Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet - Electronic Frontier Foundation (reading rainbow books .txt) 📗

Dialog, you need an account to log on.

Infinity Link Browse book, music, software, video-cassette and

laser-disk catalogs through this system based in

Malvern, Penn. Use gopher to connect to

columbia.ilc.com

Log on as: cas

The Internet Company Sort of a service bureau, this company, based in

Cambridge, Mass., is working with several publishers

on Internet-related products. Its Electronic

Newsstand offers snippets and special

subscription rates to a number of national

magazines, from the New Republic to the New

Yorker. Use gopher to connect to

enews.com

MarketBase You can try the classified-ads system developed

by this company in Santa Barbara, Calif., by

gopher to connect to

mb.com

O’Reilly and Associates Best known for its “Nutshell” books on Unix,

O’Reilly runs three Internet services. The gopher

server, at

ora.com

provides information about the company and its

books. It posts similar information in the

biz.oreilly.announce Usenet newsgroup. Its

Global Network Navigator, accessible through the

World-Wide Web, is a sort of online magazine that

lets users browse through interesting services

and catalogs.

13.2 FYI

The com-priv mailing list is the place to discuss issues surrounding

the commercialization and the privatization of the Internet. To

subscribe (or un-subscribe), send an e-mail request to com-priv-

request@psi.com.

Mary Cronin’s book, “Doing Business on the Internet” (1994, Van

Nostrand Reinhold), takes a more in-depth look at the subject.

Kent State University in Ohio maintains a repository of

“Business Sources on the Net.” Use gopher to connect to refmac.kent.edu.

Chapter 14: CONCLUSION — THE END?

The revolution is just beginning. New communications systems and

digital technologies have already meant dramatic changes in the way we

live. Think of what is already routine that would have been considered

impossible just ten years ago. You can browse through the holdings of

your local library — or of libraries halfway around the world — do your

banking and see if your neighbor has gone bankrupt, all through a

computer and modem.

Imploding costs coupled with exploding power are bringing ever

more powerful computer and digital systems to ever growing numbers of

people. The Net, with its rapidly expanding collection of databases

and other information sources, is no longer limited to the

industrialized nations of the West; today the web extends from Siberia

to Zimbabwe. The cost of computers and modems used to plug into the Net,

meanwhile, continue to plummet, making them ever more affordable.

Cyberspace has become a vital part of millions of people’s daily

lives. People form relationships online, they fall in love, they get

married, all because of initial contacts in cyberspace, that ephemeral

``place’’ that transcends national and state boundaries. Business

deals are transacted entirely in ASCII. Political and social

movements begin online, coordinated by people who could be thousands

of miles apart.

Yet this is only the beginning.

We live in an age of communication, yet the various media we use

to talk to one another remain largely separate systems. One day,

however, your telephone, TV, fax machine and personal computer will be

replaced by a single ``information processor’’ linked to the worldwide

Net by strands of optical fiber.

Beyond databases and file libraries, power will be at your

fingertips. Linked to thousands, even millions of like-minded people,

you’ll be able to participate in social and political movements across

the country and around the world.

How does this happen? In part, it will come about through new

technologies. High-definition television will require the development

of inexpensive computers that can process as much information as

today’s workstations. Telephone and cable companies will cooperate, or

in some cases compete, to bring those fiber-optic cables into your home.

The Clinton administration, arguably the first led by people who

know how to use not only computer networks but computers, is pushing for

creation of a series of “information superhighways” comparable in scope

to the Interstate highway system of the 1950s (one of whose champions in

the Senate has a son elected vice president in 1992).

Right now, we are in the network equivalent of the early 1950s,

just before the creation of that massive highway network. Sure, there are

plenty of interesting things out there, but you have to meander along

two-lane roads, and have a good map, to get to them.

Creation of this new Net will require more than just high-speed

channels and routing equipment; it will require a new communications

paradigm: the Net as information utility. The Net remains a somewhat

complicated and mysterious place. To get something out of the Net today,

you have to spend a fair amount of time with a Net veteran or a manual

like this. You have to learn such arcana as the vagaries of the Unix cd

command.

Contrast this with the telephone, which now also provides access to

large amounts of information through push buttons, or a computer network

such as Prodigy, which one navigates through simple commands and mouse

clicks.

Internet system administrators have begun to realize that not all

people want to learn the intricacies of Unix, and that that fact does

not make them bad people. We are already seeing the development of

simple interfaces that will put the Net’s power to use by millions of

people. You can already see their influence in the menus of gophers and

the World-Wide Web, which require no complex computing skills but which

open the gates to thousands of information resources. Mail programs and

text editors such as pico and pine promise much of the power of older

programs such as emacs at a fraction of the complexity.

Some software engineers are taking this even further, by creating

graphical interfaces that will let somebody navigate the Internet just by

clicking on the screen with a mouse or by calling up an easy text editor,

sort of the way one can now navigate a Macintosh computer — or a

commercial online service such as Prodigy.

Then there are the Internet services themselves.

For every database now available through the Internet, there are

probably three or four that are not. Government agencies are only

now beginning to connect their storehouses of information to the

Net. Several commercial vendors, from database services to booksellers,

have made their services available through the Net.

Few people now use one of the Net’s more interesting

applications. A standard known as MIME lets one send audio and

graphics files in a message. Imagine opening your e-mail one day to hear

your granddaughter’s first words, or a “photo” of your friend’s new

house. Eventually, this standard could allow for distribution of even

small video displays over the Net.

All of this will require vast new amounts of Net power, to handle

both the millions of new people who will jump onto the Net and the new

applications they want. Replicating a moving image on a computer screen

alone takes a phenomenal amount of computer bits, and computing power to

arrange them.

All of this combines into a National Information Infrastructure able

to move billions of bits of information in one second — the kind of

power needed to hook information “hoses” into every business and house.

As these “superhighways” grow, so will the “on ramps,” for a high-

speed road does you little good if you can’t get to it. The costs of

modems seem to fall as fast as those of computers. High-speed modems

(9600 baud and up) are becoming increasingly affordable. At 9600 baud,

you can download a satellite weather image of North America in less than

two minutes, a file that, with a slower modem could take up to 20

minutes to download. Eventually, homes could be connected directly to a

national digital network. Most long-distance phone traffic is already

carried in digital form, through high-volume optical fibers. Phone

companies are ever so slowly working to extend these fibers the “final

mile” to the home. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is working to

ensure these links are affordable.

Beyond the technical questions are increasingly thorny social,

political and economic issues. Who is to have access to these

services, and at what cost? If we live in an information age, are we

laying the seeds for a new information under class, unable to compete

with those fortunate enough to have the money and skills needed to

manipulate new communications channels? Who, in fact, decides who has

access to what? As more companies realize the potential profits to be

made in the new information infrastructure, what happens to such

systems as Usenet, possibly the world’s first successful anarchistic

system, where everybody can say whatever they want?

What are the laws of the electronic frontier? When national and

state boundaries lose their meaning in cyberspace, the question might

even be: WHO is the law? What if a practice that is legal in one

country is “committed” in another country where it is illegal, over a

computer network that crosses through a third country? Who goes after

computer crackers?

What role will you play in the revolution?

Appendix A: THE LINGO

Like any community, the Net has developed its own language.

What follows is a glossary of some of the more common phrases you’ll

likely run into. But it’s only a small subset of net.speak. You an find

a more complete listing in “The New Hacker’s Dictionary,” compiled by

Eric Raymond (MIT Press). Raymond’s work is based on an online reference

known as “The Jargon File,” which you can get through anonymous ftp from

ftp.gnu.mit.ai.mit as jarg300.txt.gz in the pub/gnu directory (see

chapter 7 for information on how to un-compress a .gz file).

ASCII Has two meanings. ASCII is a universal computer code

for English letters and characters. Computers store

all information as binary numbers. In ASCII, the

letter “A” is stored as 01000001, whether the computer

is made by IBM, Apple or Commodore. ASCII also refers

to a method, or protocol, for copying files from one

computer to another over a network, in which neither

computer checks for any errors that might have been

caused by static or other problems.

ANSI Computers use several different methods for deciding

how to put information on your screen and how your

keyboard interacts with the screen. ANSI is one of

these “terminal emulation” methods. Although most

popular on PC-based bulletin-board systems, it can also

be found on some Net sites. To use it properly, you

will first have to turn it on, or enable it, in your

communications software.

ARPANet A predecessor of the Internet.