Flux
Literary Freeware: Bruce Sterling, maverick journalist/novelist/Net spider, has placed the entire text of his best selling The Hacker Crackdown, Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier free on the Net. Why? As he explains in his preface to the electronic edition: "I didn't write this book in order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the mitts of impoverished 16-year-old cyberpunk high school students.... Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don't have much money, either. And it seems almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of America's direfully underpaid electronic law enforcement community. The information inside this book longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity. I genuinely believe that the natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic network." Sterling's book is now available as a 500k file at many sites on the Net, including ftp.eff.org: pub/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/hacker.crackdown.
Straightforward encryption: If PGP is too arcane for you, there's hope yet: PGPShell was recently released onto the Net. The DOS-based PGPShell puts a friendly face on Phil Zimmermann's Fed-frustrating program. The free program is archived as pgpshe30.zip at many Internet sites including garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/crypt and oak.oakland.edu: /pub/msdos/security.
Beats looking at the ceiling: San Francisco dentist James Campbell couples Virtual Vision's television sunglasses (see Wired 1.2, page 31) with earphones so that his patients can watch TV or a movie as he works on their teeth. A "nose mask" wafts a mild sedative into the patients' snouts, making them "more receptive to the images they're watching."
InfoBarons: In a recent issue of Harper's, Lewis Lapham takes Malone, Gates, and Smith et al to task for their mad rush to own the talent, toll booths, tarmac, and turnoffs of the info highway. After four or so pages of comparisons to 19th-century railroad robber barons, Lapham gets to the point: "In brief and in sum, does the new information order become an open or a closed society?" Lapham, with some help from Mitch Kapor, answers his own question: "[These] questions touch on the democratic character of joint American enterprise, but none of them is likely to engender a public debate." In what hole has Mr. Lapham been hiding his head? Time for a junior editor to get this guy on the Net.
Here's Your Debate: Meanwhile, over at the "Superhighway Summit" (a high-powered schmoozefest in LA earlier this year featuring every conceivable infobaron plus multiple baron-wannabes) faithful Wired reader Al Gore laid down some sweeping ground rules for the Infobahn (for a primer on what he said, read Mitch Kapor's article in Wired 1.3). In the press room afterward, would-be baron Barry Diller gave his opinion of any government interference with his interactive shopping plans: "They should just get the hell out of the way."
Still Unclear on the Concept: Remember that nifty cardboard CD we received from Sony, the one stating we were holding "the world's most interactive media" in our hands? Well they're at it again. This time the marketing geniuses at Sony sent us an invitation to listen to "The Ultimate Cassette." Inside the box: a MiniDisc cartridge. Nifty, Sony, but how're we supposed to play it?
Computer Art Awards: ARS Electronica (Linz, Austria, June 21-25), a premier event on the digerati's must-go conference calendar, is offering more than US$100,000 in awards for four categories of computer-generated art. Entries are due by the beginning of March; e-mail schoeber@jk.uni-linz.ac.at for more information.
Net Sleuth Alert: The FBI is looking for any and all leads in the Unabomb letter-bombing case, and has turned to the Net for answers. A $1-million reward awaits the successful Net surfer. FBI documents are available at naic.nasa.gov.
Butt-head Astronomer: Heard about that new computer under development at Apple under the code-name "Sagan?" Probably not, because ol' Carl unchained his copyright lawyers and sent them barking after Apple, which, in true hacker spirit, renamed the top-secret project "Butt-head astronomer."
Well Put: A recent Washington Post op-ed piece warned against the appointment of Bobby Inman, once head of the black-budget-bloated NSA, as defense secretary. "The codebreaker Inman...leans toward 'technical means' of intelligence-gathering: satellites and massive computer data banks...[he is] a lifetime intelligence professional, with a background in cryptography - which, apart from the operation of covert agents in hostile territory, is the most jealously guarded of all intelligence activities.... If the black world has invented anything newer and more exotic - which it certainly should have done, with all that money - America's future adversaries will probably not be able to do much about it even if they know it exists.... From whom, aside from US taxpayers, is the black world still keeping secrets?"
EduTrends: Research firm Mark Data Retrieval released a study showing more than 30 percent of US schools use some kind of "Integrated Learning System," or computer-based interactive curriculum. Of those that use these systems, 97 percent report "education technology enhances learning."
Your Turn To Drive: The White House Information Infrastructure Task Force has set up an InfoHighway BBS, packed with dreary government documents like committee reports, minutes of task force meetings, and the like. Is there a conferencing feature? Not yet, but there should be. For access call +1 (202) 482 1199.
Info Tech on the March: Information technology will be 1994's most important growth area, according to a Commerce Department report earlier this year. The report also claims growth of 22.6 percent for satellite commerce, 15.5 percent for data processing, and 9.6 percent for computer professional services.
Sorry Bill, You're No Liz Taylor: You'd have needed a private helicopter to crash Bill Gates's wedding earlier this year in Lanai, Hawaii: He rented out all the rooms at his 250-room hotel, sequestered every available helicopter on the island, and bought every plane ticket into the island's small airport to ensure his privacy was not ruined by pesky journalists and the like. The State of Hawaii is looking into criminal charges against Bill for his zealous actions, which included closing public beaches with a private security guard. We're sure Hard Copy was crushed.
