas, a half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark out, and we're wearing sunglasses." -Elwood "Hit It." -Joliet Jake "Men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one." -Gordon Sumner "Do you love?" -Stephen King ______________________________ From: ahawks (freud is my mother) Subject: Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 15:41:57 MST is it just me or, nevermind. it's me. -- andy ______________________________ From: ahawks (freud is my mother) Subject: who knows Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 15:55:53 MST ummm i almost worked out this quick little script to grep usenet, but, for some reason it prints out every article....hehe....other than that it works fine!!!! what it does is [well, i have it set for one group now], but, if i actually want to finish it, it would read a list of groups from a file, go into the spool dir, take each article there, remove the headers and everything below the sig, and grep just the body for words from another file, and if it matches 3 words +, it prints the article, knocking off unwanted headers in the process.... so, all i really need to do is: figure out why the hell it prints every article (something embedded somewhere deep in seemingly recursive while-do-done and for-do-done loops, methinks) and then expand it a bit, once i can get it to work for one newsgroup, so that it does it with every group....i know cheetos about programming in the shell, and just enough c to know how to compile something i ftp, hehe... i know notheeeeng..... anyway, considering i got pretty far in about 20 mins, kibo's sounds amazingly simple.... but, i dunno, crud, who knows, aargh, welp, anyway, [ok thought, get there, you can do it], ummm, ppppffrghhmmmppphhh... brain no work no good too many projects going on i'm also trying to figure out how to do some sort of heirarchal mail thing for elm, with less rigid aliases, if that makes sense. see, as individualization and specialization icnreases it seems to become apparent that everyone is going to need their own alias much like "future@nyx.cs.du.edu" - everyone with their own individual e-list. does that make sense? now, the current structures [modifying /etc/aliases] are too rigid so that everybody could have their own alias. so, i think what needs to be done is develop some sort of database thing to go along with, like, elm, where aliases could be created, changed, modified, and grouped in groups or even heirarchies, ON THE FLY. none of this 'newalias' and 'updating aliases' junk you find in elm. multiple hierarchies, intertwined, woven in odd corners, all sorts of possibilities. someone had set up an alas for the rave-lists called 'comeuniverse'... it really hit me, then, meta-lists...and with meta-lists would also inversely give rise to private-lists, whose subscribership would change from week to week, day to day, hour to hour.... hey, isn't there a program called meta-mail? anyone know what it does? maybe i should look around before i start doing this projects on my own....see what people 've done... -- andy ______________________________ From: Nowhere Man Subject: Re: Conspiracies Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 19:20:27 -0500 (EST) >[Request for information about conspiracies] I was going to suggest alt.conspiracy until I saw this next line: > Respond coherently please Good luck. ______________________________ From: zamboni@ap.cl.msu.edu (happy zamboni) Subject: Re:Bury Usenet & re:east vs. west (vs.the world) Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 19:23:48 EST A couple of quick thoughts before I leave for AZ- 1)No, by no means is Usenet worthless- In terms of "communication", as in discourse/response/dialogue...well, maybe, but! This is by no means the only purpose/use of Usenet.. I want to try and relate this back to Andy's theme of "Reconstructing and viewing information in new and different ways." Amid all the flames, fluff and general worthless noise, info, in the form of raw facts, press releases, interviews, and so on can be found. But to fully "use" Usenet, and get the most out of it, look elsewhere on it rather than the handful of groups you usually look at..find the dark strange little corners and just look at some of the other perspectives that you don't usually find in the "ghetto" you usually look in...While the intimacy of the mailing lists is real nice, they do get a little incestous at times. And note that this idea can be expanded outwards - do archie searches for obsure little strings, find the wierd little programs and pictures and texts and so on, that you may not necessarily have been looking for, but can be interesting nonetheless. A friend of mine is a sysop at one of the Sun labs here, and has a series of X-windows scripts written to, the whole time he is logged in doing dull sysop C stuff, a)do an intial archie search for some sort of picture type (In his case, swimsuit pictures, but this could be applied to any personal taste...), and while he is doing his other stuff, a random gif is ftped to his site, and thrown up as his background for a few minutes. Then a new one is thrown up, ad nauseum. While this application is a little silly, the _basic idea_ of "letting the net do it's thing" and you just letting it dump stuff at your feet (also ala USENET), I think, is a good one, and one that needs to be more fully explored. 2)In regards to the NY vs. California debate of earlier: It is possible to see regional influence in people's net activities (such as the huge numbers of techno-ish demos that pour out of Northern Europe - Denmark, Finland, etc..- and not really from many other local, geography wise...). The most interesting part of this, to me, is the possibility of the chance in world "power" (not the right word..) dynamics as time goes on. Many of the areas of the world, (again, I'm thinking of Finland, and such...sorry to lump you all together, I'm trying to make a point), that are not what would be called "major-players" in shaping world events, or at least the American media version of world events are very well represented on the net. (American readers, when was the last time you saw ANY mention of these countries on the "regular mainstream media"?) Do you see my point? Other countries that seem as if they should have more representation often seem to be in the background more....As we move forward into the future, it seems very, well...fair to me that a global net setting allows areas where intelligence and creativity is cultivated to rise to the top, as it were. I'm not wording this as well as I concieved it, but I think you know what I mean... zamboni@ap.cl.msu.edu _________________________________________________________________________ | | | That's all for today! | | To send a message to the list: future@nyx.cs.du.edu | | To subscribe/unsubscribe/change format: future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu | | All other requests: future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu | | List Maintainer is: (andy [aka hawkeye]) ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu | |_________________________________________________________________________| | | | The opinions expressed in FutureCulture are those of the individual | | author only. | |_________________________________________________________________________|