(news)letter "Say the thing with which you labor." Thoreau from the porter.micro.press Volume 1, Number 6 February 21, 1994 _________________________________________________________________ Please send suggestions, submissions and subscription requests to CTPorter 117-A S. Mendenhall St. Greensboro, NC 27403 or e-mail ctporter@rock.concert.net Your input is appreciated. Once I went to a friend's house and worked on her computer. She wanted things to happen differently and, thinking I could set it up the way she wanted, I busied myself manipulating this and that, making wonderful progress, thank you, until, suddenly, "things weren't as they should be." Everything was gone! Huge files, in the blink of an eye, became invisible! Panic set in. Where did these files go and why couldn't I find them? One rule I've learned about computer files, they don't just disappear. You might erase them but they don't erase themselves. I knew I hadn't erased them or destroyed the disk, but something had gone very wrong. Would she have to re-write her thesis from scratch? I couldn't even begin to figure out what had happened. My brain was locked completely up. I paced the floor. I tried not to let on that I had no clue but I'm not very good at hiding fears of that calibre. Calmer heads prevailed though, corrections were made, and as soon as I had corrected the problem (through outside intervention) I got my silly butt out of there. The corrective was very simple, and I'll never forget the shame I felt at not figuring it out for myself. Panic seized my brain and prevented me from seeing my hand in front of my face. The Rabbit in the Headlight Syndrome. All too often we assume the worst when faced with what we don't know. This was made clear to me during this past week, not only with what I have read but with what I have done. I have been trying this week to get access on the Internet to a feature known as the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). If the Chat feature of a public Bulletin Board System (BBS) is addicting, how much more so that on the Internet. With a BBS you might carry on a conversation with four or five other people simultaneously; on the Internet there are thousands of users from all over the world on several hundred channels. To quote an FAQ (which answers 'Frequently Asked Questions' about a topic): IRC gained international fame during the late Persian Gulf War, where updates from around the world came across the wire, and most people on IRC gathered on a single channel to hear these reports. IRC had similar uses during the coup against Boris Yeltsin in September, 1993, where IRC users from Moscow were giving live reports about the unstable situation there. So you might see why much of the work this week has been spent reading various computer manuals and instruction sets, with an increasing state of excitement as I got closer and closer to nailing down this IRC access. I want to be in on this game. And yet behind all of this manipulation is a fear that I'll do something extremely stupid and thoughtless and thereby crash the system I'm on. This fear prevents one from discovering the system's potential. Computers are dumb brutes. The computer industry loves to convey the image that a computer is a fragile thing, like a dream, and must be handled with kid gloves. Your IBM goes down and you take it to the repairman and she takes it in the backroom, operates on it behind the curtain while you wander the aisles looking at the new software, the magazines devoted to arcana, and the neat toys available. What's Ms. Repairman doing back there to your machine? She's pulling it apart and slapping it back together like you would never guess. You might have heard that static electricity can damage the inside components, so you wonder if the repair room is vacuum-sealed, if the repairman wears lint- free gloves and carries one of those breathing guards over her mouth. This is not an unreasonable mental image to get of the repairman and her work. This is what the industry wants you to think. The more firmly entrenched are the fears of the inside of a computer, the more service you bring them. Spend a little time with the masters of this knowledge, the high priests of the computer innards, and you begin to think of a computer not as a holy of holies with entrance to neophytes forbidden, not even as a television, but more as a bicycle. You can fix your own flat tire. You can adjust your own spokes. You can go buy a better seat and replace the old one. When you see a repairman slam through a basic repair you begin to lose fear of the computer and its internal problems. You haven't been able to work all morning because the computer is on the fritz, the repairman is so busy he's working seventy hour weeks all the year long, and when he gets there he makes short order of your problem. Not back in some vacuum-sealed room, not wearing lint- free gloves, but right there in front of you, with the attitude of a harried auto mechanic replacing a flat for a ditzy customer. This came back while working to get access to the IRC. I had a running e-mail conference with the helpdesk and I didn't feel that they really wanted to help me -- after all, they're not too keen about seeing my online hours jump drastically when I become addicted to the cyberspace society that's newly available. I kept asking for help and not receiving it, and finally I posed my problem and asked, "am I doing this right or am I in danger of damaging the entire infrastructure of Western Civilization as we know it?" Well that brought me an answer, not only to my problem (with a satisfyingly complete answer), but to the larger question -- "if only it were that easy." Sure there are commands that one has to watch out for, commands that can mass erase the boatload of information in your storage. And you might do that, accidentally. But it's not likely, especially if you know the least little bit about the commands that are dangerous. And you think that an inexperienced net trawler like myself is going to crash a system? Not hardly -- the folks running it know better -- I couldn't crash a network if I tried. And even if I did know how, I wouldn't dare -- I'm just too paranoid to do something like that. The Federalist Papers Two, Number One A criminal hacker, on the other hand, might take what he could from a system, crash it, then call the system operator to brag about his prowess. I spent some time this week reading a book I took off of the net, Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown. This is the story of a concerted effort by computer security personnel of various agencies and affiliations to crush computer hackers, to send a message that hacking will not be tolerated. Because the laws through which the computer cops took action were unclear, this crackdown served as a breeding ground not only for new laws regarding computer systems, but new computer policing groups and individual rights watchdogs as well. The prey in The Hacker Crackdown are those who exploit computers. The impetus for the hunt was ostensibly a breakdown of the AT&T long distance switching stations on January 15, 1990. Though AT&T technicians discovered that the flaw was in their own software, too many computer cops wanted to believe that hackers were responsible. For many hackers publicly bragged that they could have caused the damage, and AT&T was a favorite target (many hackers devote much energy to gain illicit long distance access and so avoid charges). Publicity was garnered for the computer cops, hackers were arrested, and as usually happens in PR pushes like this, life tried to resume as it had existed before. But too many important people were given the shakedown, and though hackers don't enjoy the sympathy of the public, they lost the battle but won the war. One problem was that the authorities had no ground rules for their crackdown. Rights, wrongs and penalties, were not clearly delineated. Just because a hacker has committed fraud, does that allow the cops to impound every electronic gadget in the house? Why would AT&T consider an obsolete, thirteen page document stolen from its electronic files as worth $79,449? What makes BellSouth systems passwords and connections worth $701,640? The public's conception of the malicious hacker is often offset by the computer cop's inflation of the damage that the hackers committed. Neither, it seems, can be trusted. They are each, computer hackers and the security that chases them, wrought of the same cloth. Though they sit on different sides of the issue, they share the same modem love. The end of Sterling's book features a summit meeting between the computer cops and various freedom representatives (read "hacker friends") and mutual respect was tendered from each group to the other. They began to see eye to eye. The dominant issue of the book is the need for the responsible drafting of laws for the Information Age. During the hacker witch hunt, two men on opposite sides of the continent were questioned by the police and scared enough by the specter off Big Brother on the Internet that they decided to make a stand. Mitch Kapor and John Barlow formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group devoted to the individual's cyberspace rights. The EFF has been quite a force in helping to protect hackers, and in fact has taken the upper hand on the legal battlefield. But so many questions have yet to be formulated about important issues, much less asked in court. Boundaries between right and wrong are still being formed. The Hacker Crackdown is a fascinating political case study in an area defined more by reaction than forethought. 'Auld Lang Syne,' Arranged and Performed by La Cosa Nostra With the opening of peace talks between representatives of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the English government, the battle lines might soon be redrawn in troubled Belfast. I don't know much about the war that wracks Northern Ireland -- to me it's always been an ideological struggle between Freedom and Oppression. I was given two different views of that struggle this week, the first in the movie In the Name of the Father, the second in the current issue of Harper's (February 1994). In the Name of the Father portrays an Irish-English struggle that is definitely Freedom vs. Oppression. Gerry (Daniel Day- Lewis) and his friends -- even his father -- are jailed on bogus charges of bombing a pub in England. This is a somewhat schizophrenic film, undecided whether to be a "coming of age" film or a political statement. It accomplishes the former very well; the latter often seems as an afterthought, a chance to show the Daniel Day-Lewis strut. What a weird situation though -- can you imagine sharing a jail cell with your father? This movie is heartbreaking. Even after an IRA assassin confesses to the crime and assures the English investigators that Gerry and company had no connection with the crime, they still remain in prison. And in the end, a good portion of their lives have been wasted by the outright evil of the English government. Boo! Hiss! I came away absolutely shocked at the injustice that these people underwent. I only wish we could assume that such injustices were rare. Scott Anderson, in "Making a Killing: The high cost of peace in Northern Ireland," provides a more sinister look at the city of Belfast and comes to a novel reason why the war continues. Belfast is controlled, he writes, by various paramilitary groups devoted to different purposes (the IRA for freedom from England, the Ulster Defense Association supporting English rule, as two examples), and run not by ideological heroes but godfathers of the Mafia sort. England sends money to help build up Belfast, and through that money the syndicates get rich (via kickbacks, protection rackets, employment schemes and the like). For these warlords, fighting and a fractured city profits much more than the prospect of peace. As one IRA commander makes clear, "It will always be IRA policy that the British have to leave Northern Ireland. But maybe it's better that they don't leave just yet" (54). Just as in the movie, the root of the problems can be found in the obstinacy of the powerful. "He was Mocked of the Wise Men" Re-reading one of my favorite authors, I came across a tale of one of the most obstinate powerful men in the New Testament. In Par Lagerkvist's Herod and Mariamne the author tells the story of the King of the Jews. Herod was so cruel that he ordered the execution of children when he was told of the birth of a child who would be king. Lagerkvist is an intensely spiritual writer and though often, as in the case of Mariamne, his characters fall a trifle flat, he does bring Herod to life. As the king of Jerusalem Herod is an unwelcome outsider who relies on terror to keep control: All unawares he bore the desert within him, and at times he felt its vast desolation. But he possessed also his people's wild joy in life -- joy in violence, blood and battle; joy in rampant horses trampling bleeding enemies underfoot; joy in killing and the resulting lust for living... 8-9 Mariamne is a Jewish maiden, descendent of the Maccabees, with whom Herod falls in love. Mariamne has an unsettling affect on Herod -- as cruel as he is he only has to see her and he goes all soft on the inside. He releases prisoners because she asks him to and when he tells her he loves her and wants to marry her, she takes the offer seriously. The inhabitants of Jerusalem adore her, she is their saint, and by marrying the tyrant she might change him, make him a good king for her people. One thing she cannot do, even after they wed, is love the man. Herod knows this and it burns him up inside. Not receiving her love bothers him immensely, even if he doesn't know the meaning of what he misses. What interested me was Mariamne's dilemma. Of course the story is set 2000 years ago and a woman's freedom to marry was quite different. Maybe unrealistically Lagerkvist gives her the personal freedom to make her own decision. Either go with the tyrant and provide a buffer between the ruler and the terrified subjects, or not. By agreeing to wed him she loses her family -- her kin want nothing to do with her. She is, to them, committing treason. Mariamne changes Herod's ways for a while, but Herod's rage at not receiving her love controls him. He has her murdered and becomes more vicious than before. He will always be the terror; Mariamne was merely a flower, blooming only to be picked, fading, and finally dying. In the end, Herod is Everyman. "An emblem of mankind: mankind that replenishes the earth but whose race shall one day be erased from it" (116). We will leave no monuments everlasting; we kill the only thing we really love; only too late do we realize our most horrific mistakes. Alackaday. Not much hope for Northern Ireland in that scenario, is there? Quote of the Week In The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling defines a term you'll be hearing more and more in the future: Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. THE PLACE BETWEEN the phones. The indefinite place OUT THERE, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate. (1) Now that you know where it is, this 'cyberspace,' your imagination can run free with the implications of an "invisible community." Imagine, for example, how a civil war might be fought . . .