;; $Id: innocence,v 1.4 1999/11/04 21:12:06 mknell Exp $
;; Copyright (C) 1999 by Mike Knell. All rights reserved.

Gross Gains but Net Losses - Innocence and the Internet
-------------------------------------------------------
v1.0 final +minor typo fixes 01/2000
           +more initial comments 08/2000

					Mike Knell
					mpk@well.com
					http://www.tuatha.org/~mpk/

(note - I'd appreciate any feedback people have regarding this article,
positive or negative - the mail address is above. thanks! --mike)

[ADDED 01 August 2000: The feedback I've received about this since I
 put it out has been varied, to say the least. Some of it gave me a lot
 of food for thought and made me think that maybe my original writing 
 was from a rather simplistic point of view.. sometime maybe I'll do
 a revision of it or write a followup. It sure needs it. --mpk]

ABSTRACT
--------

The last few years have been turbulent ones for the
Internet, as the explosive growth and steamrollering commercialisation
resulting from the network's transition to the mass marketplace have
sent shockwaves through the online community. This article presents a
brief history of the network and some other background information,
describes some of these changes, and considers what the online
community has gained, and lost, as a result.

Introduction
------------

I've been on the Internet for longer than most people, but for a lot
less long than a lot of people. The reason I can say "most people"
with confidence is that I first began to seriously use the net
sometime in 1992, when the majority of people hadn't even heard of the
Internet. Perhaps some home computer users used bulletin boards to
communicate with other people, argue violently about trivial things,
and share software, both free and pirated. Maybe a few enthusiastic
users were using Micronet 800 or Telecom Gold to see how their
business could benefit from this electronic mail thing, but
internetworking for any other purposes was still strictly the reserve
of academia. Commercial use was virtually unknown, with the exception
of a few hi-tech companies whose techies demanded access. As far as
the mainstream was concerned, at the turn of the nineties networking
was something you did in wine bars after work.

Things have changed now - some things indisputably for the better, but
other things for the worse. More places and people are connected to
the network than the original pioneers could have ever dreamed of, and
more information is available on the net than you could ever think of
needing. The network is easy to use and fast. But all this has not
happened without a price being paid - the trust and cooperation that
was built over the 25 years after the first ARPANET nodes were
connected together in 1969 has all but dissipated.

Doors that were previously wide open are now locked and
barred. Strangers have to be treated with suspicion, not just as
casual explorers. All across the network, the firewalls have gone up,
and system administrators now need to be security experts whether
they're working in a university or a bank, trying to keep up in the
eternal, insane race to patch the latest security holes before the
legions of crackers and script kiddies can trash their systems.

The DNS has reverted to being basically just a big hosts file, which
totally defeats the purpose of its original creation.  Domain names,
of all things, are fought over in the courts, hoarded and carpetbagged
by unscrupulous speculators, and subsequently sold for absurd
amounts. 

There are regular stories in the press either chronicling the latest
squabble over some corner of the DNS or painting the network as a den
of child porn and vice. Whether accurate or not, these stories twist
and distort the image of the Internet, but it can't be denied that
there's an element of truth to them. When a simple typographical error
can lead to a site full of eye-watering pornography instead of the
intended destination as a result of an enterprising porn site owner
registering a domain name that's a common typo of a well-known site,
it certainly makes it appear to many people's minds that the press
stories are right and that pornography does indeed lurk at every turn.

This loss of innocence saddens me, as I'm sure it saddens many others.

Before going into more detail, I should just explain a couple of bits
of possibly ambiguous terminology. When I refer to "The Internet", I
mean the cloud of hosts and networks reachable via the open, global
TCP/IP network [1], but in a more general sense I also mean the people
who are connected in some way or another via services on or connected
to the Internet. It should be obvious throughout from context which
sense is intended. "Usenet" refers to all hierarchies of newsgroups,
including "alt" - an incorrect usage as officially only the Big Eight
hierarchies (comp, soc, rec, sci, talk, misc, humanities, news)
constitute the Usenet, but for the sake of simplicity and to get rid
of a lot of repetitive redefinition I've had to twist a couple of
terms a bit.

In The Beginning
----------------

As has been told many times in many garbled and badly-researched forms
by many different journalists, the genesis of the Internet was in
October 1969, when the first messages were passed between the first
two nodes on the ARPANET, the world's first distributed computer
network. Hackers (and I use the term in the honourable sense, rather
than in the media-mangled version that means "computer criminal" -
this sense will be conveyed in this article by the term "cracker")
immediately discovered that there were other people like them out
there, and an amazing sharing culture started to grow up
[Raymond-1998]. People were swapping jokes and discussing subjects
ranging from compiler design to the Grateful Dead almost from day one
of the network's existence, as well as using the network for the
collaborative research work it was officially supposed to be there to
facilitate. Technically, all this fringe activity was unauthorized use
of the network, but DARPA [2] , who were funding the network, turned a
blind eye. But the value of this resource was well appreciated by all
the hackers who used and maintained it - "are you on the Net?" was a
common question asked of university departments by prospective
researchers.

As the network grew, this culture grew and flourished, and with the
coming of Usenet in 1979, distributed online discussion really started
to take off. From a beginning of two hosts and one newsgroup, Usenet
grew rapidly, and was soon its own online community, discussing
whatever was going on, having the occasional flamewar, but generally
being a pretty amiable place. The network as a whole reflected this -
people didn't feel the need to slam all their security doors as it
bothered the users, and preferred openness and sharing, albeit at a
slight risk that some bored student might crack into their
systems. The occasional problem did arise, such as that recounted in
[Stoll-1990], but generally speaking security didn't take up too much
time. It didn't have to.

Now let's fast-forward a few years, and pick up the story in 1992,
when I joined the network. The Internet was largely at this point a
research network - populated by computer scientists and other
academics, along with a fair sprinkling of students, including myself,
who'd discovered that spending their time in the computer centre was
far more interesting than going to lectures. Commercial use was almost
unknown, and was officially against the rules, in the USA at least,
until the National Science Foundation, who governed the network's
infrastructure, relaxed the rules in the early nineties and allowed
commercial entities to connect.

More people were reachable via electronic mail or Usenet than were
reachable directly via TCP/IP, and disparate networks running
disparate protocols were connected via a profusion of gateways. In the
UK, academia was still stuck in the bizarre world of X29 and the
famous Coloured Book protocols. The Joint Academic Network, JANET,
even used its own naming scheme diametrically opposite to the rest of
the world, just to be confusing. Many UK academic users still remember
the days of the "backwards" naming scheme - for instance,
"uk.ac.nottingham" instead of "nottingham.ac.uk". This was, as it
happens, for a good reason - JANET was using such a naming scheme
before the TCP/IP world came up with its own domain name system, and
just happened to choose to write its addresses the other way
around. (It could therefore be said that the rest of the world got it
wrong, but there are also sound technical reasons for forming
addresses the Internet way). But I digress.

And.. bang!
-----------

Over the course of the early nineties, the Internet coalesced into a
more-or-less universally reachable cloud of networks interconnected
using TCP/IP, as other protocols were gradually discarded in favour of
the protocol stack that seemed to be winning the war [4]. The NSF's
deregulation of the net, along with Sun's bundling of TCP/IP with
their version of UNIX in the late eighties, meant that commercial use
could now be made of the network. The first consumer Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) sprang up. One of the best known, the UK's Demon
Internet, arose from a discussion on the CIX conferencing system - I
remember reading the "tenner-a-month" conference that was formed to
discuss the idea at the time. Nobody back then envisaged it being more
than a tool for a few hackers to get access to the Internet from home,
to maybe ftp a few files, telnet into their work machine to get their
mail, or read Usenet.

The dialup ISP business grew slowly until a particular combination of
events put a match to the powder-keg that would change the net beyond
recognition. First came the invention of the World Wide Web. With the
Web, but more specifically with the release in 1992 of Mosaic, the
first widely-used graphical browser, came a simple point-and-click
interface to Internet resources. Anyone could now wander around the
network without having to learn any arcane command-line interfaces,
and there were graphics and pictures to keep the easily bored
occupied. Simultaneously, prices in the microcomputer market were
plummeting and processor speeds were increasing, making computers more
affordable for home users. And then, suddenly, the press got
interested, realised that the Internet existed, and ran a few stories.

The Web suddenly became very cool indeed. Hackers emerged blinking
from their offices to find that while they'd been in there the
Internet had become flavour of the month, and everyone wanted in on
it. Parents suddenly felt that the Internet would be Very Educational
For The Children, went out, bought a PC, and got online. Companies who
previously didn't know what a network was suddenly found that they
just had to have one of these website things, whatever that was. Also
in 1993 America Online, one of the largest online services in the USA,
expanded its user services to include access to Usenet, producing the
"endless September" atmosphere that many old-timers feel has prevailed
ever since.

The network grew explosively as millions of people poured into the
online community, which suddenly transformed from small town to vast
metropolis. The telecommunications industry couldn't believe its luck
as demand for data circuits outstripped supply. ISPs and cybercafes
were springing up like mushrooms. DNS registration rates skyrocketed,
Usenet traffic was doubling regularly, and virtually every metric used
to measure the size of the network started increasing exponentially.
From being a rarely used symbol on the keyboard that people considered
about as useful or interesting as ~ or ^, @ suddenly found itself the
epitome of hipness - if you didn't have a network address, you weren't
anybody. "@", "www" and ".com" were everywhere all of a sudden - on
billboards, in TV commercials, in the newspaper.

In the white heat of this revolution, a lot of people who just
happened to be in the right place at the right time became
fantastically wealthy - Cliff Stanford of the aforementioned Demon
suddenly found himself heading up a multi-million pound company with
hundreds of thousands of customers. And entrepreneurs and
get-rich-quick merchants of all sorts wanted a piece of this enormous
new marketplace. All of a sudden, the Internet was the hottest
property out there, and as if by magic, Internet companies were going
public in absurdly overvalued billion-dollar flotations. Information
of all sorts and on almost any topic now became available on the
net. And as it transformed itself into a commercial marketplace, you
could suddenly buy books, flowers, furniture and, yes, some pretty
eye-watering pornography over the net as more or less scrupulous
people exploited every possible niche in the market.

But there was a price to be paid for all this, and the price was
the community spirit and openness the network had enjoyed up until
this explosion. Ironically, this price was paid by the same hacker
community that had largely been responsible for making the net what it
was, but the public at large didn't notice. This was just how it
always had been, right? 

Wrong. Let's have a look at a few different aspects of the network
that have suffered, and continue to suffer, at the hands of the new
Internet capitalism. There are other aspects that I won't be talking
about - for instance, my feelings on the current terribly broken state
of the DNS, the mechanism that translates machine names like
www.lspace.org into IP addresses like 195.200.1.58, could make another
paper on their own. To prevent the reader from dying of boredom, I've
omitted them.

Locked doors - networks under siege
-----------------------------------

As I've recounted before, security was not a particularly critical issue
in the early days - virtually all hosts were academic or research-related,
and what crackers were around were generally relatively benign, although
the odd case such as the "Cuckoo's Egg" incident [Stoll-1990] or Robert
T. Morris Jr.'s famous Internet Worm would grab people's attention. 

Since 1993, however, a whole culture of cracking has grown up that is
less benign than in the early days. Instead of just sending surprising
mail to sysadmins from their own superuser accounts saying "I've just
broken into your system, through this hole", some of today's crackers
are much more attuned to the Dark Side - it's not unusual for web
pages to be defaced, files to be trashed, or systems to be cracked in
order to be used for attacks on other systems. In particular, what's
known as the Denial of Service attack is becoming increasingly
frequent - exploiting bugs which will crash a system, or simply
flooding a host or network with packets, overloading them and slowing
them down to the extent that trying to use them feels like wading
through treacle.

This isn't really creative, honourable, or in most cases, even
original - apart from the few talented and creative individuals who in
a way do the net a useful service by highlighting newly-discovered
security holes, most crackers are just destructive "script kiddies" -
miscreants who download ready-made code for exploiting security holes
and just throw it at systems until they find one that's vulnerable. No
talent or programming skill required, just a malicious spirit and too
much spare time. 

This plague on the Internet has forced anyone with systems connected
to the network to slam all their security doors tightly, and even
worse, has led to system administrators having to run a continual
futile race of patching systems and fixing holes as soon as possible
after they're published on full-disclosure security mailing lists
such as Bugtraq. Now, this is what sysadmins are paid to do, in part,
but this eats heavily into time that would be far better spent on
upgrading software, answering user questions and generally making
things better than it would on playing this pointless game of
"thwart-the-cracker".

The net effect of all this, of course, is that much of the feeling of
trust and cooperation that characterised the old networked community
is gone, blown away by these slimeballs and their tiresome
activities. The networks, as many people have said before, were built
on trust - if the trust disappears, so will the Internet. It's quite
unlikely that this wholesale destruction of the net will actually
happen, of course, but every particle of trust that is lost adversely
affects the development of the Internet, to the detriment of all its
users.

Usenet - IDOTNP. FA11.
----------------------

Usenet, regardless of whatever else I might say about it, is a remarkably
resilient construction. "IDOTNP. FA11" is the usual response to 
doom-mongerers like me saying that so-and-so is going to kill Usenet -
it stands for "Imminent death of the net predicted. Film at 11."

People have been saying this for many years, and it's not come true
yet.  But if Usenet isn't dying, it's certainly suffering, under siege
by selfish people who abuse this system of worldwide discussion groups
for their own ends. Partially, the problem is crackers who think that
mucking with the group control mechanisms is good for a laugh. These
days there are constant attacks on the system by people either
mass-cancelling other peoples' articles, attempting to remove active
newsgroups, or just flooding groups with garbage. 

If you want a full feed of the Usenet, you'd better have the disc
space and network bandwidth to handle over 30GB a day of traffic,
around a staggering 29GB of which is binaries. What sort of binaries?
Generally speaking, pirated software, pornography of all shapes and
sizes, and binary images of CD-ROMs, or even DVD-ROMs and movies.
Very little of this is legal, most of it is violating someone's
copyright, and all of it is wasting network bandwidth and disc space
on thousands of machines around the globe. Binaries aren't meant to be
transmitted over Usenet when there are better mechanisms available -
it's just a relic from the days when a lot of people connected to
Usenet didn't have FTP, or access to the Web.

Of the remaining 1GB of daily traffic, the majority will be spam (see
next section), random drivelling noise, and ragingly pointless
flamewars, leaving maybe 100MB of useful traffic. It's all terribly
wasteful, and looking at these figures helped me come to my conclusion
that Usenet is the section of the net that has really been laid the
lowest by the new Internet order. It's been transformed from global
community with a certain amount of low-level noise and flamage into a
vast sewer of dross, where reasonable discussion is all but impossible
in most places and the noise and flamage has risen to the
top. Remember what always rises to the top in a sewer? If you ever
needed living, breathing proof that millions of monkeys hammering at
keyboards wouldn't eventually produce Shakespeare, check out Usenet
some day.

Spam - MAKE $$$$ MONEY FAST!!!!!
--------------------------------

Perhaps the most obvious problem on the Internet from the point of
view of the average end user is the scourge of spam - unsolicited,
unwanted mass commercial e-mailings and Usenet postings, pushing wares
that are often illegal or simply nonexistent. Pyramid money-making
schemes (illegal in most territories), dodgy investments (probably
illegal too), vivid descriptions of the joys of Yet Another Porn Site -
there's a place for every dubious activity in the spam industry.

Why is it called spam? Well, the first large-scale incident of
untargeted mass-posting of an advertisement to every Usenet group,
apart from a couple of chain letters and pyramid money-making schemes
which are still making life merry hell for sysadmins the world over,
was the work of two dubious US lawyers, Lawrence Canter and Martha
Siegel, in April 1994 [Neumann-1994]. These two individuals hired a
somewhat misguided programmer to write a script to post their
advertisement for their dubious service, handling entries into the
annual US immigration "green card" lottery draw, to every group on
Usenet.

The term coined by disgruntled netizens to describe this was inspired
by the famous Monty Python sketch - all you could get, anywhere you
looked, was spam. And if you didn't like spam, that was too bad -
you'd still get a group of Vikings singing "spam, spam, spam, spam" at
you wherever you tried to take refuge. Thousands of copies of this
message, everywhere. You couldn't escape from them. These lawyers
didn't take kindly to criticism, however, preferring to threaten their
networked detractors with lawsuits. Eventually, they wrote a book
about "making a fortune on the information superhighway" which failed
to sell too many copies [3], and since then have sunk into
obscurity. The cynic in me just thinks they were a couple of years
before their time.

Since then, spam has been a growth industry - there's hardly a user on
the Internet who hasn't found their inbox crammed with dodgy and
unwanted advertisements or their favourite Usenet group full of
garbage. As the moderator of a fairly low-traffic Usenet group, I
frequently get far more pieces of spam in the moderation queue than I
do genuine articles. Many talented people are spending many days on
creating mechanisms to thwart the spammers, with some success, but
there is still a long way to go. Most people who advertise by spam are
attracted by the notion of "free" advertising - reach millions for
cents. What they don't realise is that they're just shifting the cost
burden - disc space for storage, network bandwidth to deliver it -
onto other people. This is where the oft-heard "first amendment"
defence of spam falls over completely - freedom of speech does not
include an obligation on others to pay to transport _your_ speech or a
right to intrude on others.  This counterargument is nicely summed up
and confirmed in the US Supreme Court's judgement in the case of
Rowan vs US Post Office [5].

In addition, there's the time spent by sysadmins and abuse staff who
have to clear up the mess after your spamming run, read thousands of
often abusive emails sent by angry receipients of the spam, and smooth
things over with their network providers, who'll also have been
receiving angry emails. All of this adds up to make spam indefensible,
nothing more than theft of services. Rather than free speech, it's
expensive speech for everyone but the spammer. But still spam
continues at epidemic levels - as soon as a spammer is whacked, they
pop up from another provider and just keeping going. 

This thoroughly unscrupulous practice is causing major problems for
everyone on the Internet - people posting on Usenet sometimes feel
obliged to mangle their email addresses to foil spammers scraping
addresses from the net, rendering it impossible to give them feedback
to their articles via email. People with mail servers which are still
configured to relay mail from anywhere on the net find their machines
flooded with spam that's been delivered to their machine for onward 
delivery, and have to clear up the mess caused by this "relay-raping".

The net effect of all of this? Yup, just like before, it's causing the
trust that holds the network together to disappear, and forcing people
to close doors that never had to be closed before. And again, it's
people misusing the net for their own selfish ends rather than thinking
of the effect of their actions on the wider community.

Incidentally, the Hormel corporation, makers of SPAM in the USA, have
taken this alternative use of their trademark quite gracefully, apart
from requesting that the all-capitals "SPAM" be reserved for naming
their ground-meat product, preferring the junk mail version to be
"spam" or "Spam".

It's not all bad, though..
--------------------------

Despite all my doom-mongering, it's obvious that the "virtual
communities" created by the net are far from gone. More people are
connected than ever before by a long way, and this has brought a lot
of good things to a lot of people. It's been fun for the techies like
me too, with bigger and faster computers, bigger discs, more memory,
and bigger, faster networks than ever before to play with. Not to
mention enormous salaries for those people in the right place at the
right time, which unfortunately doesn't include me, as I work in
academia.

What is happening, however, is that the Internet is becoming more a
mechanism to connect small, heavily-defended virtual communities,
gated suburbs with security guards in the middle of the turmoil and
anarchy of the city outside. Some of the original communities - CIX in
the UK, the WELL in California, and their like, are still flourishing
regardless of the chaos outside, and are benefitting from their
network connections bringing in users who wouldn't be able to afford
the long-distance charges otherwise. I wouldn't be able to get to the
WELL from Ireland without the Internet, for instance, as otherwise the
phone bill would quickly consume my entire salary.

Parts of Usenet continue to thrive, but these are islands in a sea of
insanity - I'll single out alt.fan.pratchett in particular here, an
extraordinary group that originally started out in 1992 as a
discussion group for fans of the author Terry Pratchett, but has since
evolved into..  well, into something completely different. I've been
involved with AFP almost since the beginning, and the few of us
old-timers (this is a medium where 7 years makes you a venerable old
hand) who are still around have seen it grow and thrive in ways that
nobody could have predicted, with a remarkable success rate in the
field of real-world relations as well - several marriages down the
line, the first AFP baby is on the way and is due in a couple of
months. And if that isn't a fine achievement for a virtual community,
I don't know what is.

But what makes these virtual communities work and keep their
individuality against the constant barrage of Internet-borne dross
that hammers at the doors? My pet theory is that they all involve a
certain amount of real-world interaction among their users. AFP has
regular pub meets in various parts of the world and the WELL has been
having monthly parties since time immemorial. This adds a spark to the
interpersonal relations in those groups which crosses over even to
those people who don't get to attend the meets.

Conclusions
-----------

What I've been touching on all the way through this article is that
the Internet as it's seen by new users today is busier, faster, and in
most ways far better than it was 10 years ago. However, it's also got
an edge of unpleasantness and an unfriendly aspect to it that was
never there before. The old Internet had a certain light-hearted
pioneering spirit about it, an openness and sanity, that is gone and
unlikely to return. The new Internet, though bigger and faster than
before, generally feels vicious rather than gentle, self-centred
rather than community-minded, cruel and intolerant rather than
accepting and open. And I really don't like it.

What to do? It's not really possible, nor is it desirable, to say
"Right, that's it", and turn back the clock. The commercial aspect of
the Internet is here to stay, and it's brought a lot of good things as
well as bad things, that's for sure. I've presented a lot of problems,
and there's no point in doing that without presenting some solutions
as well:

Security - The solution can be split into two parts. Firstly,
operating system and software vendors should be taking more
responsibility for the security of the systems they're selling, rather
than shipping them without a proper security audit and with default
installations that are wide open. The only people to have done this so
far are the OpenBSD folks, and they're a free software project without
the resources of the big commercial houses, so why the likes of Sun
and Microsoft won't spend the money and the time to do this as well is
beyond me. Secondly, the culture in some parts of the net that says
that malicious cracking is somehow studly or cool ("k3wl and 3l33t" in
crackerspeak) needs to get a clue. It's not big, it's not clever, and
in most parts of the world, it's very illegal. Here in Ireland, for
instance, unauthorised access to a computer system can get you a
prison sentence, and destruction of data carries a maximum of 10 years
in jail and a fine of 10,000 pounds on conviction [Oireachtas-1991],
but a lot of crackers continue to assert that their destructive
activities are a "right" rather than understanding the anguish and
trouble they cause other people who have to sort out the mess they
create.

Usenet - It's an unpopular suggestion, but I like being radical -
rmgroup (delete) the entire alt.binaries.* heirarchy, and move away
from propagating binaries via Usenet completely, backing this up with
articles containing binaries simply not being propagated by the
network. There are better ways of distributing binaries - that's what
FTP and HTTP are for. This would reduce the size of a Usenet feed to
around one-thirtieth of what it is now, making it possible for people
to take full feeds again without swamping their servers and network
connections with gigabytes of binary dross. Educate users that ISP A
is not necessarily better than ISP B because it carries 31,455
newsgroups rather than 31,454 - quality of feed and speed of
propagation rather than quantity of feed is a better metric. Educate
users in general about how to behave - at least go back to the old
tradition of automatically subscribing new users to
news.announce.newusers. Bring the network back to being a way of
connecting people together, instead of just being an incredibly
wasteful and inefficient method of distributing binaries to the few
people who want them.

Spam - There's only one way to solve the spam problem, apart from user
education, and that's zero tolerance. Providers who aren't as tough on
spammers as they need to must be educated of their role as good
network citizens, and lawmakers need to consider greater legal
measures to outlaw the theft of other people's resources for such
purposes. Some providers have been successful in imposing large fines
on spammers to cover the cost of clearing up the mess they create, but
this practice needs to be far more widespread before it starts to
really make life difficult for the spammer. Users should not be
frightened to put their correct email address in their news articles -
this is, again, a barrier that's driving wedges betwen people rather
than bringing them together.

These few simple steps would go a long way to breaking down the walls
of distrust that people have been forced to put up around themselves
over the last few years, prevent some potential technical disasters,
and just make the net a far nicer place to be. There are, of course,
other technical problems that I haven't touched on (the aforementioned
DNS issues, the fact that antisocial bandwidth-hogging applications
such as unicast streaming video over UDP are slowly but surely
bringing the network to meltdown point [Hambridge-1999], and so on)
but as these are more technical problems than social ones I've omitted
them from this discussion.

The Internet has always connected people together, but the modern
Internet seems more interested in connecting individuals for their own
benefit, disregarding others, rather than creating communities through
the same connections. The network should be something you give to as
well as take from. It's a shame, in a way, that technical measures
such as the Realtime Blackhole List, which causes mail from sites
engaged in spamming to mysteriously vanish into the ether, are
necessary for ensuring sanity on the network. Until there are some
fundamental changes of attitude among the users of the New Internet,
however, they are sadly, going to be necessary. There is nothing that
the anti-spam community would like more than for there to be no need
for an anti-spam community any more. The need for technical measures
like this is going to increase and spread to other aspects of the
network unless there is a seismic shift in attitudes.

I'm finding myself starting to agree more completely than I used to
with the sentiments in [Stoll-1995] - although I still love the
Internet and wouldn't want to be without it, I don't feel as much a
part of it as I used to. A lot of people who are spending lots of
money on getting connected as a result of all the media hyperbole are
going to be disappointed when they find out how the reality is, with a
lot of the things that are pushed as benefits of the Internet having
long disappeared. I can't wait until the network reaches into every
home and office, but the Internet as it currently stands doesn't seem
to be the right network for that purpose. Until the technical
conditions are right for this to happen, the benefits of widespread
data networking for humanity as a whole are going to be decidedly
muted.

Mike Knell
Dublin, October 31st 1999 (Halloween!)

[1] Or, if you prefer set theory, Seth Breidbart has defined the
    Internet as 'the largest equivalence class in the reflexive
    transitive symmetric closure of the relationship "can be reached
    by an IP packet from"'.

[2] The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's worth pointing
    out that just because the research was funded by the Pentagon, it
    wasn't strictly speaking military research, and all the talk
    about the original network being "a military network designed to 
    withstand a nuclear attack" is nothing more than urban legend. 

[3] Possibly something to do with the rude comments that got scribbled in
    bookshop copies, a terribly unfair, and illegal, but
    understandable thing that some frustrated netizens were driven to.

[4] Largely as a result of its inclusion in the 4.2BSD version of UNIX
    in 1984.

[5] Available online at
    http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/dmlaws.html#summary.

Acknowledgements
----------------
Thanks to Jos Dingjan and Kate Harris, and particularly to Adrian Colley
and Gabriel Krabbe, for valuable and informed food for thought, and to
Janice Wright for bullying me into writing this rant in the first
place.

References 
----------

[Hanbridge-1999] - DON'T SPEW, NWG Request for Comments 2635. Sally
Hambridge & Albert Lunde, June 1999. Available at:
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2635.txt

[Neumann-1994] - Article in ACM RISKS forum digest, vol 15 no 76, Peter
G Neumann, April 1994.  Available at:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/15.76.html#subj2

[Oireachtas-1991] - Criminal Damage Act, Acts of the Oireachtas no. 31 
of 1991.

[Raymond-1996] - "The New Hacker's Dictionary", Eric S Raymond (ed.),
MIT Press, 1993

[Raymond-1998] - "A Brief History of Hackerdom", Eric S Raymond. 
Published in "Open Sources - Voices from the Open Source Revolution",
ed. DiBona, Ockman & Stone, O'Reilly & Associates, 1999

[Stoll-1990] - "The Cuckoo's Egg", Clifford Stoll. Bodley Head, 1990

[Stoll-1995] - "Silicon Snake Oil - Second Thoughts On The Information
Highway", Cliff Stoll. Macmillan, 1995