Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/fade into you/being there/Rants/Surfing the Wild Internet

Text File | 1994-10-21 | 25KB | 424 lines

   SURFING THE WILD INTERNET

   Thomas F. Mandel

   Scan No. 2109

   SRI International

   Business Intelligence Program

   Menlo Park, California, U.S.A.March, 1993



   Copyright 1993 by SRI International Business Intelligence Program.All
   Right Reserved.

   Contact the author ([e-mail]) for further information or
   copies.

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

   SRI International Futurist Tom Mandel describes the history, rapid
   growth, andvaried interactions on internetworked computer systems such
   as the Internet.Developed from research-related university and
   government communicationssystems, the Internet is now doubling in size
   each year. The entire globalelectronic information matrix, which
   includes the Internet, will probably reachmore than 500 million users
   by the end of this century. As a significant partof the infrastructure
   for the emerging information society, the Internetreveals the major
   new issues created by a world where copyright replacesproperty right,
   theft becomes invasion of privacy, and the realities of
   socialinteractions include on-line personas, information addiction,
   virtual coffeehouses, and lovers who tryst without ever meeting
   through the exchange ofe-mail and sexually explicit graphics files. In
   this electronic community, a"new frontier" ethic among collaborative
   users motivates continuing userinnovation in communications software,
   information filters, and encryptionprograms. The first truly
   wide-membership global community, the Internet hascreated and will
   continue to innovate new versions of work and play, love andcrime in
   human society. The major future uncertainty concerns the
   evolvingboundaries of this network, the network's ultimate penetration
   into corporateand personal spaces, and the dynamic effects of
   increasing interconnectivity oneconomies, nations, and values.

   SURFING THE WILD INTERNET

   Computerized communications networks such as the Internet create the
   technicalfoundation of the information society. Its rapid growth and
   varied interactionsdefine the norms and aspirations of this new world.

   One forecast that has proved true about the information society is the
   rapidemergence of computer/communications networks. Throughout the
   late 1980s andinto the present, no corners of the information
   infrastructure exist whereconnectivity (linked computers and
   communications systems) and internetworking(networks of computer
   networks) are not growing explosively. The business,social, and
   political consequences of increasingly dense connectivity will befar
   reaching, and the patterns of change are visible in the activities
   alreadygoing on.

   Outside the public switched telephone network-the global computerized
   telephonesystems-the Internet is the world's largest computer
   internetwork. It developedin the early 1980s, as a restructuring of
   the U.S. Department of Defense-fundedARPANET computer network, to
   connect several hundred university and U.S.government mainframe
   computers (hosts) for the exchange of electronic mail(e-mail),
   information, and computing resources. Since 1986, the number
   ofcomputer hosts on the Internet has grown at approximately 100% per
   year, and byJanuary 1993, the Internet connected more than 1 300 000
   hosts in nearly allmajor countries (see Figure 1). No one knows how
   many people access Internetcomputer services, but estimates range from
   8 million to 15 million peopleworldwide-and these estimates exclude
   users on hosts that, for securityreasons, are invisible on the
   Internet system. Although growth of the Internetin the United States
   is slowing down (to 80% in the past year), growthelsewhere in the
   world is just starting to take off. For example, the number ofhosts
   increased 200% in the United Kingdom last year (where Internet hosts
   nownumber more than 58 000) and increased some 170% in Japan, with
   nearly 24 000hosts (see Items Worth Noting in the February Scan).

   [Figure 1 deleted from this electronic version. It illustrates
   thegrowth of Internet hosts from about 200 in 1981 to roughly 1.3
   millionas of January, 1993. Source: SRI International.]

   Growing alongside the Internet are the tens of millions of users of a
   number ofpacket data networks such as Sprintnet, BT (British Telecom)
   Tymnet, andCompuserve Packet Network and the tens of thousands of
   companies worldwide thatlink employees with private local- and
   wide-area networks-many of which connectto an internetwork. According
   to John Quarterman, publisher of Matrix News,these corporate computer
   networks are together already at least as large as theInternet itself.
   Cellular radio networks such as Viking Express and Ardis nowprovide
   interconnectivity to notebook computer users, and-in the
   nearfuture-telephone systems will offer digital information services
   that willeffectively make them large internetworks as well. New
   internetworkingstandards that have rapidly evolved during the past
   five years ensure that thecomplexity and connectivity of these
   different networks and internetworks willincrease by several orders of
   magnitude in the 1990s. At the end of thisdecade, internetworks will
   link several hundred million computers together, andthe total number
   of users with access to the global electronic informationmatrix will
   exceed 500 million.

   More interesting than the sheer volume of communications are the
   mostlyunpredicted new behavior and social phenomena that the
   internetworks nurture.An overview of the major developments hints
   strongly at both the bright and thedark aspects of the emerging
   information society.

   People's Need to Talk

   One of the most rapidly growing categories of exchanged files on the
   Internetis personal communications. Today e-mail and facsimile mail
   are the two mostrapidly growing new media for direct connection
   between individuals,businesses, and other organizations. Experimental
   network connections fore-mail between politicians and the public have
   existed for many years, startedby telecommunications visionaries such
   as Dave Hughes in Colorado, but nowthese experiments are spreading
   rapidly. During the 1992 election campaign,President Clinton's
   campaign staff publicized an e-mail address through whichthe public
   could ask questions, express opinions, and provide or
   receiveinformation. Compuserve still maintains an e-mail connection to
   Clinton'sstaff, and reports suggest that members of Congress will soon
   be addressablevia Internet e-mail. Because these channels can support
   the samequestion-and-answer format that President Clinton has
   popularized throughtelevised town-hall meetings, internetworking will
   likely accelerate the changein the power relations of public political
   dialog. Prodigy, the largest (innumber of users) U.S. interactive
   consumer information service, recentlyannounced that it would offer
   e-mail services to and from the Internet.Because e-mail addresses are
   usually on password-secure personal computers,e-mail can exceed the
   postal service as a private, secure communicationschannel. As a
   result, even love and sex occur through electronic messages. Someusers
   get to know each other in newsgroups (see below) and Internet
   RelayChannel (IRC), start flirting, and carry on long-distance
   electronicrelationships without ever meeting. Occasionally one even
   runs into the networkequivalent of obscene phone calls. And some user
   groups create text and digitalgraphic files of erotica, then swap
   these files electronically with otherInternet users. These examples
   are also the first public efforts to use theInternet for primitive
   multimedia communications.

   Real-time conferencing channels are much smaller than e-mail services,
   whichcan exchange mail with almost all major private and public
   networks through theInternet. The first computer businesses to offer
   real-time computerconferencing services quickly discovered that their
   customers liked to banterin real time about life-style and personal
   interests. The Internet developed"chat" features as a result. One of
   these features-IRC-provides real-timecommunications to thousands of
   users worldwide at hundreds of different sites.IRC's structure has
   different "channels," not unlike conference telephonecalls, that may
   address any topic, from research to postadolescent prattle.Some
   channels are completely private. Most, but not all, IRC participants
   arecollege students using university Internet hosts around the world.
   Within anIRC channel, it is not unusual to banter simultaneously with
   users in Taiwan,Korea, Finland, Switzerland, Israel, Australia,
   Canada, and the United States.Time-zone differences matter little to
   the night-owl habitues of the IRC"virtual cafe." And English is the
   language making global chat possible (muchas English created a global
   rock music culture). Other, better-designedreal-time conferencing
   systems, such as Scott Chasin's 4m (for forum), areemerging to meet
   the growing demand for conferencing that is less chaotic andspirited
   than often prevails in IRC.

   Global Computer Conferencing

   When the ARPANET started, a number of users developed programs so that
   theycould discuss subjects of interest to them in text versions of
   round-tablediscussions. A system of "newsgroups" and later
   "mailgroups" emerged that userscan enter through the Internet, USENET
   (a network of Unix and other systems),BITNET (a network of college
   systems), and other networks. Users "subscribe" tothe newsgroups of
   their choice, which are available to their host computersystems; they
   read and respond to text messages within directories that
   definespecific topics of interest. The more private mailgroups go to
   individualsubscribers rather than hosts, and membership in some (such
   as mailgroupsdiscussing computer security) is restricted to qualified
   people. Earlynewsgroups focused on computer use-an early group
   addressing "computer risks"still thrives today-and science fiction. By
   the mid-1980s, just before theInternet started growing rapidly,
   perhaps 300 different newsgroups wereavailable over thousands of
   computer systems. Today, more than 3000 suchnewsgroups are available
   to more than 1 million hosts and perhaps ten times asmany individual
   users. The public electronic file listing all known mailgroupsis some
   300 printed pages long. Though many newsgroups are technical, the
   mostactive address social, political, recreational, and other special
   interests.The technical information frontiers have rapidly transformed
   into habitats forpersonal and everyday use, and on a global scale.

   Freedom of Information

   The Internet is awash with information, both useful and banal. In a
   very realsense, the entire Internet (and other internetworks) is
   becoming one extremelylarge, globally distributed, and mostly public
   electronic library, post office,and discussion forum. The Internet
   evolved with a strong and explicitphilosophy of sharing information
   (mail, documents, programs, data, andgraphics), and that perspective
   has dominated how the system works today. Theinternetwork has evolved
   into a web of public and private channels bounded byexplicit security
   barriers. Occasional network horror stories-such as the 1989computer
   "worm" originated by a Cornell University graduate student,
   whichincapacitated hundreds of public and private computers on the
   Internetsystem-have actually improved the overall reliability and
   security ofinternetworking. In this context, a distinctive
   new-frontier ethos hasdeveloped among Internet users, championing the
   free exchange of informationand the intricate new issues of on-line
   etiquette, expression, and userprotections against vandalism,
   harassment, invasions of privacy, and commercialsolicitations. These
   users' credo is "Information wants to be free."

   Texts from the Internet Library

   The originating purpose of the Internet was the exchange of computer
   files, andthis exchange remains a primary activity on the network. A
   basic Internet toolis FTP, a program that enables users to move files
   from one Internet computerto another. Some large corporate and
   university systems maintain large publicFTP directories-"anonymous FTP
   sites"-listing all the files available to publicaccess. But as the
   Internet grows, simply finding where programs are locatedbecomes
   increasingly difficult, so easy-to-use search tools make this
   taskeasier. Archie, one of the most widely used programs, can locate
   the more than2.1 million computer programs in the Internet public FTP
   directories, accordingto Ed Krol, author of The Whole Internet User's
   Guide and Catalog. An Archiesearch is usually straightforward and
   simple; it can take as little as a minuteto identify specific programs
   worldwide that are publicly available via FTP.Archie is relatively
   crude compared to newer programs to search for informationon the
   Internet. Gopher burrows through indexes of files; presents the
   contentsmuch like a multiwindow, interactive card catalog in a library
   does; and letsthe user browse the contents of selected documents.
   Different Gopher serversprovide access to different kinds of
   information on different parts of theInternet-from UPI press feeds as
   an indexed resource to entire libraries ofbooks. WAIS (Wide Area
   Information Service) is a newer and more sophisticatedInternet
   information searching program (see D92-1612, Wide-Area
   InformationServers: An Executive Information System for Unstructured
   Files). WAIS letsusers ask simple questions, essentially searching
   WAIS-directoried filesavailable on the Internet for particular words
   and phrases, and refiningkeywords until they locate desired files.
   Some 250 WAIS libraries are currentlyavailable free on the Internet,
   maintained by volunteer effort and donatedcomputer time. Commercial
   services such as Dow Jones Information Service alsouse the WAIS
   interface to provide searchable information on a for-fee basis.

   Computer Fun and Games

   Internet users were quick to use internetworking for recreation. Whole
   EarthCatalog founder Stewart Brand (in "Fanatic Life and Symbolic
   Death Among theComputer Bums," Rolling Stone, December 1972) first
   described the tendency ofmainframe-computer programmers to create and
   play new computer games for hourson end. This phenomenon is repeating
   on the Internet but with a new twist:During the past several years,
   several hundred interactive, multiusersimulation games (or
   environments)-MUDs and MUSEs-have popped up on Internethosts. MUD
   stands for Multiuser Dungeons and Dragons and MUSE, which is
   moregeneric, means Multiuser Simulation Environment: computer versions
   of boardadventure games. Several hundred MUDs and MUSEs are now
   running on mostlyuniversity-based Internet systems, and many are
   accessible from elsewhere onthe network. MUSE users take advantage of
   special computer languages to createin-text fantasy environments that
   can interact with each other as if theirindividual MUSE were a real
   world. Most MUSEs are wild, chaotic science fictionor fantasy worlds,
   but some are very serious experiments. Cyberion City, a MUSEthat
   "lives" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
   Cambridge,Massachusetts, is a multilevel "spaceship" being designed,
   built, andconstantly modified by elementary, high school, and college
   students (and a fewadults). Several computer research companies are
   exploring the MUSE medium, andat least one graphical MUSE interface is
   under development in Europe. Many ofthese simulations are available on
   the Internet.

   Semi-Intelligent Bots

   Finally, semismart software programs-bots (for robots) are appearing
   in certainparts of the Internet. These programs reside in various
   applications andperform tasks tailored to an individual user's needs.
   Some IRC users programbots to record conversation, note the arrival of
   and send messages to specialfriends, and provide information on
   request to other users. In the MUSE world,bots can be programmed with
   distinct personalities; in Cyberion City, thefashion is to create a
   personal bot that will greet visitors to the user'ssimulated world
   when the creator is not logged on. Bots represent the
   firstuser-programmed steps toward true network agents-programs that
   will performspecific services for individual users anywhere on the
   network.

   Besides performing these explicit communications functions, the
   Internet iseffectively an experimental social system, inhabited by
   computer-literatepeople and shaped by the infrastructures, standards,
   protocols, expertise, andvalues that enable communications through the
   internetwork system. The majorimplications of this new system emerge
   from the patterns of interaction alreadyvisible within it:

   o An information community. Internetworkers share only information,
   and thisfocus profoundly redefines the basic issues of human
   community. Copyrightreplaces property right, computer security
   replaces home security, file erasurereplaces arson, freedom from
   harassment replaces invasion of privacy. Thematerialistic, racial,
   gender, and occupational stratification of society issuperseded on the
   Internet by a new class structure based on expertise,connectivity,
   access, and "on-line persona." This change redefines the powerand
   privacy assumptions that developed around other communications:
   Thetechniques of mass-media advertising and personal solicitation are
   widelyscorned by the internetworking population. Politics, work, and
   recreation areundergoing redefinition as well.

   o Information junkies, information overload, and hypersegmentation of
   interest.The new information world has revealed human psychological
   tendencies andlimitations unknown a decade before and is penetrating
   and opening individuallives in unexpected ways. Curiosity and facility
   with network tools arecreating a growing number of people extremely
   adept at gathering informationoff the Internet and connected systems.
   Some of them have become informationjunkies, avidly collecting trivia
   just for the sake of the search. Addiction tonetwork personal
   communications and discussion groups is a problem for others.The
   Internet defines new kinds of addiction, abuse, and
   "cyberpathologicalbehavior." Users less avid for information sometimes
   complain of informationoverload-a rare complaint just a few years ago
   but one that is common today.One result is that new kinds of
   message-handling and filtering programs areemerging, creating personal
   windows of interest through which unwantedinformation may not pass.
   Individual "bozofilters" allow newsgroup users toavoid seeing postings
   by irritating cosubscribers, and "killfile" commands letwire-service
   subscribers exclude news on particular topics. With 3500newsgroups and
   a third as many mailgroups, users must focus quickly on whatmatters
   most, creating a hypersegmentation of interest areas.
   Specificnewsgroups exist on a broad range of social, legal, and
   business issues (in theUnited States, Germany, Australia, and other
   countries); on software; oncomputer hardware; and on nearly every
   sport and hobby imaginable. These toolswill accelerate a trend toward
   narrow but intensive information andcommunications that enhance
   personal identity and overlapping, highlycollaborative communities of
   interest. The diversity of Internet microsegmentswill undoubtedly
   increase as more users come on-line, but frontier innovationmay become
   a fringe user activity as more conventional, middle-class usergroups
   emerge.

   o Collapse of boundaries and codes of privacy. The Internet and other
   parts ofwhat John Quarterman calls "the information matrix" are
   timeless and placeless.A message sent by a student in Melbourne in the
   evening is read immediately inthe morning by another in Ohio;
   conversations go on continually in IRC; informationsearches and
   transfers keep the network alive 24 hours a day, 365 days a
   year.National boundaries are essentially meaningless on the network:
   Interaction,trade, crime, and surveillance occur continually and in a
   global context.Although many countries' laws restrict the movement of
   many kinds ofinformation without special permission, no real physical
   or electronic barriersexist to distributing information from one
   country to another in seconds. Themost important boundary issues
   concern personal privacy and informationsecurity. The early Internet
   and many of the computer systems on it werevulnerable to snoopers and
   computer crackers, and the growth of the network hascomplicated
   security concerns enormously. But the network was designed to
   berelatively open, and many underbudgeted systems administrators are
   lax aboutsecurity. As a result, users seeking privacy have designed
   their own encryptionprograms for personal communications and files.
   Despite threats by U.S. andother government agencies to control
   encryption resources legally becauseencryption software may facilitate
   computer-related crime, the genie ofpersonal encryption is already out
   of the bag. Internet-based programs toencrypt host-to-host
   communications are also emerging.

   o Collaborative work and grass-roots community ethics. Government
   intrusion onthe encryption issue rubs raw against the new-frontier
   standards of theInternet community. The Internet is itself the
   outstanding achievement ofcollaborative computer work among a large
   number of computer and communicationsprofessionals working together on
   a wide range of specific projects over a longperiod-a model for
   high-technology work of the future. Newsgroups andmailgroups and the
   programs to read and post to them were all the result ofsmall groups
   of people thinking up new and better ways to exchange information,an
   impetus that has doubled the number of newsgroup reader interfaces in
   thepast two years. These activities also reflect the new-frontier
   camaraderieamong users. Some of the best e-mail interfaces on the
   network were created byInternet users, then became available to
   everyone for free. The Internet'srapid growth and permissive
   management are creating new ethicalissues-copyright infringement,
   false identities, shared pornography, on-lineharassment, and the uses
   of advertising-that are discussed widely and seriouslyby the user
   community.

   o Heterarchical management. Overall, the Internet has no central
   controller,and network governance is coevolved across many different
   sites rather thanhanded down from a central location. This paradigm
   makes the Internet a modelfor flat, decentralized organizations and
   management systems of the future. TheU.S. federal government, regional
   public and private institutions, telephonecompanies, and several large
   corporations all participate in managing thenetwork's backbone (the
   network of information superhighways) and setting a fewgeneral rules.
   Business, universities, and other owners of systems add theirown local
   rules. But different clusters of users create and self-policestandards
   of conduct for activities in which they engage.

   o The dynamics of interconnectivity. Finally, connectivity is a
   property ofcomplex systems that can profoundly affect system behavior,
   yet the dynamicconsequences of increasing connectivity are simply
   unknown. The shutdown ofcomputer systems by the Cornell computer
   "worm" and the 1987 crash of the U.S.stock market (driven largely by
   highly interconnected and computerized tradingprograms shifting the
   resources of huge mutual and pension fund accounts) showthe negative
   potential impact. In the longer term, the emergence of acollective
   mind-millions of individuals connected interactively to the
   samesources of imagery, information, and rhetoric-is likely to create
   entirely newsocial, political, and market dynamics.

   The preceding examples represent a very selective slice of what is
   going on theinformation matrix. In the midst of it all, a truly new
   electronic culture isbeing invented on-line by the computer expertise
   and communicative behavior oftens of millions of users of the Internet
   and its interconnected public andprivate hosts.

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    Copyright 1994 by SRI International. Questions and comments to
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