Hacker Crackdown - Bruce Sterling (books for 9th graders .TXT) 📗

that maybe an MBA would be more to the point. He still owes his attorneys $30,000, but the sum is dwindling steadily since he is manfully working two jobs. Knight Lightning customarily wears a suit and tie and carries a valise. He has a federal security clearance.

Unindicted PHRACK co-editor Taran King is also a technical writer in Washington DC, and recently got married.

Terminus did his time, got out of prison, and currently lives in Silicon Valley where he is running a full-scale Internet node, “netsys.com.” He programs professionally for a company specializing in satellite links for the Internet.

Carlton Fitzpatrick still teaches at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, but FLETC found that the issues involved in sponsoring and running a bulletin board system are rather more complex than they at first appear to be.

Gail Thackeray briefly considered going into private security, but then changed tack, and joined the Maricopa County District Attorney’s Office (with a salary). She is still vigorously prosecuting electronic racketeering in Phoenix, Arizona.

The fourth consecutive Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference will take place in March 1994 in Chicago.

As for Bruce Sterling… well *8-). I thankfully abandoned my brief career as a true-crime journalist and wrote a new science fiction novel, HEAVY WEATHER, and assembled a new collection of short stories, GLOBALHEAD. I also write nonfiction regularly, for the popular-science column in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION.

I like life better on the far side of the boundary between fantasy and reality; but I’ve come to recognize that reality has an unfortunate way of annexing fantasy for its own purposes. That’s why I’m on the Police Liaison Committee for EFF-Austin, a local electronic civil liberties group (eff-austin@tic.com). I don’t think I will ever get over my experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I expect to be involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the rest of my life.

It wouldn’t be hard to find material for another book on computer crime and civil liberties issues. I truly believe that I could write another book much like this one, every year. Cyberspace is very big. There’s a lot going on out there, far more than can be adequately covered by the tiny, though growing, cadre of network-literate reporters. I do wish I could do more work on this topic, because the various people of cyberspace are an element of our society that definitely require sustained study and attention.

But there’s only one of me, and I have a lot on my mind, and, like most science fiction writers, I have a lot more imagination than discipline. Having done my stint as an electronic-frontier reporter, my hat is off to those stalwart few who do it every day. I may return to this topic some day, but I have no real plans to do so. However, I didn’t have any real plans to write “Hacker Crackdown,” either. Things happen, nowadays. There are landslides in cyberspace. I’ll just have to try and stay alert and on my feet.

The electronic landscape changes with astounding speed. We are living through the fastest technological transformation in human history. I was glad to have a chance to document cyberspace during one moment in its long mutation; a kind of strobe-flash of the maelstrom. This book is already out-of-date, though, and it will be quite obsolete in another five years. It seems a pity.

However, in about fifty years, I think this book might seem quite interesting. And in a hundred years, this book should seem mindbogglingly archaic and bizarre, and will probably seem far weirder to an audience in 2092 than it ever seemed to the contemporary readership.

Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of sustained attention. Personally, I keep tabs with the milieu by reading the invaluable electronic magazine Computer underground Digest (tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu with the subject header: SUB CuD and a message that says:

 

SUB CuD your name your.full.internet@address).

 

I also read Jack Rickard’s bracingly iconoclastic BOARDWATCH MAGAZINE for print news of the BBS and online community. And, needless to say, I read WIRED, the first magazine of the 1990s that actually looks and acts like it really belongs in this decade. There are other ways to learn, of course, but these three outlets will guide your efforts very well.

When I myself want to publish something electronically, which I’m doing with increasing frequency, I generally put it on the gopher at Texas Internet Consulting, who are my, well, Texan Internet consultants (tic.com). This book can be found there. I think it is a worthwhile act to let this work go free.

From thence, one’s bread floats out onto the dark waters of cyberspace, only to return someday, tenfold. And of course, thoroughly soggy, and riddled with an entire amazing ecosystem of bizarre and gnawingly hungry cybermarine life-forms. For this author at least, that’s all that really counts.

Thanks for your attention *8-)

Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us—New Years Day 1994, Austin Texas.