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CRYPT NEWSLETTER 25
May 1994

Editor: Urnst Kouch (George Smith, Ph.D.)
Media Critic: Mr. Badger (Andy Lopez)
INTERNET:  [e-mail]
COMPUSERVE: 70743,1711
Crypt Newsletter BBS:  818.683.0854
Crypt Newsletter voice: 818.568.1748

[The Crypt Newsletter is a monthly electronic magazine
distributed to approximately 12,000 readers
on the Internet. It features media handling of
issues dealing with computers and society, news in science
and technology, and satire.]
----------------------------------------------------------

IN THIS ISSUE:

A new uniquely stupid US fad: E-mail
death threats . . . The psycho death struggle
of one English programmer and his American
nemeses . . . Michael Milken and more breakthroughs
in mentufacturing . . . Reviewed: Philip Kerr's
"A Philosophical Investigation" . . . Mr. Badger
on supernerds and CD-ROM . . . much more.



THE NEWEST UNIQUELY STUPID AMERICAN FAD: E-MAIL
PRESIDENTIAL DEATH THREATS

When President Clinton and colleague Albert Gore
announced the opening of their electronic mail
addresses on the Internet, they probably did not
expect rude and threatening techno-riffraff to take
up anonymous death threats as a hobby.

In early December, Christopher J. Reincke, a University of
Illinois student sent President and Mrs. Clinton unfriendly
electronic mail.

"How would you feel about being the first president to be
killed on the same day as his wife? You will die soon.
You can run, but you cannot hide," warned Reinke balefully.

The Secret Service subsequently ran Reincke to ground, and the
local district attorney claimed he was content to let the
student off with probation, presumably because Reinke is only
a menace to himself and his parents' peace of mind.

On February 26, the Secret Service intercepted another e-mail
death threat, this time from the blind of a hacked computer
account at an undisclosed private school.

On April 2, the Secret Service commented such e-mail threats
against the president were "infrequent."

By April 22, another teenage student, Matthew M. Thomas of
Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas, was
indicted on two counts of sending electronic mail threats
to the White House on April 7. His initial plea was not guilty.

The Secret Service visited Stephen F. Austin after it traced
the mail from the school's computer lab.

This fad, notes the Crypt Newsletter, is a pricey one as such
mail entails possible 5-year federal prison terms without
parole and $250,000 in fines per nastygram.

The Crypt Newsletter is curious, however, as to what kind of
diplomatic relations the US government has with the anonymous
Internet mail servers in places, like, uh, Finland.

We would also like to know how anyone got the stupid idea
that politicians personally read their electronic mail anymore
than they do the old-fashioned kind.


"DR. SOLOMON'S PC ANTI-VIRUS BOOK" EXPOSES
THE CREEPING EVIL OF PEOPLE WITH FUNNY NAMES WHOM
YOU WILL NEVER MEET

Sometime at the dawn of the personal computer age,
publishers reversed the laws of good writing for the
specialty niche of computer books.  In place, readers
got anti-consumerism which mandated that, usually,
books about computers, computer issues, or software
would be written only by presidents or employees of
computer manufacturers, consulting firms peddling advice
on computer issues defined by the same consultants or
software developers and their publicity stooges.

This means that if you actually buy such books, you're
getting a pig in a poke.  Nowhere is this more obvious
than the "DOS For Dummies" series, a line of
pamphlets so easy to sell competitors have rushed
out mimics written for "Idiots" and/or "Morons."
"Imbeciles" anyone?

And, in the true spirit of American mass marketing, you
can now purchase attractive yellow and black "DOS For
Dummies" baseball caps, suitable for wearing inside the
house, restaurant, bowling alley or local smart bar.
In reality, the hats are a fiendishly clever IQ test.
If you buy one, you fail, signalling to the corporate
office that you are the kind of Pavlovian consumer
ready to invest in a fax subscription to weekly company
press releases.

Which is a long way of bringing the reader to "Dr. Solomon's
Anti-Virus Book" (New-Tech/Reed Elsevier), which fits all
the, uh, _good_ characteristics of the _computer book_.

On the cover are always tip-offs.  Look for concocted
venal plaudits and non-sequiturs.  For instance, "The
Anti-Virus Book" is "THE book on how to eliminate
computer viruses" ". . . from the foremost anti-virus
experts" and exposes "computer games and viruses - the
truth!"  The publishing inference is that readers have
somehow become too stupid in 1994 to recognize
something decent without a gratuitous amount of
pettifogging and boasting.

Alan Solomon and his co-author, Tim Kay, do realize the
bogus nature of computer literature.  On page 26 they write,
"If you hadn't the money to start manufacturing, or the
knowledge to program, you could always aim at the book
market . . . Anyone who could persuade a publisher that he
had an area of expertise and could write, which wasn't
that difficult, could get into print.  One author was reputed
to be writing four or five books at once by using several
different typists in different rooms.  The story went that
he walked from room to room dictating a sentence to each
typist as he went.  Looking at some of the output, there is
no reason to doubt this story."

That's a good tale.  But rather ill-spirited when
considering "The Anti-Virus Book" is a higgledy-piggledy
assembly of reprints from the S&S International
(Solomon's company) corporate organ Virus News
International, Solomon interviewing himself and
bursts of writing which make absolutely zero sense.

For example:

"It would be difficult to create more [virus] experts, because
the learning curve is very shallow.  The first time you
disassemble something like Jerusalem virus, it takes a
week.  After you've done a few hundred viruses, you could
whip through something as simple as Jerusalem in 15 minutes."

Or:

" . . . the DOS virus will become as irrelevant as CPM
(an obsolete operating system).  Except that DOS will still
be around 10 or 20 years from now, and viruses for the new
operating system will start to appear as soon as it is
worth writing them."

And this favorite:

". . . take the game of virus consequences:

"In the game of Consequences, you start with a simple
phrase, and build up to a convoluted and amusing story.  In the
virus version of consequences, you start off with a false
alarm and build from there."

The computer underground also figures highly
in Solomon's book as he spent a great deal of time over
the past couple years attempting to track down and
telephone American hackers from the United Kingdom.

Nowhere Man - the author of the Virus Creation Laboratory -
is in the book.  Although VCL viruses never seemed to make it
into the wild, mentioning the software without pointing this
out has always been in vogue.  Members of the hacking group
phalcon/SKISM appear, as does John Buchanan, a Virginia Beach
resident, who sold his virus collection to numerous takers,
making about $6-7,000 in the process.  Solomon didn't have
these numbers - they're mine. He also fails to mention that at
one point Buchanan contributed his virus collection to
S&S International and was nominated for membership in
the pan-professional Computer Anti-Virus Research Organization
by Solomon, one of its charter members.

Solomon's book wouldn't be complete if it didn't invoke the
creeping evil of virus exchange bulletin board systems.
"The Hellpit" [sic] near Chicago, is one.

And "Toward the end of 1992, the US Government
started offering viruses to people who called one of
their BBS's . . . In 1993 the Crypt newsletter blew the
whistle on the US Government [AIS bulletin board]
system . . . " Solomon writes.

Since I edit the newsletter, this is a surprise to me and I'm
sure, Kim Clancy, the AIS system supervisor. But it's almost
identical to the nutty claim made by American computer
security consultant Paul Ferguson when the black-balling
of AIS was featured news in Computer underground Digest.  As
the story developed, Ferguson - egged on by Solomon - planted
complaints about AIS in RISKS Digest and, later, the Washington
Post. Solomon has been a reader of the Crypt Newsletter and it
must have seemed logical to embroider the story because a back
issue featured an interview with Clancy after she was profiled
in Computer underground Digest.

However, Clancy had been a target of CARO since opening
her system to hacker underground files.  Finally, Solomon
and his colleague's negative publicity campaign did that
part of the AIS system in.

What a lot of people don't know is that other public systems
have been a target of the same people.  About a year earlier,
Hans Braun's COM-SEC computer security BBS in San Francisco had
been a target of a similar smear campaign for carrying
issues of 40Hex, a phalcon/SKISM-edited virus-programming
electronic magazine. In a recent interview for the book "The
Virus Creation Labs," Braun mentioned security workers
David Stang (who has by turns been involved with or worked
for the National Computer Security Association in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania; the International Computer Security
Association - now defunct - in Washington, DC; and Norman
Data Defense of Falls Church, Virginia) and Alan Solomon as
responsible for the pressure. Since COM-SEC wasn't politically
sensitive like AIS, Braun said the efforts to tar him
were unsuccessful. COM-SEC still carries 40Hex magazine.

"The anti-virus software industry is going through a shake-out;
not everyone is successful anymore," said Braun.  "It's my
opinion, most of these kinds of things are really attempts
to keep access to information from competitors."

"The Anti-Virus Book" also has annals of alleged virus-related
computer crime, which illustrates the same rush to seize
everything without leveling criminal charges as seen in the
United States.

In the book there is the case of an unnamed man in the town of
Rugby, who had his door broken down by a sledgehammer and all
his equipment grabbed by New Scotland Yard officers in December
of 1992 after taking out an ad selling a virus
collection in the English periodical Micro Computer
Mart. The charges were ethereal to non-existent.

The case remains open.

About the same time, a hacker was arrested for
stealing phone service from his neighbor's line and
his equipment confiscated, too. The hacker turned out
to be Apache Warrior, a member of the small United
Kingdom virus-writing group called ARCV (for
Association of Really Cruel Viruses).

Some background information not included in the book:
Alan Solomon was apparently able to convince New
Scotland Yard's computer crime unit that they should also
try to prosecute Apache Warrior as a virus-writer and that
the rest of the group should be rounded up, too.  In
conversation, Solomon has said Apache Warrior turned over
the names of other group members. Subsequently, New
Scotland Yard and local constabularies conducted raids
at multiple sites in England, arresting another man.
Paradoxically, prior to the arrests, Solomon joked that
ARCV was better at cyber-publicity than
virus programming and its creations were little more
than petty menaces.  The book offers no reported
incidences of ARCV viruses on the computers
of others, although Virus News International, by
extension S&S International, solicited readers for
such evidence in 1993.

Later in the year, Solomon telephoned John Buchanan to
tell him he had been implicated as a member of
ARCV - he was not - and that Scotland Yard might be
interested in extraditing him for trial.  It turned
out to be so much air.

Apache Warrior settled with the telephone company for the
fraud and the virus-writing prosecutions remain unresolved.
Most of this is left out of "The Anti-Virus Book" except
parts about the necessity of jailing virus programmers.

The final part of "The Anti-Virus Book" is devoted to
around fifty pages of leaden legal boilerplate addressing
computer meddling supplied by a lawyer named
Wendy R. London. Only those required under penalty of death
or the mentally ill would be interested in paying
attention to it.

A computer book must also include poor reviews of the
author's competitors' products. "The Anti-Virus Book" toes
the line in this regard, criticizing McAfee Associates and
Central Point Software.

Also included is a diskette containing an extravagant
color advertisement for S&S International and
a poster-sized Virus Calendar for 1994 and 1995.

The calendar was fun.  I'm thinking of sending it to
some middle manager in computer services at a large,
boring corporation (or an editor at a computer
magazine).  Then they can vex their underlings
(or readers) every day with network e-mail
like, "It's May 31. Be on the lookout for
Tormentor-Lixo-Nuke, VCL-Diogenes, AntiCad-COBOL,
Month 4-6, Ital Boy, and Kthulhu computer
viruses."

Finally, it would be unfair not to mention
"The Anti-Virus Book's" GOOD parts.  The technical
analyses of well known PC computer viruses were
fascinating as was Solomon's description of how he
developed specialized virus identification programming
for S&S International. Solomon's development project,
called Virtran, was capped when John Buchanan - the
same fellow who was denounced by him for selling
viruses in America - gave the programmer a copy of
the NuKE Encryption Device, or NED - a piece of code
written by Nowhere Man and designed to encrypt viruses
in an esoteric manner.  At the time Solomon
received it, the NED code wasn't actually in any viruses.
It still isn't, in fact, except for one called
ITSHARD. And the story of the development of Solomon's
anti-virus software shows how the virus underground
and one developer in 1993 had each other in a weird
involuntary combination stranglehold and symbiosis.

". . . it does everything in a hundred different ways;
it uses word and byte registers, there are lots of
noisy nonsense bytes, little jumps . . . The NED looked
like something out of a Salvador Dali nightmare and I
thought it was going to take a month of programming
[to detect ITSHARD]," writes Solomon.

According to the book, Solomon threw up his hands and
decided to revive a stalled project called the Ugly
Duckling. The result was a major revision of his software,
the fruition of the proprietary Virtran programming
techniques used in it and a Queen's Award for
Technological Achievement in 1993.  The one NED
virus - ITSHARD - still isn't in the wild almost two
years after Nowhere Man wrote the original encryption code.

These sections didn't suffer at the hands of the patchwork
editors who threw most of "The Anti-Virus Book" together.
Unfortunately, they comprise a small part of "The Anti-Virus
Book" and were written so that only someone already acquainted
with the field - not your average computer user - would get
much from them. Just like most of the dubious literature
marketed by computer book publishers.


BREAKTHROUGHS IN MENTUFACTURING, CONTINUED: MICHAEL
MILKEN JUMPS ON INFO HIGHWAY & THE RETURN OF
FICTUAL FACTS AND FACTUAL FICTIONS


In the first week of April, former imprisoned Drexel
Burnham Lambert financier Michael R. Milken conducted a
special public seminar for educators at the new Milken
Research Forum for the Reconstruction, Acquisition, and
Understanding of Data (MR-FRAUD) on the campus of UCLA
in Los Angeles.

Milken lectured educators on how computer-assisted teaching can
and must level the playing field for rich and poor students.
"Education can find you in South-Central Los Angeles, East
St. Louis, Newark, just as easy as it can find you
in Connecticut, Palo Alto or Beverly Hills," said Milken.

Joining Milken at the forum was Sega of America Vice-President
Douglas Glen who pledged one Sega game system to every public
school district in the state of California.

"Video games breed self-esteem by challenging kids," said Glen,
"I challenge the state of California to match my contribution
to the children of this great state by contributing an equal
number of Sega game systems - a few over 10,000.  Our
kids are the ultimate resource.  We cannot ransome
our future by being miserly with the technology of
it for the students of today. Not only does excellence
in Sega game-playing culture self-esteem,
confidence and strategic planning, it aclimates the children
to the in's and out's of silicon chip-based processing - the
universal on-ramp to the data superhighway.  And everyone
knows kids, games and computers click."

The first school to receive Glen's Sega initiative is Greater
Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, due north of Los
Angeles. Los Angeles United School District superintendent
Beryl Ward accepted the system from Glen.

Milken also unveiled a new mathematical paradigm for the
handling of vast amounts of data, information and
communications.

"Based loosely on Claude Shannon's ground-breaking 1948
treatise 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication,' the
Milken Electro-data Sorting System (MESS) can be
licensed to corporations or schools and paid for under
the National Information Infrastructure
initiative," said Milken.

Milken stated that information glut is one of the
key obstacles to effective innovation. Presently,
separating the wheat from the chaff takes up
too much time, imposing a bottleneck on productivity.
The Milken Sorting System relies upon the fact that
no organization can any longer supervise every packet
of information flowing through its environment.  So,
it introduces and manages a randomizing agent which
ensures that every bit of data, if circulated to every
point on the system, must eventually hit upon the
right one.

Milken said that the idea was based upon his recent
reading in the field of cosmology and how unknowable
quantities of near atomic dust move through the
intergalactic spaces.


REVIEWED: PHILIP KERR TOO PHIL-OH-ZAW-FI-GULL FOR
MR. BADGER

"Philip Kerr's ingenuity is unquestionable . . . This
is probably the crime story of the year for computer buffs,
amateur philosophers, and would-be time travelers."

                                --London Review of Books


"A Philosophical Investigation," by Philip Kerr (Penguin/Plume,
$10.95), is a futuristic detective/suspense story set in England
in the year 2013.  To set the tone, the story is replete
with references to nicotine-free cigarettes, cholesterol-free
bacon, and voice controlled elevators
and hotel room doors.  Portable computers have envelope-sized
screens, miniature keyboards, and cellular connections to
networks. Compact discs are now the size of a coin and
recordable on both sides.  The European community has adopted
a standard currency - the EC dollar.

Serial killers are common, too.  So common, that
Scotland Yard has a "Gynocide" division to track down those that
prey on women.  Serial sex killings account for 20 per cent
of all murders - a total of 4,000 each year in the European
community.  ID cards, carried by everyone, contain the
"genetic fingerprint" of their bearers.  Instead of prison
sentences, criminals are put into "Punitive Coma," that
is, drugged into vegetation for the length of their
sentences.

Kerr's attempts to create a futuristic milieu are
doomed to failure, however, because he continually shoots
down his creations. "Punitive Comas" are used because jail
is too expensive. Yet consider Kerr's description of the
unit where the comatose inmates are stored:

"The sight of one open drawer, slightly larger than a coffin,
interrupted her step.  Curious, she stopped to examine it
more closely.  The bottom of the drawer was upholstered in
soft black calf leather, which was the only concession made
to prevention of pressure sores.  A number of tubes and
catheters, which would be attached to the convict's body,
protruded from the drawer's sides.  On the front of the
cabinet was a small flat screen on which the body functions
could be read and a card key lock to prevent anyone from
interfering with the drawer's occupant."

Right. Nothing but leather needed to prevent that tissue
breakdown. Mr. Badger has seen comatose patients under
hospital intensive care procedures develop bedsores clear
to the bone while on $10,000 Clinitron beds.  All leather
would do is hold the really memorable aroma of . . . oh,
never mind.  In any case, the medical costs of maintaining
a patient in a coma are horrendous. To believe
that the human body can be drugged up, plugged in, and
stored for several years as a cost cutting measure is
ludicrous.  Hell, even canned ham doesn't last that long.

Even more silly - the same paragraph that gives us the 4,000
serial murders per year states that the "European Bureau of
Investigation" estimates 25 to 90 such killers are responsible.
Let's see. Twenty-five killers responsible for 4,000 deaths
per year works out to . . . each one killing
every 2-3 days.  Even 90 killers works out to each one killing
every 8-9 days.  With universal DNA fingerprinting, the police
can't catch these guys?  That works out to 44-160 crime sites
per serial murderer, per year, and they _still_ can't catch
them?  Bah, humbug!

Other issues are worse.  The stupidest blunder - and you
have to remember, I'm a gun nut - is the actual murder
weapon, a .44 caliber "gas gun."  The bullets are described
as weighing _forty_ grams apiece.  They are fired from
a machined brass cartridge case with a self-contained,
reloadable, high pressure air reservoir, all designed to
fit in what appears to be a conventional handgun.  When
fired, the gun has no recoil and makes "no more noise
than a hand slapping a desk top."

There are several problems with this, all of them having to do
with defying the laws of physics.  The first is that a forty
gram bullet is two to three times heavier than those used in a
conventional .44 magnum.  The air pressure needed to propel such
a bullet would be immense.  This means that the "brass
cartridge" would have to be built to contain pressures
above 100,000 pounds per square inch - 50 tons! This means
the walls of the cartridge would be, of necessity, so large
there would be no room for the compressed air, much less the
necessary valve system.

[Ordinary cartridges don't have this problem, as the pressure
doesn't build up until the gunpowder within burns.  When this
happens, the cartridge is inside a chamber that supports the
brass.  In the case of this supposed "gas gun,"
the cartridges would have to be strong enough to take the air
pressure even before being placed in the firearm.]  Both the noise
and the recoil when shooting a firearm are felt _after_ the
bullet has left the end of the barrel.  Think about it. It's the
escaping gas out of the end of the gun that produces the backward
recoil.  The sound is produced by the escaping gas as well (along
with the bullet, should it break the speed of sound).  The gas gun,
as described, has the same retort as a standard firearm.  Robert
Parker wouldn't screw up like this.

Some Crypt readers may be wondering why I dwell on such
things anal, because, after all, literary license is a
long-standing tradition. But, errors like these are the
hallmark of a lazy writer and editor.  They could be
corrected in half a dozen ways, without damaging the
plot at all.  The failure gives you a clue about the
computer-related portions of the text.

The actual plot begins with the government sponsored Lombroso
program, which attempts to identify potential serial killers
based on anatomical features of the brain.  Lombroso is an
acronym for Localisation of Medullar Brain Resonations
Obliging Social Orthopraxy. It shares the same name as
the Victorian criminologist that attempted to classify
criminals by external physical measurements of the body.
Men are encouraged to come in for a brain scan and, if
found to be of the correct profile, offered hormonal
treatments and counseling under a pseudonym.

Their anonymity is guaranteed, as all employees know
them only by the computer-assigned pseudonym.  The same
computer will release their actual name only if it is
cross-referenced by a police computer during the course
of a homicide investigation.

One of the men who is singled out by the process, code-named
Wittgenstein, takes exception, and succeeds in accessing the
Lombroso database with the goals of erasing himself and targeting
others in the program for assassination.  The details make
for a turgid combination of fancy, conjecture and ignorance.

The author seems to understand one verity of hacking.  In
Wittgenstein's words:

"The image of the computer-hacker spending many hours in front
of a screen trying to break into a system is a false one.
He is more often to be found scavenging in a company's refuse
bins in an attempt to find a piece of information that will
provide a clue as to the computer system's password."

Yet, how does the Wittgenstein get the password?  While waiting for
his screening with Lombroso - before even knowing that he will be
singled out - he tinkers with a television set in the waiting room.

"The problem was a simple one -- a channel improperly tuned -
and I had just started to rectify this when I noticed that
the set, which was rather an old one, was picking up
electromagnetic radiation from one of the other computer
installations in the building.  Somewhere in the Institute
a VDU was radiating out harmonics on the same frequency as
television set."

This interference, of course, turns out to be a terminal.
The villain ends up seeing the "basic entry code, an
individual operator's personal 'key' word, and the Lombroso
system's password for the day."  While feasible, one can't
wonder if the much vaunted concept of HDTV hasn't come about yet,
or if it is simply so shoddy that it still can't ensure picture
quality.  Still, the author threw in the comment about the
television being rather old, and I let it slide.

So having the necessary passwords, what tools are needed
to break into the network?

". . . I possessed . . . all the equipment for such
a task -- PC, modem, the telephone company's Jupiter
computer information system, [and] digital protocol
analyser . . . "

Say what!  Just what in Sam Hill is a digital protocol
analyser, anyway?

"A protocol is a set of rules.  An analyser is a portable
device with its own miniature screen and keyboard.

OK, but what about the Lombroso's security systems?  Get
a load of the following, and bear in mind that RA, Reality
Approximation (aka Virtual Reality) is the buzzword of the day.

"They must have anticipated having to deal with unauthorized
entrants to the system, because the very first thing that
happened was that a nude Marilyn Monroe graphic appeared
on my screen and, with a wiggle of her lifelike bottom,
asked me if I felt lucky.  'Because if you can answer three
little old questions you and your reality approximation
software get to fuck my brains out.'

"Marilyn was referring to the software which controlled
the computer's optional body attachments and which
enabled one to enjoy an approximate physical sensation
of whatever kind of reality was being created . . . The
point of Marilyn was to trap the unwary schoolkid
hackers into wasting their time and not progressing
any further within the system.  I knew the chances were
that if you did manage to answer Marilyn's questions
correctly . . . you were liable to discover that your own
computer software had been infected with a very nasty,
possibly terminal virus."

How droll.  Computer security employees have the time and
will to generate "Reality Approximation" graphics. They feel
free to send viruses to suspected hackers.  They have no
fear of public censure for sexist and other lewd and/or
politically incorrect themes. And they work for a bureaucracy.

In any case, Wittgenstein bypasses these security measures by
typing in "goodbye" and the Lombroso system password for the day.
His next hurdle is Cerberus:

". . . suddenly there he was on-screen, a three-headed black
dog graphic with blood-chilling sound effects, and guarding
the system . . . From the size and number of his teeth I was
very glad I had not been wearing my Reality Approximation
body suit.  It was clear that I wasn't going any further
until I had dealt with him."

Yeah, you read right.  Not only does computer security entail
designing "Reality Approximation" characters, but the makers can
arm them with the ability to actually hurt hackers wearing
appropriate suits.

"Exiting the system once more I tried to remember how dead
Greeks and Romans had been able to pass into Pluto's
kingdom without molestation . . . the trick would be to create
a cake that would enable Cerberus to fulfill a standard
legitimate routine . . . but which would hide a piece of
unorthodox active instruction, specifically to fall
asleep . . . the general effect was similar to a computer virus,
except that the basic premise was to limit the action of the
binary mechanism to Cerberus himself.

"Back in the super-op directory, I offered the shiny black
beast the cake and, to my delight, he snapped it up
greedily . . . almost as quickly as he had appeared, Cerberus
fell to the bottom of the screen with a very audible
computer SFX thud, and remained motionless."

Yeah, you read right, again.  Computer security also encompasses
programming the graphics and sound effects for moments when your
security is bypassed.  It is mandatory to program
defects in line with whatever theme is being used, as well.

Eight months and eight dead bodies later, it finally occurs to
someone to check the Lombroso database for signs of intrusion.
They have a log showing when and how the database was altered.  At
this point, you would think that they simply compared the backups
from that and the previous day to find which records had been
deleted.  Wrong!  There are no backups.  It's not that they are
missing, corrupt, or inaccessible.  It's not that the database
managers were slack or inefficient.  Even worse, while the best and
brightest from the Police Computer Crime Unit of New Scotland Yard
investigates and accidentally sets off a logic bomb left by
Wittgenstein, he hasn't made a backup either.  Backups simply
don't exist.

Apparently databases can't be recreated.  Nobody ever thinks
of going through the brain scans and rescheduling appointments to
recreate the data.  The data is simply assumed to be -- GONE.

That "A Philosophical Investigation" could reap praise from
the Library Journal, the NY Times Book Review, and the Wall
Street Journal shows the state of modern fiction in the
English-speaking world . . . and something of the mental acuity of
its nincompoop reviewers.  It doesn't need to be consistent,
believable, or well-researched.  As long as it
joins in worship with the Church of the Twisted
Psyche, it's good.

You see, sometime in the Sixties, the praise of the bizarre
crossed from the medium of paint to writing.  Where once we had
to suffer with surrealist's worship of the unconscious, we
now have the novelist's worship of the unconscionable.
"A Philosophical Investigation" has a man-hating, sexually
unresolved, robotic female investigator.  It has a
sociopathic intellectual.  It has half-baked philosophy like
what Nietzsche babbled when he broke down crying
over a horse and got carted away to rot in solitary madness.
It has sub-plots and supporting characters worthy of a
television movie. Heck, maybe it was written to be a TV
movie in America - on Sunday night right after SeaQuest DSV!
[A producer could even get someone from the MIT Media Lab
to chatter crazily at the audience near the end of the show
just like Bob Ballard does for Seaquest and Steven Spielberg.]
"Investigation" isn't about the year 2013 -- it's about
the 1990's.

In a different era work like this would have brought
its author hunger, neglect, and shameful death.  The spirit
of man is now so poor that one gains praise for
pretentious inferiority.

MR. BADGER'S SATURDAY AFTERNOON MEXICAN
HORROR WRESTLING HOUR:  ON SUPERNERDS AND CD-ROM

Stop the presses!

USA Today (March 28) just discovered
that hand-held "computers" are suffering major problems.
Those already on the market - like the Apple Newton - are
suffering because they're packed with features no one
cares about.  Those in pre-production are still
plagued with bugs.  Compaq is even questioning
the Holy Grail of hand-held computing:  The ability
to process handwritten scribble. Just a hint to all those
manufacturers out there:  It helps to know what the
product actually is _before_ you start marketing it.

You may recall my arrant jibe at The Village Voice last
month concerning the worth of drag queens as a hard
news topic.  Well, Lord help us, life mimics art
as The Voice menacingly continues to insist on
assigning writers used to La Dolce Musto on cyberspace.
A March 15 copy featured a piece called "E-Male or
Female: Cross-Dressing Online."  That's right!  A whole
story on "The Politics of Online Gender Bending."  Sigh.
I'd endorse kidnapping the editors of The Voice and flogging
them with rattan canes . . . but they would only enjoy it.

That magazine for the mentally ill aspiring upper-middle
class white social climber, TIME, put a malevolent Bill
Gatesian caricature on its April 11 cover, claiming
"high tech [Wall Street] supernerds are playing dangerous
games with your money."

The "supernerd" article was a mix of strong but
vague half-fabrication and jargon which editor James R. Gaines
must have cunningly sensed made snazzy, unverifiable copy.

"Swaptions . . . Caps . . . Floors . . . LEAPS . . . Yield-Curve
Notes . . . I/Os and P/Os . . ." were terms TIME threw at the
reader.  Did the writer know what they meant?  No.  Maybe
TIME artists did since the terms were packed into an
illustration of what looked like a flame-spitting bowling ball
being shot at with dollar signs beaming out of radar dishes.

Yes, this _stuff_ is invented by "data miners" who
wear "high water pants" and "mate . . . in one night
stands."  "The [data miners] are in prayerful communion
with the computer" and "[no one] knows what they're talking
about."  Including TIME.  Or you and me. But that's the
point. Ah, ah, help, help, start legislation, the sky is
falling, the sky is falling, meta-computing, Fourier transform,
eigenvalue.

What TIME's journalism by committee should really
be telling you - in English - is there are a bunch of young
Wall Street financiers experimenting in a non-real world
economy construct assigned the jargon-term "derivatives."
These goings on have no meaning for the average American
who couldn't affect any of it anyway.  Which is the
real nub of the piece, something TIME has never had the talent
to get across.

These workers in "high water pants" trade in financial
computer-generated fictions created purely from the instantaneous
electronic technology of the information age.  It's disruptive
to the world economy but decoupled from the bedrock of real
trade in which services are rendered, products produced and
the infrastructure built.  "Data miners" is just another
stupid name which disguises what the phenomenon really
is: The work of assholes.

In the same issue TIME struck out to interview
outraged Americans who are pretending to have just discovered
what anyone with half a brain has known for the last three
decades: convicts lift weights in prison. The magazine
interviewed Roger Quindel, an amateur body-builder who should,
perhaps, bend his mind to the mental Soloflex a little more
before pegging statements like, "Do we really want stronger
criminals?  I'd rather buy them computers . . . "  with the
implication prisoners named "Maggit" are too stupid to
operate PC's.

Subscribe to TIME so you're always well-informed.

In the first week of April, Rolling Stone ran a piece on "ROM and
Roll."  The contents page looked like this:

        "It's difficult to love CD-ROM.  Expecting slick machinery,
         we get something cranky instead.  Yet the significance
         of this new medium lies not in pie-in-the-sky technology
         but in the way we can use it to explore our own lives."

The story managed to gerrymander an intro/history of the format
with reviews of several current CD-ROMs and threw in vague
speculation on multimedia's future.  Surprisingly however, Mr.
Badger is starting to share some of the optimism concerning
multimedia.  I was much impressed with the Terminator 2
laser disc and have seen a couple of musical instruction CD-ROMs
that were quite interesting.

Unfortunately, we're still dealing with stillborn formats.  Face
it. We're squeezing the last dregs of utility from the basic DOS
and PC frameworks.  We have video and sound boards but
second rate animation and music.  We have CD-ROMs but fall
asleep while they're loading.  If Windows NT and OS/2 are to be
our salvation in this area, it's time to arrange for mass
seppuku.

The other end of the spectrum is filled with those attempting to
modify audio CD and game players, yet another instance of turbo-
charging antiquated technology.  If and when something new
comes along that _is_ actually worth using, count on it to be
locked between the copyright claws of a money-mad megacorporation
bent only on manufacturing mind-numbingly boring video games for
the high school/collegiate idiot savant market.

For those not keeping track, U.S. Patent No. 5,241,671 was
essentially struck down - at least for the moment - last
month.  Norman Bastin - who looks a little like the bleached
"What izzit" Bohemian in the Zima commercial - of Compton's
New Media has been stymied in his attempt to license all
general sort, retrieve and index functions for
CD-ROM multimedia.  You could think of it as similar
to a grab at licensing the English language, which apparently
escaped the usual faceless dolts in government responsible for
keeping track of such things, namely the U.S. Patent Office.

Bastin, however, stormed on, telling the Los Angeles Times on
April 17 that Compton's wouldn't be stopped until it completed
a coffee-table book/CD-ROM [?] devoted to the TV program
"Babylon 5".  Thank heaven for these small favors.

Gratifyingly, the supremacy of the written word looks assured
for the foreseeable future although, if Norm Bastin has his
way, CD-ROM will multiply to the point where it
eclipses regular television and videotape in triteness.
The few exceptions will still be meager promises of what
someday _might_ become reality. Until then, I demand we
rename "multimedia" into "Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none-media."

Finally, Mr. Badger must apologize.  Last time
I shamelessly flacked for my hometown newspaper, The State.
Needless to say, days later The State ambushed me and saw
fit to reinforce the first rule of the American press:

"If we didn't betray their trust, we simply weren't trying
hard enough!"

The March 22 edition contained a feature article in the
Health/Science section - I know, I know, it sounds awful
already - on Virtual Reality.  As a piece of
journalism, it had the all the wit and savvy of Beaver
Cleaver on methaqualone.  As a pro forma press release
extolling the amount of money Clemson University and
Georgia Tech are wasting in "research," it ignited a vicious
migraine.  You, the Crypt Newsletter reader, will be spared.
I've run out of Percocet and Midrin, and I just can't bear
to repeat any details right now.


ODDS & ENDS: COMPUTER ETHICS BOOK MIRRORS THE VIRTUAL
BOSS AND OTHER STUFF RECEIVED

A revised edition of "Computer Ethics" (Prentice Hall)
by Deborah G. Johnson arrived on our doorstep.

The book is assembled around cases for discussion,
most of them rather interesting.  Johnson explains
a student was actually enlisted to concoct some of
the ethical conundrums she feels worth discussing.
One from a chapter on computers and privacy is
worth mentioning here:

"Estelle Cavallo was recently hired to supervise a
large unit of a medical insurance company . . . One
of the first things [she] will do when she starts
this job is to install a software system that will
allow her to monitor the work of each and every
claims processor.  The software will allow Estelle
to record the number of keystrokes made per minute
on any terminal in the unit.  It will also allow
her to bring the work of others up on her computer
screen so that she can watch individual work as
it is being done.  As well, Estelle
will be able to access copies of each employer's work
at the end of each day.  She will find out how much
time each worker spends with the terminal off; she
will see what correspondence the person prepares;
she will review the e-mail that the worker sends
or recieves . . . "

Johnson's book invites the students to chew
this over, among others.

Anyway, the scenario formalizes one of the
major points of the best piece of computer fiction
in the last twelve months or so, Floyd
Kemske's "The Virtual Boss" (Catbird Press) which
tosses the reader into a nightmare of computer-enforced
management and bureaucratization. Since Kemske's book
isn't about computers, but people, it sucks the
reader into a totally believable America fucked up
beyond all recognition by the supremacy of corporate
paranoids, hermits, and psychopaths who've hitched
their drays to total computerization.

In fact, "The Virtual Boss" and "Computer Ethics"
would make a great pair of books for any course
covering controversial issues at the juncture
of computing and society - a pretty big field,
we think you've noticed.  Someone should have
mercy on college students - let them at something
they'd enjoy - and take the Crypt Newsletter
seriously on this one. Leave all the dry crap from
the ACM legal briefs for optional reading.

Also received: "Computer Communications Security:
Principles, Standard Protocols and Techniques"
(PTR Prentice Hall) by Warwick Ford, a standard text
covering the current thinking on network security
from system architects.

FINDING/OBTAINING/READING THE CRYPT NEWSLETTER:

"I, too, hate Star Trek, WIRED and the National Security
Agency.  Keep up the good work Crypt!"

                    ---a satisfied Crypt Newsletter
                       reader

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Professional. (Kudos to Cassandra Birzes and Wallace Wang for
getting the ball rolling in this area.)

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Besides Crypt InfoSystems BBS (818.683.0854), there are many
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For the Apple Mac crowd in greater Los Angeles County and
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On COMPUSERVE, straight text editions of the newsletter
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The "CyberLit" library in CYBERFORUM (GO CYBERFORUM).

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On DELPHI, these versions are warehoused in The Writers
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On GENIE, the Crypt Newsletter can be found in the
DigiPub RT special interest group.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Editor George Smith edits The Crypt Newsletter from
Pasadena, CA, when not working on "The Virus
Creation Labs". Andy Lopez lives in Columbia, SC.

(c)opyright 1994 Crypt Newsletter. All rights reserved.