From: Chris Canning <kwartz@wxs.nl>
Subject: Cyber space "The final frontier"
Date: Sunday, May 02, 1999 2:41 AM


The Final Frontier


    We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. We are
    feeling our way into it, blundering about. That is not surprising. Our
    lives in the physical world, the "real" world, are also far from
    perfect, despite a lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are
    imperfect by their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace.
    The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live
    in the real world. We take both our advantages and our troubles with
    us.


Bruce Sterling wrote those words in the introduction to The Hacker
Crackdown four years ago. The driving force for the invasion of
cyberspace then was the growing availability of cheap personal
computers, and the steadily increasing population curve as
universities and businesses linked into one network or another.
The curve is being driven harder now -- both by the mass of the
information available via the net, and by the introduction of
graphical user interfaces for information access. Users don't
need to understand anything about computers to enter cyberspace
anymore.

Perhaps that is why so few of them understand the limitations of
the systems they use. Or perhaps the second wave of immigrants never
respects the landscape the way the first pioneers did. 

From
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/ElectronicFrontier/LawEthicsSociety.LaMacchia.html#neighborhood

As a sysop you should be interested in legal and ethical issues in Cyberspace. 

Chris

