__ Scans __
__ Hacking the Clinton White House __
I'm not a cracker anymore," Nate Dias insists. "I gave up dumpster diving when I went legit." Legit, in this case, means working as MIS director for the Democratic National Committee. Dias, a 28-year-old raver, recovering Deadhead, and self-described antiauthoritarian phreak, discovered hacking in high school and later did a miserable stint crunching code at Digital. Two years ago, Dias moved to Washington, DC, to find out how politics really work. He arrived to find a DNC network "held together with chewing gum and rubber bands."
Now Dias boasts that the DNC has "gotten its technoshit together." He's particularly proud of the DNC's new BallotNet intranet - a rapid-response info weapon for use on the campaign warpath. In the old days, local party offices used a decentralized phone or fax network to distribute campaign briefings or opposition research from office to office. "Phone trees are so pass�," Dias groans in a faint Southern drawl. "Now we can quickly disseminate information on talking points and issues we want played up in different areas. The automated distribution takes enormous pressure off our staff."
BallotNet may offer a glimpse into the future of high tech campaigning, but it's also a prime example of old-fashioned political backscratching. "AT&T built the network for free as a political contribution," Dias admits, adding that Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and Novell also donated equipment to the campaign.
When Dias isn't troubleshooting, he's often causing trouble. Or trying to. An adamant opponent of the Clinton administration's stand on crypto restrictions, the Communications Decency Act, and "antiterrorism" wiretapping, Dias isn't shy about speaking up when the opportunity presents itself. "Whenever I get Clinton or Gore alone, I tell them that Clipper sucks, and they're pissing off a whole generation of information professionals," he crows. "Clinton and Gore are pretty free thinking, but they're getting bad advice. If I run into Louis Freeh at a party, I'll punch him in the nose."
Dias the cracker has become Dias the political operative, but he's still no politician. "When the election is over, I'm moving out to San Francisco to get away from this Babylonian crap," he declares. "I'll definitely write a book about my experience here. I figure it'll be sort of Hunter S. Thompson meets Clifford Stoll."
Jessie Scanlon
__ Lucas Strikes Back __
Computer technology has been a boon to filmmakers who want to create wild new imagery. Now it's being used to fix old images, too. The three films of the original Star Wars trilogy will be the first to undergo a digital makeover, courtesy of creator George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic. "Now I'm able to fix all the things that have bugged me for years," says Lucas.
Algorithmic alchemy has allowed ILM to completely erase traces of Jabba the Hutt's clumsy rubber suit, replacing it with a sauntering digital model. In the new additions to the Star Wars story, which should d�but in 1999, theatergoers can also expect to see Yoda getting around a bit more, as well as souped-up, computer-generated versions of C-3PO and R2D2. "It's so liberating to be free of the constraints of plastic suits," Lucas sighs.
Paula Parisi
__ You are the Problem __
Chris Korda is under the ultimate deadline. As reverend of the Church of Euthanasia (www.paranoia.com/coe/), she's running an edgy, in-your-face campaign to stop human overpopulation before every redwood, owl, and butterfly fades into history.
With a droll theology that advocates suicide, abortion, cannibalism, and sodomy, Korda and her crew of young eco-hackers are waging war on the reproductive habits of the baby boomer generation - before the planet gets too messed up."
Some of the hardest cases we deal with are liberals and other 'humanists' who consider themselves intelligent and civilized," Korda says. "They are far more heavily indoctrinated than less 'educated' people and therefore offer much more resistance." In Korda's perfect world, people will think of themselves less as individuals and more as members of a species of "tool-wielding apes, housed among many other sentient beings, all of whom play some part in this vast, extraordinary, living organism we call Earth."
Kate Rix
__ Alabama's Home Team __
As the digital revolution shifts into warp speed, some cyber soothsayers worry that average Americans will be left tinkering in the garage while the wealthy zip around in virtual spaceships. Technological apartheid, they say, could further widen socioeconomic inequities, creating a "digitariat" of unwired have-nots.
Maybe the Jeremiahs and Luddites should head down to Cedar Bluff School in the heartland of rural Alabama. Tiger Computers, which operates out of the school, is working hard to arm small-town America with the skills to keep up with the information technology onslaught. Selling rural schools and communities high-performance computers at a low cost, Tiger is run by high school students who control assembly, sales, distribution, training, and service for the products they offer.
"People just can't believe what we're doing out here," says high school senior Joseph Bynum, a three-letter varsity athlete and Tiger manager who supervises the 30 students the company employs. "The whole town looks up to us." With initial funding from the Lyndhurst Foundation and the University of Alabama's Program for Rural Services, Tiger has blossomed since the business started five years ago. After generating US$30,000 in sales during its first year, Tiger is expecting to top $300,000 in 1996.
But the kids who run the show aren't focused exclusively on the bottom line. Production Manager Patrick Clifton, responsible for assembly and distribution, excitedly says, "It's not about money. It's about learning, teaching, and sharing information. When I leave here I'll have a hand up on everyone else, no matter where they live." All Tiger's student-employees graduate knowing how to put together and take apart computers, how to set up Web sites, and how to train others - older and younger - to feel comfortable with modern technology.
At Cedar Bluff, folks don't fret when the football team loses a heartbreaker. That's because everyone knows Tiger Computer is having a hell of a fourth quarter.
Jason Sheftell
__ The Celluloid Archilogist __
Rick Prelinger stands in an air-conditioned warehouse in Manhattan's meat-packing district, surrounded by 12-foot stacks of metal film cans. "This is the inside of my brain," exclaims the stout, silver-haired film archivist as he walks down an aisle. At one stack, he pulls down a film called Once upon a Honeymoon. "It's a 1956 advertising film done in the style of a Hollywood musical that explains why you need color telephones," Prelinger says with over-caffeinated speed. "It signaled that phones were becoming part of the decor of the home."
He continues down the aisle. "Here's one called The Fun of Making Friends. Here's The Story of Sugar."
Separately, the titles are bewildering and mundane, but together, Prelinger's collection of more than 35,000 industrial films offers a sinister view of postwar consumer propaganda. The genre, which the 43-year-old collector has dubbed "ephemeral film," encapsulates the hundreds of thousands of advertising,promotional, and educational films produced by corporations and local governments to teach, influence, and manufacture "traditional" American values. "I'm fascinated with the past," Prelinger says emphatically, "but I hate nostalgia. Nostalgia is commercial exploitation of a consensus that never existed."
Prelinger says ephemeral films "reveal the conflicts in our national unconscious. Conflicts that involve gender, race, and class; the division between work and leisure; protechnology and antitechnology. Many of these unresolved conflicts have been with us for a long, long time." In his recently published Voyager CD-ROM series Our Secret Century: Archival Film from the Darker Side of the American Dream, Prelinger edits his collection into a 12-volume greatest-hits survey of contemporary civic ideology.
The historical narrative contained within the Prelinger Archives is as serendipitous as the films. "I don't want to project just one interpretation of the past," he says. "These films allow people to be influenced by their own opinions."
Rachel Lehmann-Haupt
__ Cybersaunas For Salarymen __
In Tokyo, fun for salarymen is beer, TV, nude pictures, and steam. Not the Net. Though multimedia is all the buzz, the burnt-out masses just aren't getting their feet wet online. But in the redesigned sauna at Tokyo Dome, they can have their fun - and "lose that Internet innocence" in the process, as *SPA! *magazine joked.
Every day, more than 200 robed customers pay &YEN2,500 (US$23) to surf the Web from plush recliners in the Dome's steam-free lounge. The sauna is staffed by slightly dowdy "waitresses" who gently encourage customers to tinker with Netscape Navigator. For would-be surfers traumatized by the long lines or hip attitude at many cybercaf�s, the Tokyo Dome sauna is a warm and friendly alternative.
Bill Marsh
__ Digital Recording for the Analog Soul __
Chris Winter thinks immortality is all in your mind and about 30 years away. Winter, a researcher with British Telecom, is leading a seven-person team that's exploring the possibility of capturing and recording human experiences with the help of microscopic robots.
Winter's device, dubbed the Soul Catcher, would employ nanobots to crawl into your cranium, latch onto your sensory nerves, and begin recording experiential data. The brain receives around 100 Mbytes of sensory information for each second of experience - 90 percent of which comes from the eyes alone. Once the nanorecorders upload their data, your life could be stored on a 10-terabyte memory chip, which, Winter believes, should exist in a couple of decades. Theoretically, these experiences could then be transmitted to playback nanobots in another person's brain, allowing them to literally "relive the moment." Winter calls it "immortality in the truest sense," adding that "the optic nerve can be treated just like a digital information system."
BT invests as much as US$50 million annually in futuristic research, a portion of which supports Winter's work. The company's artificial life team is currently developing software that will grow by learning to write its own code. The Soul Catcher is part of an ongoing project that uses the brain as a model for complex communications networks.
Winter, a solid-state physicist with a background in biochemistry, envisions surgeons using the Soul Catcher to guide them through difficult operations or cops using it as the ultimate surveillance device.
Of course, skeptics abound. According to nano researcher Michael L. Dertouzos, director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, there is an essential hurdle the Soul Catcher must first surmount to become a reality. "I have no problem saying that in 30 years we may be able to find all the spots in the brain where the stimuli are and record them," says Dertouzos. "But we're a long way from understanding how to go from stimuli to the next level - recognition."
Still, Dertouzos doesn't completely dismiss the possibility of teens sporting a Sony Nanoman one day. "Biology and computers will find more and more common ground as time goes on," he says. "But the time frame, as I see it, is much longer."
Noah Robischon
__ Electric Shark Repellent __
You're in scuba gear, placidly contemplating a coral reef, when all of a sudden - *DUNT-DUNT-DUNT-DUNT! *- a bloodthirsty shark decides to make you his next meal. Remain calm, old chum. If you've attached a Sharkpod ("pod" stands for protective ocean device) to your aqualung, you're *probably *in the clear.
The Sharkpod is a 5-pound device that emits a force field of low-level electrical pulses strong enough to ward off sharks swimming within 20 feet. "Sharks sense the very weak bioelectric fields that all animals produce," says Geremy Cliff, research director of the Natal Shark Board in South Africa, whose scientists developed the antishark device. "The pod creates an electrical field that makes sharks increasingly uncomfortable the closer they come to the source."
In tests, the pod has a 90 percent success rate. Keep that in mind before you try to pose for a souvenir photo with Jaws.
Dave Cravotta
