Reports from the Electronic Frontier: The Year in Review, Part I Tom Maddox I've been writing this column for a little over a year, which in terms of the electronic frontier is a long time. So, rather than waiting for the traditional New Year's List of Stuff You Hoped Would Be More Interesting, I've decided to beat the rush and start my Old Year's List--my way of pointing toward those events and trends I've found interesting and important on the electronic frontier. The Internet: I returned last month to The Evergreen State College (in Olympia, Washington, a very green community, eco-conscious to a fault) from a year's sabbatical and found an event in progress that, while not particularly surprising in itself, was startling in context. The event was a well-attended Internet workshop, a very small affair by any university's standards, but remarkable at Evergreen, where many of the faculty, staff, and students are notable for their uneasiness with technology, if not downright technophobia. Not only was the workshop well attended but also many of the people sitting there could have made my Least Likely to Master Unix List. These included older faculty, including many in the humanities and social sciences, some of whom had previously talked to me about how difficult and unnerving they found the emerging world of data communications. I took the sight of these greybeards seeking Internet proficiency as a harbinger, a local symptom of a national phenomenon: even at Evergreen, the Internet is happening; or to put it another way, the Internet is one of the year's big stories. This is literally true. Weekly newsmagazines and daily newspapers small and large have run articles, and while many, if not most, of the articles are notable more for being half-baked than for being well-informed, they nonetheless a signify an amazingly expanded awareness of electronic networks in general and the Internet, that most grand, cosmopolitan, and multivarious of all networks, in particular. When I wrote my first few columns, I set out (with what success, I'm not sure) to explain the fundamentals of the Internet: ftp, telnet, e- mail, and other relatively simple notions. However, the very idea of the Internet was so little known, I felt as if I were explaining the arcana of a dark art. Now I find that at least a basic knowledge of such things is becoming widespread, and one can hear even the least likely people, such as aging English teachers, discussing mailing lists and good ftp sites. One of the major factors in this growth of knowledge is the continuing publication and wide distribution of books about the Internet. Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.) remains the most generally accessible and useful introduction to the Internet, but it has been supplemented by a number of books, notably The Internet Passport: Northwestnet's Guide to Our World Online, by Jonathan Kochmer and Northwestnet ($39.95, available by mail from Northwestnet at 15400 S.E. 30th Place, Suite 202, Bellevue, WA 98007, or call 206/562-3000). Also of interest are The Internet Companion, Tracey LaQuey with Jeanne C. Ryer (Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.), a chatty introduction to the whole idea of the Internet; Internet Mailing Lists, edited by Edward T. L. Hardie and Vivian Neou (Prentice-Hall),a catalog of the amazingly diverse mailing lists one can subscribe to on the Internet; and Connecting to the Internet: A Buyer's Guide by Susan Estrada (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.), which details the various kinds of Internet connections available and suggests ways for choosing among them. Once people get online, they will find that the generally available software for exploring the Internet has continued to grow in friendliness and power. Gopher, WAIS, WWW have spawned a whole realm of client software for computers large and small. What this development means is that much of the information available through the Internet is actually becoming accessible to ordinary citizens. Don't mistake me: that day has not yet come and in fact remains somewhat over the horizon, but its coming seems certain. Instead of the Internet being largely the province of Unix-happy techheads (among whom I number many good friends, I hasten to add), it will be a place for a varied citizenry, only marginally-competent computer users among them. It's a day whose arrival I look forward to. Encryption: The Internet has continued to serve as carrier of a movement the Federal Government, or at least the State Department, apparently finds dangerous, the spread of secure and readily-available encryption. To be specific, the State Department has just recently launched attacks on Phil Zimmermann, prime mover behind the dissemination of PGP: "Pretty Good Privacy," a program available for most common computer platforms that allows public key encryption, kind of guerrilla tool for securing computerized data. (As I advised in an earlier "Report," you can see Steven Levy's article "Crypto Rebels," in the May/June, 1993 Wired for an explanation of the idea and its importance). The attack takes the form of requiring purveyors of PGP to registers as arms dealers-- yes, that's right, you heard it here, arms dealers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's summary of the situation is as follows: The Customs Bureau has interviewed Phil Zimmermann and others involved in PGP. A San Jose grand jury, convened by Assistant US Attorney William Keane, subpoenaed documents relating to PGP from Zimmermann, as well as ViaCrypt and Austin Code Works, two companies who intend to offer commercial products related to PGP. Finally, the State Department has sent a letter to the Austin Code Works requiring them to register as an arms dealer, even if they don't plan to export cryptography. And EFF's response: EFF's Board of Directors believes that this case may involve fundamental issues in the application of the U.S. Constitution to digital media. At stake is the right of privacy, public access to secure cryptography, the right to publish digital writings, and the right of equal protection under the law. Apparently the Feds came away from previous encounters with cyberspace (cases in Chicago and Texas where the authorities were hammered like gongs in court) undaunted. Whether under Reagan and Bush or Clinton, the Feds just don't want to tolerate Constitutional freedoms unless forced to do so. Stay tuned on this issue, which is ongoing, as is that of the Clipper Chip, another Federal attempt to limit the effectiveness of encryption that deserves its own discussion. If you are on the Internet and want news now, you can ftp to eff.org or read Usenet groups such as sci.crypt, eff.news, and eff.talk. Electronic publishing: This is a growth field, to be sure, where no one is sure of what the future will bring. In fact, no one can define clearly what "electronic publishing" means. Distribution solely on disk or over the net? Supplementary distribution by either method? And whichever method one chooses, what rules govern copyright and similar legalities? What seems certain is that money can be made in electronic publishing, howsoever defined, and several people are now trying to figure out exactly how. Among them is Brad Templeton, head man at ClariNet Communications Corporation (one of the first enterprises to turn a profit off the existence of Usenet). I just had a look at one of ClariNet's ventures into this field, its Hugo and Nebula Anthology 1993. This is a CD containing an extraordinary amount of fiction, including five novels: Connie Willis, Doomsday Book, Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, John Varley, Steel Beach, Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang, and Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep; this along with what seems to be all the shorter fiction nominated for both Nebulas and Hugos and samples from the Campbell Award nominees. Also on the CD are Hugo- nominated artwork and a sampling of various bits and pieces from sf fandom. The question naturally arises with regard to all this fiction on a disk, who is going to read it? Given the present state of display technology, sitting and paging through the more than a thousand screens of the Doomsday Book does not seem appealing. The truth is that I have not sat down and tried to read a book in electronic form, and I suppose I must. In his introduction to the collection, Brad Templeton remarks that LCDs, the displays typically used on laptop computers, make for better reading than most CRTs, which we find on most desktops. I plan to take him at his word and try to read a novel on my Powerbook; again, more later. By the way, I was especially interested in the Vinge book as it is supposed to come specially prepared "with almost 500k of hypertext-linked author's notes." In short, it is supposed to come as something more than simply an electronic rendition of a perfect acceptable hard copy book; it is supposed to have a form that takes special advantage of the electronic medium. Unfortunately I seem to have been given a pre-release CD, one with A Fire Upon the Deep in unannotated form. (I sent Brad Templeton e-mail about this, but he had not replied by deadline. I will follow this one up.) New media, new problems: this is only to be understood. However, whatever the bugs in the new software, I find the publications themselves extremely interesting. First, note the cheapness, $29.95 in this instance for what the CD's cover copy claims to be "over $230" at hard copy prices. Second, electronic access to texts makes it possible to retrieve information that could only be gotten laboriously from a hard copy text. For instance, you may be interested to know that the word "machine" appears only four times in Doomsday Book, while the word "time" makes three hundred and five appearances; or, on the other hand, you may not. Scholars will certainly find electronic access a boon, and I believe that non-scholars will develop new reading habits as they grow used to the power of reading software, most of which allows searching, sorting, and annotating. Other electronic publishing enterprises focus on the Internet itself. ClariNet has tried a project in which Nebula-nominated short fiction was made available over the Internet. Called "Library of Tomorrow," it met with indifferent success, and its future is uncertain. It has been shut down and may or may not be started up again. However BiblioByte is planning a more determined entry into this field. Glenn Hauman, publisher of BiblioByte, says they hope to be doing business by January 1, 1994. They are at present working out the software that will make possible realtime credit card purchases over the Internet. Initially, titles will be available by ftp, but they hope to add Gopher, WorldWideWeb, and WAIS as well. They have acquired nearly two hundred titles. Among them are An Alien Light, Nancy Kress; Waiting for the Galactic Bus and The Snake Oil Wars, Parke Godwin; four Ron Goulart books, Broke Down Engine, Gadget Man, Skyrocket Steele, and Lectric Jack and Associates; Loading Las Vegas and Concert in the Sun, Charles Potts; Share the Dream: Meeting of Minds and First Person Ocular: the Computer as Private Eye, Edward Wellen; Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler, and (an acknowledgement of conflict-of- interest requires me to disclose) Halo, Tom Maddox. There will also be mysteries, romances, westerns, various kinds of non- fiction, and a very long list of public domain titles. The books will be available in four formats: ASCII (the lingua franca of computer formats, readable by almost any machine), RTF, Write for Windows, and a semi-proprietary Macintosh reader. At present BiblioByte is giving away the first three chapters of Crash Course, Wilhelmina Baird, a novel that Ace Books has been giving a big push. To get the chapters, ftp to bb.com and retrieve them by the usual means; a file called bb.info is also available. If you do not have ftp access, send e-mail to crashcourse@bb.com with one of four things in the Subject line, depending on which file format you wish: ascii, rtf, pc, or mac. Again, electronic publishing is very much a field in constant change, and I will give a fuller account of the field in the near future. ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .