

  THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN UNDERGROUND COMPUTING / Published Periodically

  ======================================================================

  ISSN 1074-3111           Volume One, Issue Four           June 7, 1994

  ======================================================================

    

      Editor-in-Chief:        Scott Davis      (dfox@fennec.com)

      Technology Editor:      Max Mednick      (kahuna@fennec.com)

      Consipracy Editor:      Gordon Fagan     (flyer@fennec.com)

      Network Security:       George Phillips  (ice9@fennec.com)



      ** ftp site: etext.archive.umich.edu    /pub/Zines/JAUC



      U.S. Mail:

      The Journal Of American Underground Computing 

      10111 N. Lamar #25

      Austin, Texas 78753-3601



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 "The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing

 power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media

 to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori

 ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books,

 discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest..."



 (William S. Burroughs and Daniel Odier, "The Job", Viking, New York, 1989)

 

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 Contents Copyright (C) 1994 The Journal Of American Underground Computing

 and/or the author of the articles presented herein. All rights reserved. 

 Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission 

 of the Editor-In-Chief and/or the author of the article. This publication

 is made available periodically to the amateur computer hobbyist free of

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     THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN UNDERGROUND COMPUTING - Volume 1, Issue 4



                          TABLE OF CONTENTS



 1)  We've tried To Be Nice...                     Carl Guderian

 2)  Defcon Convention Update                      Dark Tangent

 3)  Obituary / Mimsey                             Unknown

 4)  Call For Papers / Neural Networks             Readers

 5)  Press Release: Spyglass/NCSA Agreement        Readers

 5)  The Real Story                                Carl Guderian

 6)  Legion Of Doom T-Shirt Ad                     Chris Goggans

 7)  Libertarian Party / Opposition To DTA         Libertarian Pty

 8)  Unabom - 1 Million $ Reward                   William Tafoya

 9)  The Massachusetts Encryption Bill             Unknown

 10) Book Review: Information Warfare              Scott Davis

 11) Whisper Who, A Unix Tool (Source Code)        Editors

 12) Hacker Barbie                                 Readers

 13) The Well: A Small Town...                     Cliff Figillo

 14) The Feminization Of Cyberspace                Doctress Neutopia

 15) Response To The Feminization Of Cyberspace    Jason Webb

 16) Easy-to-Use Kennedy Conspiracy Chart          Gordon Fagan

 17) Meeks Defense Fund                            MDF

 18) HOPE - Hackers On Planet Earth                Emmanual Goldstein

 19) TV & Movie Mania Radio Show                   Lauren Weinstein

 

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 Special thanks to the anonymous reader who sent the software to my US Mail

 address...it was very cool.    -Scott

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 The Journal Of American Underground Computing supports DEFCON II in Vegas!!

 We will be there, and we encourage you to do the same.

 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



            We've Tried to Be Nice: Other Ways to Fight Clipper



 by Carl Guderian (bjacques@cypher.com)



 (You've read about Clipper ad nauseam elsewhere, so refer to other sources 

 if you still don't know about Clipper, the Digital Telephony Act, and 

 everything else that will be lumped together here under the rubric of 

 "Clipper."  Start with John Perry Barlow's excellent "Jackboots on the 

 Infobahn" in issue 2.04 of Wired Magazine. If you want balance, ask the NSA 

 for its opinion and weigh it against our position that Clipper obviously 

 blows. Onward.)



 The Situation, Spring 1994



 The Clinton White House is apparently steaming ahead on Clipper despite our 

 perfectly reasonable arguments and well-mannered campaign against it. To 

 John Perry Barlow (see intro) it plays like Invasion of the Body Snatchers 

 II: The White House Years--formerly sensible folks replaced by pod people 

 blandly assuring us that if "I could tell you what I know, you'd agree with 

 me."  No help there.

 

 Various industry consortia were ready to sell us down the slippery slope 

 until the feds double-crossed them at the last minute by rescinding the 

 offer to lift export controls on encryption in exchange for support for 

 Clipper. An attempt to make RSA/PGP encryption a politico-economic fait 

 accompli by sheer numbers of users is moving slowly, if at all (PGP really 

 requires direct internet access, it's hard to use, and RSA's suing Phil 

 Zimmerman so nobody else is going to dress it up for the market). The White 

 House spooks may make a bigger splash in the market by ordering their 

 50,000 electronic keyholes than we can by passing out copies of PGP for 

 free. We're fighting the enemy on its own turf and terms and we could lose. 

 It's time to fight dirty. Below are a couple of suggestions.



 Mutt and Jeff



 Just as for every civil rights Freedom Rider there was a Black Panther, for 

 every Pat Schroeder there's a Riot Grrl, and for every polished Dixiecrat 

 Senator there was a KKK Nightrider, so must we field media streetfighters 

 to complement our sincere and polite public spokesmen. The history of social 

 progress (and, unfortunately, reaction) is that of good cop and bad cop. 

 Opponents of Clipper must employ these Siamese twins of persuasion in order 

 to get anywhere. If you've never been interrogated by police, customs 

 officials, school principals, or corporate investigators, a little 

 explanation of good cop/bad cop may help. 



 In interrogations conducted in civilized countries, the object is to crack 

 the interviewee without resorting to physical torture. The most effective 

 method is good cop/bad cop. The bad cop, sent in first, acts enraged and 

 threatens to beat the truth out of the suspect. He gleefully enumerates all 

 the terrible things that can happen to an uncooperative suspect. Sometimes 

 this alone works. If the prisoner stands firm (or is frozen with fear), the 

 good cop comes to the rescue, radiating sympathy and bonhomie. He offers a 

 cigarette, a friendly ear, and assurances that, he and the suspect are 

 really on the same side. 

 

 The good cop plays on the suspect's pride, suspicions, or other 

 psychological weaknesses in order to get a voluntary confession. The good 

 cop's presence carries the implied threat of the return of the bad cop if 

 no confession is forthcoming. To accuse the good cop of waging psychological 

 warfare is to miss the point. Psychological warfare is waged by adept 

 deployment of both good and bad cops in order to break the prisoner. 

 It's very effective against folks who don't know any better, especially 

 young hackers, schoolkids, and Seattle scenesters en route to Vancouver. 



 The Occult Technology of Power



 The point of the above digression is that a tool well-known to the 

 authoritaries can be, and has been, used against them as well. As gays have 

 learned, neither the noisy AIDS Die-ins by ACT-UP nor lobbying by advocacy 

 groups is alone sufficient to win public support. Together the tactics work 

 because they offer different levels on which the public can deal with issues 

 (and people) that clearly won't go away. 



 Clipper advocates already know the weakness of their position, so arguments 

 are useless. They repeat the same arguments in hopes the public will get 

 tired of hearing about it and simply sign the blank check. We must pre-empt 

 the argument with bite-sized zingers. In the economy of attention, the 

 market goes to the side with the pithiest arguments. When they say "law and 

 order" we respond with "ATF." Such sound bites are Patriot Missiles that 

 shoot down the other side's forensic Scuds. Channel the spirits of Dorothy 

 Parker and Oscar Wilde. Give their straw man a hotfoot; they summon up 

 nuclear terrorism, we resurrect the Branch Davidians. The issue doesn't lend 

 itself to riotous demonstrations, but with a really good negative media 

 campaign we can whip up a good hate frenzy against Clipper. We already do 

 this somewhat, but we need to go further, with high concept slogans and 

 catch phrases. 

 

 "Clinton chip," like "Hooverville," has a dry, sharp ring to it, commanding 

 attention like the snap of a bone. Plus, it yokes the President personally 

 to the issue. If that sounds lame, try something else. The ancient 

 techniques of propaganda apply here, wedded to the black art of meme/

 information virus theory. It's a media war, so we'll use a little McLuhan. 

 (If you've read his stuff, you know his writing style was really disjointed, 

 but sounded great! Which may be the point.) Slick attack ads, sound bites, 

 rants to the editor, whisper campaigns, and other forms of media 

 manipulation are in order. Anything short of gross distortion or outright 

 lies is acceptable. The truth is scary enough and can be made to sound 

 positively Lovecraftian, if we succeed in seizing the metaphors. Detourned 

 ads such as "big brother inside" are a good start. The opportunities for 

 satire are boundless, especially given the history of government projects. 

 Emphasize how much more a Clippered future will play like "Brazil" than 

 "1984." 

 

 Why assume things will always work out for the Bad Guys Conspiracy? Want to 

 bet that when the government buys Clipper chips the Secret Service, FBI, 

 CIA, NSA, and State Department will probably spy on each other (since no one 

 else will use it)? Or that when Clipper charges out the fortress gate its 

 broken carcass will likely be flung back over the wall (i.e., it will be 

 cracked and posted to the net)? How will they know I haven't sold my 

 Clippered cellular phone at a garage sale? And so on. 

 

 Negative campaigns don't by themselves win support, but reasonable words 

 don't win much attention either. Both tricks must be played in their turn. 

 Not good cop or bad cop, but good cop AND bad cop. A diverse battle plan 

 gives sympathizers more options for action. Some folks like to lobby and 

 others like to sling mud. Hey, we're a big tent. And the streetfighters can 

 keep the lobbyists honest. 



 Useful Idiots



 In order for an issue to get attention it should demonstrably arouse the ire 

 of a number of large and unrelated groups. Right wing fundamentalist 

 screwheads as well as flaming liberals stand to lose if Clipper becomes the 

 law, so we put a bug in their respective ears in hopes of getting a 

 response. Support for one's position comes from surprising places. 

 Cyberpagans, for example, will be shocked to learn that Phyllis 

 "Church Lady" Schlafly denounced Clipper in a syndicated column a couple of 

 months back (she got a few details wrong, but you have to expect that). 

 Equally shocking (at least to this writer) is Rush Limbaugh, avid computer 

 user, so far passing up an opportunity to savage Clinton on Clipper. Liberal 

 groups can be persuaded that a conservative Republican administration armed 

 with Clipper would make J. Edgar Hoover look like Norbert the Narc.

  

 This strategy is aimed primarily at right wing groups for a number of 

 reasons. They already hate the present Democratic administration.  They're

 best at marshalling money and "good-ole-boy" clout. Right-wing paranoia is 

 more entertaining than the left-wing variety, so it is more likely to be 

 heard. To the Christian Right, for instance, Clipper carries the musky scent 

 of the Beast 666, and they expect Clinton to spend a second term stamping 

 our hands at the door of the Hellfire Club. And did you ever notice how 

 many cypherpunks own guns? Play up the gun analogy.

   

 This avenue to political action is time-critical. If 1997 sees a Republican 

 administration in place, right-wing groups will lose interest in attacking 

 it. And since it was the Bush White House (or spooks within it) that 

 proposed Clipper, you can bet the rent that President Dole, Quayle (!), or 

 whoever will make it a fact of life quicker than you can say "national 

 security." So much for looking to the Republicans for relief from Clipper.

 

  The Golden Apple of Discord



 Thank the Deist god of the Founding Fathers that our government is not a 

 monolithic entity possessed of a single will. Battles are already underway 

 over which agency gets the secret skeleton key to the Clipper escrow vault 

 to bypass the official safeguards that won't work anyway. Getting the Crips

 and Bloods to make peace was a cakewalk compared to Clinton's efforts to get

 the Three Letter Agencies to talk to each other. As long as they must 

 compete for funding it will be so. 



 Not quite the end



 With a bit of work we can play up Clipper so that it attracts as much 

 attention as the abortion, gun control, or gay rights issues have. Getting 

 the cover of Newsweek was good; mainstream coverage in a proposal normally 

 of interest only to propeller heads and conspiracy buffs is gratifying. 

 Remember the fallout after the Hacker Crackdown of 1990? But sustained 

 pressure is needed. Clinton's people need their noses rubbed in the sheer 

 breadth of opposition to Clipper. If a White House aide hears "Clinton Chip" 

 or something similar on the street, the President will hear of it and 

 realize we're serious.



 Really the end



 According to a recent issue of Federal Computer Week, the NSA is adopting as 

 it's mascot the armadillo. Maybe we can thank Bobby Ray Inman for this one. 

 FCW recently ran a contest to name the "dillo." Entrants were asked to 

 consider the NSA's reputation for prurience and the animal's best known 

 habitat (the freeway center stripe). The contest is probably over by now, 

 but "Roadkill" seemed to be the winner paws down. "Road rash," "Winston 

 [Smith]," and "Harry Buttle" (the poor sap whose erroneous arrest and 

 subsequent death under torture--er, information retrieval--trigger the 

 events of "Brazil") were this author's favorites.



 Credits



 Many thanks go posthumously to Marshall McLuhan for his theory of 

 perception, which states that most people see either the figure or the 

 background (a vase or two faces?) but that true perception is seeing both 

 figure and background.	This seemed pretty wacky a year ago, but it makes a 

 lot more sense now. Backhanded thanks go to a trio of Canadian customs 

 guards at the Peace Bridge connecting Buffalo, NY to Ft. Erie, Ontario for 

 personal instruction in the tactics of "good cop/bad cop". Thanks also to 

 ReSearch (for PRANKS!), the Situationist International (including King Mob), 

 Richard Dawkins (meme theory) and the late Count Alfred Korzybski (general 

 semantics), for inspiration.



 Please wash your hands before leaving the 20th century.



 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                            DEFCON UPDATE



 by Dtangent (dtangent@defcon.org)





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 XXXXxxxxxxxxxxXXXX XXXXXXXXX    DEF CON II Convention Update Announcement

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 XXXXXXxxxxxxXXXXXXXXX X         DEF CON II Convention Update Announcement

 XXXXXXXxxxxXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX      DEF CON II Convention Update Announcement

 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX DEF CON II Convention Update Announcement



READ & DISTRIBUTE & READ & DISTRIBUTE & READ & DISTRIBUTE & READ & DISTRIBUTE

DISTRUBUTE & READ & DISTRIBUTE & READ & DISTRIBUTE & READ & DISTRIBUTE & READ

 ============================================================================



 What's this?  This is an updated announcement and invitation to DEF CON II,

 a convention for the "underground" elements of the computer culture.  We try

 to target the (Fill in your favorite word here): Hackers, Phreaks, Hammies,

 Virii Coders, Programmers, Crackers, Cyberpunk Wannabees, Civil Liberties

 Groups, CypherPunks, Futurists, Artists, Etc..



 WHO:   You know who you are, you shady characters.

 WHAT:  A convention for you to meet, party, and listen to some speeches

        that you would normally never hear.

 WHEN:  July 22, 23, 24 - 1994 (Speaking on the 23rd and 24th)

 WHERE: Las Vegas, Nevada @ The Sahara Hotel



 So you heard about DEF CON I, and want to hit part II?  You heard about the

 parties, the info discussed, the bizarre atmosphere of Las Vegas and want to

 check it out in person?  Load up your laptop muffy, we're heading to Vegas! 



 Here is what Three out of Three people said about last years convention:



 "DEF CON I, last week in Las Vegas, was both the strangest and the best

 computer event I have attended in years." -- Robert X. Cringely, Info World 



 "Toto, I don't think we're at COMDEX anymore." -- CodeRipper, Gray Areas



 "Soon we were at the hotel going through the spoils: fax sheets, catalogs,

 bits of torn paper, a few McDonald's Dino-Meals and lots of coffee grounds.

 The documents disappeared in seconds." -- Gillian Newson, New Media Magazine



 DESCRIPTION:



 Last year we held DEF CON I, which went over great, and this year we are

 planning on being bigger and better.  We have expanded the number of

 speakers to included midnight tech talks and additional speaking on Sunday.

 We attempt to bring the underground into contact with "legitimate" speakers.

 Sure it's great to meet and party with fellow hackers, but besides that we

 try to provide information and speakers in a forum that can't be found at

 other conferences.



 While there is an initial concern that this is just another excuse for the

 evil hackers to party and wreak havok, it's just not the case.  People come

 to DEF CON for information and for making contacts. We strive to distinguish

 this convention from others in that respect.



 WHAT'S NEW THIS YEAR:



 This year will be much larger and more organized (hopefully) than last year.

 We have a much larger meeting area, and have better name recognition.

 Because of this we will have more speakers on broader topics.  Expect

 speaking to run Saturday and Sunday, ending around 5 p.m.  Some of the new

 things expected include:



 o An Internet connection with sixteen ports will be there, _BUT_ will only

   provide serial connections because terminals are too hard to ship.  So

   bring a laptop with communications software if you want to connect to the

   network.  Thanks to cyberlink communications for the connection.



 o There will be door prizes, and someone has already donated a Cell Phone

   and a few "Forbidden Subjects" cd ROMs to give away, thanks to Dead 

   Addict.



 o Dr. Ludwig will present his virus creation awards on Sunday. 



 o A bigger and better "Spot The Fed" contest, which means more shirts to

   give away.



 o More room, we should have tables set up for information distribution.

   If you have anything you want distributed, feel free to leave it on the

   designated tables.  Yes, this year there will be a true 24 hour

   convention space.



 o A 24 hour movie / video suite where we will be playing all type of

   stuff.

   VHS Format.  Mail me with suggested titles to show, or bring your own.

   We'll use a wall projector when not in use by speakers.



 o Midnight Tech Talks on Friday and Saturday night to cover the more

   technical topics and leave the days free for more general discussions.



 WHO IS SPEAKING:==========================================================



 This list represents almost all of the speakers verified to date.  Some

 people do not want to be announced until the event for various reasons, or

 are waiting for approval from employers.  A speaking schedule will go out

 in the next announcement.





 Phillip Zimmerman, Notorious Cryptographer & author of PGP.

 Dr. Ludwig, Author of "The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses," and

     "Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and Evolution"

 Loyd Blankenship (The Mentor), Net Running in the 90's and RPG.

 Padgett Peterson, Computer Enthusiest, Anti-Virus Programmer.

 The Jackal, A Radio Communications Overview, Digital Radio and the Hack 

 Angle.

 Judi Clark, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

 Gail Thackery, (Of Operation Sun Devil Fame), Topic to be Announced.

 To be Announced, The Software Publishers Association, Topic to be Announced.

 Toni Aimes, Ex U.S. West Cellular Fraud, Cellular Fraud Topics.

 Mark Lotter, Cellular Enthusiest, Hacking Cell Phones.

 Lorax, The Lighter Side of VMBs.

 Peter Shipley, Unix Stud, Q&A on Unix Security.

 George Smith, Crypt Newsletter, Virus Topic to be Announced.

 Cathy Compton, Attorney, Q&A Surrounding Seisure Issues, Etc.

 John Littman, Reporter and Author, Kevin Poulson, Mitnick, and Agent Steal.

 Red Five & Hellbender, Madmen With a Camcorder, Who Knows?

 Chris Goggans (Erik Bloodaxe), Wierd Wireless Psycho Shit.. Stay Tuned..



 There should be a few round table discussions on Virus, Cellular, Unix and

 something else surrounding the industry.



 I'll name the rest of the the speakers as they confirm.  I'm still working 

 on a few (Two?) people and groups, so hopefully things will work out and I 

 can pass the good news on in the next announcement, or over our List Server.



 ============================================================================



 WHERE THIS THING IS:



 It's in Las Vegas, the town that never sleeps.  Really. There are no clocks

 anywhere in an attempt to lull you into believing the day never ends.  Talk

 about virtual reality, this place fits the bill with no clunky hardware.  If

 you have a buzz you may never know the difference.  It will be at the Sahara

 Hotel.  Intel is as follows:



         The Sahara Hotel: 1.800.634.6078 

         Room Rates: Single/Double $55, Tripple $65, Suite $120

                    (Usually $200) + 8% tax



         Transportation: Shuttles from the airport for cheap.



    NOTE:  Please make it clear you are registering for the DEF CON II

    convention to get the room rates.  Our convention space price is

    based on how many people register.  Register under a false name if

    it makes you feel better, 'cuz the more that register the better for

    my pocket book.  No one under 21 can rent a room by themselves, so

    get your buddy who is 21 to rent for you and crash out.  Try to contact

    people on the Interactive Mailing List (More on that below) and

    hook up with people.  Don't let the hotel people get their hands on

    your baggage, or there is a mandatory $3 group baggage fee.  Vegas

    has killer unions. 



 OTHER STUFF:



 I'll whip up a list of stuff that's cool to check out in town there so if 

 for some reason you leave the awesome conference you can take in some unreal

 sites in the city of true capitalism.  If anyone lives in Las Vegas, I

 would appreciate it if you could send a list of some cool places to check 

 out or where to go to see the best shows and I'll post it in the next

 announcement or in the program



 -o I am asking for people to submit to me any artwork, pictures, drawings,

    logos, etc. that they want me to try and include in this years program.

    I am tring to not violate any copywrite laws, but wat cool shit.  Send

    me your art or whatever and I'll try and use it in the program, giving 

    you credit for the work, of course.  Please send it in .TIF format if it 

    has more than eight bit color. The program will be eight bit black and 

    white.

 -o in case you want to make adjustments on your side.



 *** NEW MAILING LIST SERVER ***



 We've finally gotten Major Dommo List Serv software working (Kinda) and it

 is now ready for testing.  MTV spent alot of time hacking this thing to work

 with BSDi, and I would like to thank him.  The purpose of the list is to

 allow people interested in DEF CON II to chat with one another.  It would

 be very sueful for people over 21 who want to rent hotel space, but split

 costs with others.  Just mention you have room for 'x' number of people, and

 I'm sure you'll get a response from somone wanting to split costs.  Someone

 also suggested that people could organize a massive car caravan from 

 Southern Ca. to the Con.  My attitude is that the list is what you make of 

 it.  Here are the specifics:



 Umm.. I TAKE THAT BACK!!  The mailing list is _NOT_ ready yet.  Due to

 technical problems, etc.  I'll do another mass mailing to everyone letting

 them know that the list is up and how to access it.  Sorry for the delay! 



 MEDIA:



 Some of the places you can look for information from last year include: 



 New Media Magazine, September 1993

 InfoWorld, 7-12-1993 and also 7-19-1993 by Robert X. Cringely

 Gray Areas Magazine, Vol 2, #3 (Fall 1993)

 Unix World, ???,

 Phrack #44



 COST: 



 Cost is whatever you pay for a hotel room split however many ways, plus

 $15 if you preregister, or $30 at the door.  This gets you a nifty 24 bit

 color name tag (We're gonna make it niftier this year) and your foot in the

 door.  There are fast food places all over, and there is alcohol all over

 the place but the trick is to get it during a happy hour for maximum

 cheapness.



 ==========================================================================



 I wanted to thank whoever sent in the anonymous fax to Wired that

 was printed in issue 1.5  Cool deal!



 ===========================================================================



 FOR MORE INFORMATION:



 For InterNet users, there is a DEF CON anonymous ftp site at cyberspace.com

 in /pub/defcon.  There are digitized pictures, digitized speeches and text

 files with the latest up to date info available.



 For email users, you can email dtangent@defcon.org for more information. 



 For non-net people call:



 For Snail Mail send to: DEF CON, 2709 E. Madison Street Suite #102,

                         Seattle, WA, 98112



 For Voice Mail and maybe a human (me), 0-700-TANGENT on an AT&T phone.



 A DEF CON Mailing list is maintained, and the latest announcements are 

 mailed automatically to you.  If you wish to be added to the list just send 

 email to dtangent@defcon.org.  We also maintain a chat mailing list where 

 people can talk to one another and plan rides, talk, whatever.  If you 

 request to be on this list your email address will be shown to everyone, 

 just so you are aware.



 STUFF TO SPEND YOUR MONEY ON:



 o Tapes of last years speakers (four 90 minute tapes) are available for $20 



 o DEF CON I tee-shirts (white, large only) with large color logo on the

   front, and on the back the Fourth Amendment, past and present.  This is

   shirt v 1.1 with no type-o's.  These are $20, and sweatshirts are $25.



 o DEF CON II tee-shirts will be made in various colors this year, including

   a few long sleeve shirts.  Sizes will be in large only again, with a

   few white mediums made.  Shirts will be $15, Long Sleve $17, Sweat shirts

   will be $20.



 o We will have a few (ten maybe?) embroidered hats with this years logo.

   Not shure how much they will be.. like $10 maybe.



 o Full sized 4 color DEF CON II wall posters will be for sale for about $5.

 

 o Pre-Register for next year in advance for $15 and save half.



 o Make all checks/money orders/etc. out to DEF CON, and mail to the address

   above.  Way above.



 If you have any confidential info to send, use this PGP key to encrypt:



 -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

 Version: 2.3



 mQCrAiyI6OcAAAEE8Mh1YApQOOfCZ8YGQ9BxrRNMbK8rP8xpFCm4W7S6Nqu4Uhpo

 dLfIfb/kEWDyLreM6ers4eEP6odZALTRvFdsoBGeAx0LUrbFhImxqtRsejMufWNf

 uZ9PtGD1yEtxwqh4CxxC8glNA9AFXBpjgAZ7eFvtOREYjYO6TH9sOdZSa8ahW7YQ

 hXatVxhlQqve99fY2J83D5z35rGddDV5azd9AAUTtCZUaGUgRGFyayBUYW5nZW50

 IDxkdGFuZ2VudEBkZWZjb24ub3JnPg==

 =ko7s

 -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----



- The Dark Tangent



 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 



 TO: EDITORS@FENNEC.COM

 Subject: OBITUARY - VAX 8600, aka Mimsy, dead at age 8

     

        An era of computing in the University of Maryland Computer Science

 Department came to an end Sunday, March 20th, when the Department's last 

 VAX, an 8600, peacefully died in its sleep. After a power-down, the VAX, 

 which had been off maintenance since July, 1993, was not able to boot as 

 a result of a disk/controller that finally went bad.



      The 8600 had arrived in 1986 as the Department's most powerful machine

 and had been named "Brillig"; in November 1990, when the Department's VAX 

 11/785 was retired, the 8600 assumed the name and duties of "Mimsy" and 

 had served in that capacity until its semi-retirement in July, 1994. At 

 that time, the 8600 was renamed "Imladris" and the "Mimsy" moniker was 

 bestowed upon a Sun SPARC 10/30.



      Along with being the last VAX, the 8600 was also the last UMD machine

 running the mutoid 4.3/4.3tahoe/4.3reno/Net-2 conglomeration (4.3BSD Torix, 

 as it was called here) that emerged over the span of a decade of working 

 with Unix. Although it is now gone, the hacks it helped inspire live on

 in locally-changed versions of the SunOS, Ultrix, OSF/1 and BSDI offerings 

 in hundreds of other systems here.



      It is somewhat ironic that the VAX ended the way it did. Its demise

 was originally scheduled for earlier that week, when the 8600, after a short 

 ceremony, was to have committed suicide. The machine would have, under its 

 own free will and volition, executed (through the "cron" facility) a shell 

 script prepared by Dr. Vax Kevorkian which would have issued an "rm -rf /" 

 command. Onlookers were to have watched the process until the machine seized 

 up, and would have then powered the machine down and gone to dinner.



      However, an earlier problem with the building Uninterruptible Power

 Supply (UPS) necessitated a load test for the 20th, and as a large consumer 

 of power, it was decided the 8600 would remain on for this one last task. As 

 a result of a short power-down during the UPS load test, the machine's 

 mighty heart (ummm, disk) gave out.

 

      Funeral arrangements are not yet complete, but tentative plans call

 for shipping the remains to Chris Torek's apartment in Berkeley, as a token 

 of the staff's appreciation. The staff has requested that all gifts of 

 condolence be made to the University of Maryland's Dinner-for-Wayword-

 Hackers Fund; checks may be made payable to Pete Cottrell.

      

        MIMSY IS DEAD! LONG LIVE MIMSY!

     

 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%     



     CALL FOR PAPERS: Neural Networks for Automatic Target Recognition 



 By Dept of Cognitive and Neural Systems (announce@retina.bu.edu)



 ATR is a many-faceted problem of tremendous importance in industrial and

 defense applications. Biological systems excel at these tasks, and neural

 networks may provide a robust, real-time, and compact means for achieving

 solutions to ATR problems. ATR systems utilize a host of sensing modalities

 (visible, multispectral, IR, SAR, and ISAR imagery; radar, sonar, and acoustic

 time series; and fusion of multiple sensing modalities) in order to detect 

 and track targets in clutter, and classify them. This Special Issue will 

 bring together a broad range of invited and contributed articles that 

 explore a variety of software and hardware modules and systems, and 

 biological inspirations, focused on solving ATR problems. We particularly 

 welcome articles involving applications to real data, though the journal 

 cannot publish classified material. It will be the responsibility of the 

 submitting authors to insure that all submissions are of an unclassified 

 nature.  



 Co-Editors:

 -----------

 Professor Stephen Grossberg, Boston University

 Dr. Harold Hawkins, Office of Naval Research 

 Dr. Allen Waxman, MIT Lincoln Laboratory 



 Submission:

 -----------

 Deadline for submission: October 31, 1994 

 Notification of acceptance: January 15, 1995 

 Format: as for normal papers in the journal (APA format) and no longer 

 than 10,000 words 



 Address for Papers:

 -------------------

 Professor Stephen Grossberg 

 Editor, Neural Networks 

 Boston University 

 Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems 

 111 Cummington Street 

 Room 244 

 Boston, MA 02215 USA 

       

  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                  PRESS RELEASE: SPYGLASS/NCSA AGREEMENT

                  

 From: Eric W. Sink (eric@spyglass.com)



 The following press release announces our new relationship with NCSA

 and Mosaic.  I would like to prepend a clarification or two:

 Initially, Spyglass will sell Mosaic to volume users requiring a

 minimum of 5000 licenses per year.  It is our intention to let the

 needs of smaller volume customers, including end-users, be met thru

 other channels.



 Also, remember that NCSA Mosaic, for Windows, Mac, and UNIX will

 continue to be freely available from NCSA.  Development of the free

 versions will continue at NCSA, and Spyglass will be in collaboration

 with the NCSA development team.

 

 At Internet World Booth #609:

 For Immediate Release 



 Spyglass Signs Agreement with NCSA to Enhance and Broadly Relicense

 Mosaic Graphical Browser for the Internet

 (C)1994 Internet World

 Commercial Windows and Macintosh Versions Available in June; X Windows

 Version to Follow in July



 INTERNET WORLD, SAN JOSE, Calif., June 1 -- Spyglass, Inc. and the

 National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the

 University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign have entered into an agreement

 that will get Mosaic, NCSA's graphical browser for the Internet, to

 the desktops of millions of people. The agreement gives Spyglass full

 rights to enhance, commercialize and broadly relicense

 Mosaic. Spyglass is making a multimillion-dollar commitment to NCSA

 and will focus initially on developing a commercially enhanced version

 of Mosaic that other companies will incorporate with their products

 for distribution to their customers. The announcement was made today

 in San Jose, on the opening day of exhibits at the Spring '94 Internet

 World conference.



 Developed by NCSA, Mosaic gives users point-and-click access to the

 World Wide Web (WWW), an information retrieval system on the Internet

 with more than 2,300 graphical, multimedia databases of "hyperlinked"

 documents. The Internet is a vast "supernetwork" of public and private

 networks connecting thousands of organizations and an estimated 20

 million individual users. New users are joining the Internet at the

 rate of 2 million each month, and hundreds of new WWW servers are

 coming online every month. Because of the reach of the Internet, it

 offers an attractive vehicle for electronic publishing and for

 conducting business globally.



 "Mosaic and World Wide Web are two key ingredients for successful

 electronic publishing and commerce on the Internet. But, to date,

 businesses have tapped only a fraction of the Internet's potential

 because these tools haven't been commercially available. Working with

 NCSA, we're going to change this," said Douglas Colbeth, president of

 Spyglass, which was formed in 1990 and has commercialized other NCSA

 technologies.



 "We're committed to evolving Mosaic so it becomes a robust, commercial

 tool with complete documentation, technical support and advanced

 features," explained Tim Krauskopf, co-founder of Spyglass and

 developer of NCSA Telnet. "We'll be collaborating with NCSA and other

 key partners to create new tools and establish standards that will

 help organizations build robust World Wide Web information servers

 quickly and inexpensively."



 "It has been thrilling to see the universal acceptance of NCSA Mosaic

 as an interactive window into cyberspace," said Larry Smarr, director

 of the NCSA. "I am very pleased to see Spyglass making such a

 financial commitment to the commercialization of Mosaic, which frees

 NCSA up to develop the next level of functionality for the public

 domain. Spyglass has been a terrific technology partner for us in the

 past and we look forward to an even closer working relationship in the

 future."



 "We welcome Spyglass as our partner in this effort because of the

 company's track record in commercializing other NCSA technologies and

 our rapidly developing close working relationship with the people at

 Spyglass," said Joseph Hardin, associate director of NCSA's software

 program. "Spyglass gives us the cross-platform development, global

 distribution and ongoing financial resources we need to take the

 Mosaic environment to the next level. With this commercialization

 arrangement with Spyglass in place, NCSA is freed to continue to

 develop core technologies for Mosaic as well as new technologies that

 leverage the Internet. We encourage companies to take advantage of

 this new relationship with Spyglass and contact them about volume

 licensing arrangements for Mosaic technology."



 Mosaic has been called the "killer application" for the Internet

 because it lets users navigate the Internet by browsing through a

 series of graphical, multimedia documents. The WWW was developed

 several years ago by CERN, a European consortium of scientists based

 in Switzerland, to keep track of researchers' information and to

 provide an easy method of sharing data. Subsequently, WWW has grown

 into one of the world's most open and widely used environments for

 information publishing, browsing and retrieval.



 WWW servers contain eye-catching documents with built-in links to

 other documents, allowing the user to move easily and naturally around

 the Internet. With Mosaic, users can browse through page after page of

 menus, hyperlinked to data dispersed all over the world, without

 having to know the location or network address of the information they

 are seeking.



 Spyglass has re-architected Mosaic so it will be a more robust and

 full-featured tool.  Enhancements available in Enhanced NCSA Mosaic

 from Spyglass include improved installation, better memory management,

 increased performance, new forms capabilities, online hypertext-based

 help, support for a proxy gateway and user interface improvements such

 as support for multiple windows. Future versions will include enhanced

 security and authentication, which will enable credit-card and other

 business transactions to take place on the Internet; filters that will

 enable documents from popular document readers to be read seamlessly

 by Mosaic; and integration with emerging editing and document

 management tools. A number of businesses are already using Mosaic and

 WWW to publish magazines, deliver goods and services, provide

 technical support to customers and conduct other forms of business

 electronically. For example, Mosaic and WWW are part of the recently

 announced $12 million CommerceNet project, a public- and

 private-sector-backed initiative exploring various ways to conduct

 commerce over the Internet and other data networks. NCSA will continue

 to maintain a public-with-copyright version of Mosaic, which Internet

 users can download for free from the Internet. NCSA, which began

 distributing Mosaic in the late fall, estimates that more than one

 million people use Mosaic and that more than 30,000 copies are being

 downloaded each month.



 Spyglass will be targeting the following types of customers as initial

 prospects for large-scale Mosaic client licensing agreements: computer

 systems and communications vendors, publishers and content providers,

 and online information service providers. For example, a publisher

 might want to include Mosaic with a subscription to an online magazine

 or a computer vendor might want to include Mosaic with each system

 sold. By building WWW servers themselves and distributing Mosaic

 clients to their customers, businesses can easily use this system for

 communicating with customers, providing technical support,

 distributing product and marketing information and other kinds of

 commerce.

  

 Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass will be available for Microsoft

 Windows and Apple Macintosh desktop computers this month and for X

 Windows computers in July. To navigate the Internet, Mosaic users

 require a direct connection to the Internet or a PPP or SLIP

 connection. Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass will be priced

 aggressively for high-volume distribution, enabling licensees to

 incorporate Mosaic into their products and services for a modest

 cost. For more information about Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass,

 contact Spyglass directly at (217) 355-6000, mosaic@spyglass.com or

 http://www.spyglass.com/.



 The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, based at the

 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is supported by grants

 from the National Science Foundation, other federal agencies, the

 State of Illinois, the University of Illinois and corporate partners.



 Founded in 1990, Spyglass, Inc. is the leading developer of visual

 data analysis tools for the engineering and scientific marketplace,

 which support Windows, Macintosh and UNIX platforms. The company's

 venture-capital partners include Greylock Management of Boston,

 Mass. and Venrock Associates of New York City.



 Spyglass is a registered trademark of Spyglass, Inc. All other brands

 or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their

 respective holders and should be treated as such.



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                            THE REAL STORY



 By Carl Guderian (bjacques@cypher.com)



 The Real Story



 (The following report is a compilation of printed materials and transcripts 

 of personal interviews conducted by the author(s). In the course of this 

 exhaustive research we have come to feel that, given the controversial 

 nature of the subject matter, it is best that the authors as well as their 

 primary sources be kept confidential. Perhaps it is just as well, as the 

 events depicted in the report are years or decades in the past. Many of the 

 principals are retired or dead and, therefore, beyond any earthly reward or 

 revenge. The author(s) may be dead, too. In this line of journalism, that is 

 very likely.



 1994, Leopold & Loeb, Media Consultants)



 

 Employee Motivation Seminars



 Employee motivational seminars are a modern management tool, predicated on 

 the assumption that external motivation, whether carrot or stick or 

 combination thereof, is insufficient to move employees to give 110% to the 

 job; rather, internal motivation must be cultivated in the employees 

 somehow. Motivational seminars, usually conducted by outside consulting 

 firms, employ a variety of techniques, from survey questionnaires to group 

 exercises to meditation. These seminars have become enormously popular since 

 their introduction in the 1950s (mostly in sales-related fields then), as 

 they present a real advance over basic reward/punishment systems (-Theories 

 X and Y+) or even Frederick W. Taylor's scientific methods. More 

 importantly, they have actually worked. Workplace productivity has markedly 

 increased since the introduction of motivational seminars. 

 

 However, no innovation is universally welcomed. Recently, deeply religious 

 employees have begun to level serious accusations against motivational 

 seminars, declaring the programs promote a socialistic or New Age ethic. A 

 socialistic attitude, they argue, will lead otherwise sensible people to 

 embrace a world government under the Anti-Christ, as predicted in the Book 

 of Revelation in the Christian Bible (as interpreted by fundamentalist 

 Christians). A related and more serious charge is that the meditation 

 techniques (such as those used in the Krone program) open employees to 

 possession by demons. The latter charge is the focus of this report.

 

 The diabolical connection is real. Employee motivational seminars did indeed 

 spring from an arrangement between American industry and the Prince of 

 Darkness. Satan respects Americans like he respects no other people because 

 it was an American, Daniel Webster, who defeated him in court, using his 

 wits. Others have beaten the Devil, but only through invoking the powers of 

 Heaven, a tactic akin to bringing in grownups to restrain a schoolyard 

 bully. American corporate executives cut a deal with the Devil to deliver 

 the souls of underlings in exchange for the usual favors. Though the souls 

 of corporate employees are industrial grade, and therefore not worth as much 

 as the souls of the elite, an executive must deliver a number of them in 

 exchange for infernal favors. Paradoxically, the worth of elite American 

 souls has risen in direct proportion to the degradation in the worth of 

 those of followers. The perfect mechanism for delivering B-grade souls by 

 the bushel is, of course, an employee motivational seminar, in which large 

 numbers of workers are possessed at once (By the way, television evangelists 

 work the same way; their mass public healings are actually mass 

 possessions).

 

 This cozy arrangement between American leaders and Satan has served both 

 sides well. Demons consider possession of Americans to be a kind of working 

 vacation, a welcome relief from tormenting the damned souls toiling 

 eternally in the flaming dung-pits of Hell. Not that this isn't enjoyable 

 work, but even a demon likes a change of scenery. Satan and his lieutenants 

 can dole out plum earthside assignments for demonic devotion, thus 

 reinforcing the infernal hierarchy. American leaders, of course, get the 

 usual rewards of power, sexual potency (or firm breasts and derriere), and 

 that Christmas bonus for boosting corporate productivity while laying off 

 excess workers.



 Lately, however, the system's inherent problems have begun to manifest 

 themselves. As motivational seminars have gained in popularity, they have 

 increased the demand for demons. As the innovation has become more 

 widespread, it has ceased to be a competitive advantage. In Hell, too, the 

 system's success has presented similar problems, and Satan is now seems 

 ready to pull out of the deal.

 

 The shortage of demons is a Hellish fact. Present-day demons, of course, are 

 the same ones who participated in the original rebellion of Lucifer (now 

 Satan). All the angels were created at once, and no new ones have been made 

 since. The pool of demons, then, is a subset of that group. Occasionally a 

 truly wicked soul is promoted to demon status, but equally often a demon is 

 devoured by an angry superior (a la C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters). On 

 the whole, the supply of demons should be considered to be fixed. 

 

 In the early years of the program, American executives were pleased to see 

 their employees possessed by only the most hard-working demons. Today, 

 however, all the good ones are taken. Latter-day possessions by demons of 

 procurement fraud, office-supply theft, and general loafing on the job have 

 taken their toll on the system. Worse, even the best and brightest demons 

 seem to have gone native or become Americanized, becoming easily distracted 

 by the attractions of our post-industrial society or falling dangerously 

 into sympathy with the modern worker.  One formerly trustworthy (!) demon 

 was even caught committing workplace sabotage in solidarity with his 

 co-workers!  An embarrassed Satan had to deal personally with the matter.  

 All in all, the phrase working like a demon has begun to lose its cachet.

 

 As more corporations jumped on the infernal bandwagon, they found that the 

 employees of their competitors were performing equally well (or recently, 

 equally poorly). Worse, as the quality of the everyday American soul has 

 declined, many hapless executives have found themselves caught short. In one 

 company, the worth of the workers' souls had fallen drastically between the 

 signing of the contract and the possession of the workers. The contracting 

 executive killed a fellow executive (who was his wife - also on the infernal 

 take) over the shrinking soul pie at their company in order to hold up his 

 end of the bargain, lest he be forced to hand over his own soul. It didn't 

 help. The wife caught up with him in Hell.

 

 Meanwhile, in Hell the situation has also deteriorated. Eventually all 

 demons have been recruited earthside, so the dream ticket has ceased to be a 

 credible reward for exemplary effort. Furthermore, production in the Satanic 

 Mills is down. Temporarily out of sight of their demon overseers, damned 

 souls have begun shirking on the eternal job.

 

 By piecing together accounts channeled through trance mediums (leaks are now 

 worse than ever!), the authors have been able to determine that Satan has 

 begun revoking all contracts dealing with motivational seminars, releasing 

 the possessed workers and taking back favors bestowed on contractees. This 

 may partly explain the recent decline of the old industrial corporations in 

 favor of information technology firms, in which traditional religious values 

 are relatively absent.

 

 Thus, the era of employee motivation seminars seems to be drawing to a 

 close. The heyday of private economic deals with the Devil seems to be over 

 as well. Overheard executive conversatons reveal that Satan is simply not 

 interested in any more such contracts. Though some may be tempted to see the 

 above episode as another case of the power elite enlisting the powers of 

 Hell to fuck over the little guy, they should look at the larger picture and 

 realize the system seems to have taken care of itself according to the laws 

 of the Free Market. The Invisible Hand really does seem to work. 





 Postscript



 It now appears that Satan plans to compete in the world labor market after 

 having seen the prevailing trend toward cheaper labor. He has an advantage 

 over the Chinese, who lead the market using convict/slave labor. Political 

 prisoners have to be fed bread and water and must be allowed 3 or 4 hours of 

 sleep a day. The damned souls of Hell, of course, eat nothing and work 

 tirelessly twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The Devil now knows 

 quite a bit about management theory (in relation to his demonic supervisors) 

 and wants to recall them to Hell to oversee the re-engineering of Hell's 

 production lines. Modern world leaders thinking to hold off this development 

 are doomed to failure. Hell has on its side such notables as Albert Speer, 

 Josef Stalin, Adolf Eichmann, and Roy Cohn (to handle the legal work) and 

 will soon have Henry Kissinger to handle international relations. Given a 

 team like that, it's only a matter of time.



 Post-postscript



 The original (now void) contracts are sought-after collectors items, not the 

 least for their blackmail value. Even when the signatories are beyond 

 blackmail, as in the case of the aforementioned executive and his wife, 

 their contracts are worth a lot simply as works of art. The Devil is a 

 traditionalist at heart, and insists that contracts be handwritten by demons 

 noted for their calligraphic skill and that the documents bear his seal and 

 those of major demons acting as witnesses. The early contracts (pre-1983) 

 are worth the most, as they are the most visually stunning and bear the 

 names of America's best and brightest of the time, as well as the seals of 

 Hell's best known demons and devils.



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%





                 LEGION OF DOOM T-SHIRTS!! Get 'em



 By Chris Goggans <phrack@well.sf.ca.us>



After a complete sellout at HoHo Con 1993 in Austin, TX this past

December, the official Legion of Doom t-shirts are available

once again.  Join the net luminaries world-wide in owning one of

these amazing shirts.  Impress members of the opposite sex, increase

your IQ, annoy system administrators, get raided by the government and

lose your wardrobe!

 

Can a t-shirt really do all this?  Of course it can!

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

"THE HACKER WAR  --  LOD vs MOD"

 

This t-shirt chronicles the infamous "Hacker War" between rival

groups The Legion of Doom and  The Masters of Destruction.  The front

of the shirt displays a flight map of the various battle-sites

hit by MOD and tracked by LOD.  The back of the shirt

has a detailed timeline of the key dates in the conflict, and

a rather ironic quote from an MOD member.

 

(For a limited time, the original is back!)

 

"LEGION OF DOOM  --  INTERNET WORLD TOUR"

 

The front of this classic shirt displays "Legion of Doom Internet World

Tour" as well as a sword and telephone intersecting the planet

earth, skull-and-crossbones style.  The back displays the

words "Hacking for Jesus" as well as a substantial list of "tour-stops"

(internet sites) and a quote from Aleister Crowley.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

All t-shirts are sized XL, and are 100% cotton.

 

Cost is $15.00 (US) per shirt.  International orders add $5.00 per shirt for

postage.

 

Send checks or money orders.  Please, no credit cards, even if

it's really your card.

 

 

Name:       __________________________________________________

 

Address:    __________________________________________________

 

City, State, Zip:   __________________________________________

 

 

I want ____ "Hacker War" shirt(s)

 

I want ____ "Internet World Tour" shirt(s)

 

Enclosed is $______ for the total cost.

 

 

Mail to:   Chris Goggans

           603 W. 13th #1A-278

           Austin, TX 78701

 

 

These T-shirts are sold only as a novelty items, and are in no way

attempting to glorify computer crime.



 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



     LIBERTARIAN PARTY ANNOUNCES OPPOSITION TO DIGITAL TELEPHONY ACT



 NEWS FROM THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY

 1528 Pennsylvania Avenue SE

 Washington DC 20003



 For additional information:

 Bill Winter, Director of Communications

        (202) 543-1988







        Calling it a "serious infringement of civil liberties and a

 gross violation of property rights," the Libertarian Party National

 Committee unanimously voted to oppose the Digital Telephony and

Communications Act of 1994. 



        At their quarterly meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, the

 governing body of America's third-largest political party charged that

 "the Digital Telephony Act would make furnishing the FBI with easy

 wiretapping capability the overriding priority for designers of

 telephone equipment and related software."



        "It is a lie to call this legislation a 'Privacy Improvement

 Act,'" said Bill Evers, the National Committee member from California

 who sponsored the resolution.



        The Digital Telephony Act, noted the resolution, "requires

 telephone, cable television, and computer network companies to ensure

 that the government can conduct surveillance while private communication 

 is going on. It requires the installation of surveillance-facilitating

 software in telephone switching equipment to expose personal information -- 

 such as telephone-calling patterns, credit card purchases, banking

 records, and medical records -- to the view of the government."



        "Such personal information should be the private property of

 either the company that assembles it or the individual to whom it

 pertains," said Evers.



        Libertarians also oppose the Digital Telephony Act because it

 "would require a fundamental re-engineering of the communications

 infrastructure at great expense to American taxpayers, and to the

 owners of private communications systems," said Evers.



        The Libertarian National Committee also unanimously voted to

 oppose the National Security Agency's Escrowed Encryption Standard -

 the so-called Clipper Chip system - or any "government policies

 promoting or requiring specific encryption methods for civilian use."

 The party also urged the "repeal of the U.S. ban on export abroad of

 Clipper-free encryption devices produced by American companies."



        "Government-mandated encryption standards will foster

 indiscriminate surveillance of private communications by the

 government," charged Evers. 



        The resolution said "the Clinton Administration plans to induce 

 American manufacturers to install government-readable encryption devices 

 in every telephone, fax machine, and computer modem made in the United 

 States."



        "The Clinton Administration is explicitly denying that the

 American people have the right to communicate in private," said Evers.

 By contrast, he said, "The Libertarian Party has long upheld the civil

 liberties of the American citizen."



        Approximately 120 Libertarians serve in elected and appointed

 office around the country, including four State Representatives in New

 Hampshire and two mayors in California. The Libertarian Party platform

 calls for vigorous defense of the Bill of Rights, free enterprise,

 civil liberties, free trade, and private charity.



 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%







                             UNABOM

                       $1,000,000 Reward

                 SERIES OF 14 UNSOLVED BOMBINGS





 William L. Tafoya, Ph.D. Special Agent, FBI

 UNABOM Task Force, San Francisco, CA (btafoya@orion.arc.nasa.gov)

 



   Beginning in May, 1978, a series of 14 bombing incidents have 

 occurred across the United States for which there is no apparent 

 explanation or motive.  No person or group has been identified as 

 the perpetrator(s) of these incidents.  The explosions have taken 

 place in seven states from Connecticut to California.  As a result 

 of these bombings, one person has been killed and 23 others 

 injured, some grievously.  There had been no incidents identified 

 with this series of bombings since 1987. However that changed in 

 late June, 1993, when a well known geneticist residing in Tiburon, 

 California, and a renown computer scientist from Yale University, 

 New Haven, Connecticut, opened packages which had been mailed to 

 them and both were severely injured when these packages exploded.  



   In the past, targets of the bomber have been associated with 

 the computer industry, the aircraft and airline industry and 

 universities.  Seven of these devices have been mailed to specific 

 individuals and the other seven have been placed in locations 

 which suggest there was no specific intended victim. All but two 

 of the explosive devices functioned as designed and exploded.  All 

 14 crimes, dubbed "UNABOM", have had common effects:  all have 

 caused terror, grief, and fear.  On September 11, 1985, Hugh 

 Scrutton, the owner of the Rentech Computer Company, in 

 Sacramento, California, was killed by one of these diabolic 

 devices.  The two most recent victims narrowly escaped death.  



   In response to the June, 1993, events, the Attorney General 

 directed that a task force of federal law enforcement agencies be 

 reestablished to urgently investigate and solve these crimes. The 

 UNABOM Task Force, consisting of investigators from the FBI, ATF, 

 and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, has been operational in 

 San Francisco and Sacramento, California, since July 12, 1993, and 

 is dedicated exclusively to the investigation of these crimes.  



   Among the clues in the case are the following words in what 

 appears to be a note possibly written by the bomber as a reminder 

 to make a telephone call:  "call Nathan R--Wed 7PM."  The UNABOM 

 Task Force believes that "Nathan R" may be associated, perhaps 

 innocently, with the bomber and that "Nathan R" may have received 

 a telephone call from the bomber on a Wednesday prior to the June, 

 1993 bombings.



   The two most recent tragic bombings illustrate the senseless 

 and tragic consequences of these crimes and demonstrate the urgent 

 necessity of solving this case.  This serial bomber will strike 

 again.  We do not know who the next victim will be.  We do believe 

 that there is someone out there who can provide the identity of 

 the person or persons responsible for these crimes. This person 

 may be a friend, a neighbor, or even a relative of the bomber(s).



	UNABOM's chronology is as follows:



 1)  Northwestern University

     Evanston, Illinois

     May 25, 1978           



   A package was found in the Engineering Department parking lot 

 at the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois. The 

 package was addressed to an Engineering Professor at Rensselaer 

 Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.  The package had a return 

 address of a Professor at Northwestern's Technological Institute.  

 The package was returned to the addressor who turned it over to 

 the Northwestern University Police Department because he had not 

 sent the package.  On May 26, 1978 the parcel was opened by a 

 police officer who suffered minor injuries when the bomb 

 detonated.



 2)  Northwestern University

     Evanston, Illinois

     May 9, 1979            



   A disguised explosive device which had been left in a common 

 area in the University's Technological Institute, slightly injured 

 a graduate student on May 9, 1979, when he attempted to open the 

 box and it exploded. 



 3)  Chicago, Illinois

     November 15, 1979



   An explosive device disguised as a parcel was mailed from 

 Chicago for delivery to an unknown location.  The bomb detonated 

 in the cargo compartment of an airplane, forcing it to make an 

 emergency landing at Dulles Airport.  Twelve individuals were 

 treated for smoke inhalation.  The explosion destroyed the 

 wrapping to such an extent that the addressee could not be 

 determined.



 4)  Chicago, Illinois

     June 10, 1980    



   A bomb disguised as a parcel postmarked June 8, 1980 was 

 mailed to an airline executive at his home in Lake Forest, 

 Illinois.  The airline executive was injured in the explosion.



 5)  University of Utah

     Salt Lake City, Utah

     October 8, 1981     



   An explosive device was found in the hall of a classroom 

 building and rendered safe by bomb squad personnel.  



 6)  Vanderbilt University

     Nashville, Tennessee

     May 5, 1982          



   A wooden box containing a pipe bomb detonated on May 5, 1982, 

 when opened by a secretary in the Computer Science Department.  

 The secretary suffered minor injuries.  The package was initially 

 mailed from Provo, Utah on April 23, 1982, to Pennsylvania State 

 University and then forwarded to Vanderbilt.  



 7)  University of California

     Berkeley, California

     July 2, 1982            



   A small metal pipe bomb was placed in a coffee break room of 

 Cory Hall at the University's Berkeley Campus.  A Professor of 

 Electrical Engineering and Computer Science was injured when he 

 picked up the device.  



 8)  Auburn, Washington

     May 8, 1985       



   A parcel bomb was mailed on May 8, 1985, to the Boeing 

 Company, Fabrication Division.  On June 13, 1985, the explosive 

 device was discovered when employees opened it.  The device was 

 rendered safe by bomb squad personnel without injury.



 9)  University of California

     Berkeley, California

     May 15, 1985            



   A bomb detonated in a computer room at Cory Hall on the 

 Berkeley Campus.  A graduate student in Electrical Engineering 

 lost partial vision in his left eye and four fingers from his 

 right hand.  The device was believed to have been placed in the 

 room several days prior to detonation.



 10)  Ann Arbor, Michigan

      November 15, 1985  



   A textbook size package was mailed to the home of a 

 University of Michigan Professor in Ann Arbor, Michigan from Salt 

 Lake City.  On November 15, 1985, a Research Assistant suffered 

 injuries when he opened the package.  The Professor was a few feet 

 away but was not injured.





 11)  Sacramento, California

      December 11, 1985     



   Mr. Hugh Scrutton was killed outside his computer rental 

 store when he picked up a device disguised as a road hazard left 

 near the rear entrance to the building.  Metal shrapnel from the 

 blast ripped through Scrutton's chest and penetrated his heart.



 12)  Salt Lake City, Utah

      February 20, 1987   



   On February 20, 1987, an explosive device disguised as a road 

 hazard was left at the rear entrance to CAAMs, Inc. (computer 

 store).  The bomb exploded and injured the owner when he attempted 

 to pick up the device.



 13)  Tiburon, California

      June 22, 1993      



   On June 22, 1993, a well known geneticist received a parcel 

 postmarked June 18, 1993, at his residence.  The doctor attempted 

 to open the package at which time it exploded severely injuring 

 him.  It has been determined that this parcel was mailed from 

 Sacramento, California. 



 14)  Yale University

      New Haven, Connecticut

      June 24, 1993         

  

   On June 24, 1993, a Professor/Computer Scientist at Yale 

 University attempted to open a parcel which he had received at his 

 office.  This parcel exploded severely injuring him.  It has been 

 determined that this parcel was mailed from Sacramento, California 

 on June 18, 1993.



   At this time, the UNABOM Task Force would appeal to the 

 public for assistance.  For this purpose, a one million dollar 

 reward is being offered for information which results in the 

 identification, arrest and conviction of the person(s) 

 responsible.  Contact the UNABOM Task Force at 1-(800) 701-

 2662.







 William L. Tafoya, Ph.D.

 Special Agent, FBI

 UNABOM Task Force

 San Francisco, CA

 btafoya@orion.arc.nasa.gov

 



 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 





                   MASSACHUSETTS ENCRYPTION BILL





                    THE STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS

  

       MASSACHUSETTS 179TH GENERAL COURT -- 1994 REGULAR SESSION



 HOUSE NO.  4491

 BY MR. COHEN OF NEWTON, PETITION OF DAVID B.  COHEN AND ANOTHER RELATIVE

 TO ESTABLISHMENT OF THE PRIVACY OF PERSONAL RECORDS LAW AND REGULATING THE

 TECHNOLOGY OF DATA  ENCRYPTION.  THE JUDICIARY.

                       



                                                  February 25, 1994



 AN ACT RELATIVE TO THE TECHNOLOGY OF DATA  ENCRYPTION. 

 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General

 Court assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:



 SECTION 1.  The General Laws are hereby amended by inserting after

 chapter sixty-six A the following chapter:



 CHAPTER 66B. MASSACHUSETTS PRIVACY OF PERSONAL RECORDS ACT.



 Section 1. For the purposes of this chapter the following terms shall

 have the following meanings:



 "Personal data files", any machine readable information or information

 in a state of electronic, optic, or other computer based transmission

 which is capable of being read, stored, copied, transmitted, changed,

 or deleted by or through computer or telecommunications devices and

 which relates to or describes any person, including a corporation,

 partnership or sole proprietorship, or such person's real or personal

 property. It shall include, but not be limited to, magnetic tapes,

 disks, cartridges, floppy disks, CD-ROM's, optical cubes or other

 optical storage devices, documents printed in magnetic ink or OCR

 symbol sets, and any other medium capable of being read or stored at

 high speed, in large volume, or without substantial human

 intervention.  The term denotes the substance of the information as

 distinguished from the incidental medium of its storage or

 transmission.



 " Encrypted" , changed in form by programmed routines or algorithms so

 as to be unintelligible to any person without employing a suitable

 decryption routine or algorithm. 



 "Decryption", the reverse process of  encryption,  so as to restore any

 data so  encrypted  to its original, human readable form. 



 "Routine or algorithm", any series of discrete steps in a computer,

 microprocessor, or calculator native machine language which is

 performed as a unit to  encrypt  or decrypt data, or to present such

 decrypted data on an end user display medium; provided, however, that

 it shall not include source code written in any human readable

 language.



 "End user display medium", a video display terminal or paper.



 "Source code", any programming language used to produce the native

 machine language described in the definition of "routine or

 algorithm". 



 "Authorized end user", any person, including a corporation,

 partnership, sole proprietorship, or governmental body for whose

 specific use the data in question is produced. If shall specifically

 exclude any person, including a corporation, partnership, sole

 proprietorship, or governmental body into or through whose possession

 said data may pass before reaching said authorized end user. 



 "Numeric data", symbols representing exclusively quantities.  It shall

 specifically exclude expressions containing number which represent

 nonnumeric entities including, but not limited to, social security

 numbers, license numbers, bank account numbers, street addresses, and

 the like.



 "Custodian", a person, including a corporation, partnership, sole

 proprietorship, or governmental body, that has access of any kind

 whatsoever to personal data files. 



 "Live data", any personal data which currently represents or at any

 time in the past had represented any actual person, including a

 corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship or such person's

 property.



 SECTION 2.  Personal data files within the commonwealth shall be

 encrypted.



 SECTION 3.  Decryption of  encrypted  data may be accomplished only by,

 for, or on behalf of the authorized end user of such data, and only to

 render such data into human readable form for the use of such

 authorized end user or an end user display medium.  Any intermediate

 storage or transmission of decrypted data in machine readable form

 shall be a violation of this chapter.



 SECTION 4.  Machine executable routines or algorithms used to decrypt

 encrypted  data shall reside only in those routines or algorithms which

 present the data to authorized end users upon end user media. Source

 code for such routines or algorithms shall reside only at the situs of

 the authorized end user or at the situs of a party engaged in the

 development or maintenance of said source code.  No party so engaged

 may use live data for any purpose whatsoever except as provided in this

 chapter.



 SECTION 5.  Any copy, excerpt, summary, extension, transmission, or

 other transfer of any personal data, whether or not originally

 encrypted,  shall be encrypted  during such transfer until it reaches

 the authorized end user.



 SECTION 6.  Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter,

 numeric data may be stored in decrypted form during testing of summary

 or other numeric routines or algorithms in connection with development

 or maintenance of software whose purpose is the processing or display

 of such data for the use of the authorized end user, where such testing

 would be rendered impossible or unreasonably burdensome using

 encrypted  data.  For the purposes of this section, amounts used to

 calculate simple algebraic sums shall not qualify for decrypted storage

 under this section.



 SECTION 7.  Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, any

 personal data which is stored and maintained exclusively or generally

 for the purpose of providing access to such data by the public shall be

 exempted for the encryption  requirements this chapter.  The exemption

 provided hereby shall extend to excerpts, and compilations of such

 data, however and by whomever used.  Any and all other data from other

 sources which are not specifically exempted under this section or under

 sections nine or ten shall be  encrypted, whether or not merged,

 appended, inserted, or otherwise attached to exempted data, and are

 subject to all of the provisions of this chapter in the same manner as

 if such exempted data did not exist.



 SECTION 8.  Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, any

 routines or algorithms used for the decryption of  encrypted  data may

 be provided to the appropriate law enforcement agencies for the purpose

 of assuring compliance with various national, state, and local laws.

 For the purposes of this section, such law enforcement agencies shall

 be considered authorized end users.



 SECTION 9.  Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, any

 person may waive the protections afforded by this chapter. Evidence of

 such waiver must be given in writing by such person to each custodian

 of data pertaining to said person.  When more than one person is

 entitled to protection under this chapter, by virtue of joint ownership

 or other such relationship, no waiver shall be effective unless signed

 by all parties so involved.  Such waiver shall be construed to waive

 protection only with respect to the specific kinds or elements of

 information enumerated on its face, and shall operate to exclude only

 encryption  of said data by the particular custodian of such data as is

 named in said waiver and in whose possession to waiver is kept. The

 waiver may operate in perpetuity or be limited to a particular time.

 Any ambiguities in any waiver given under this section shall be

 resolved in favor of encryption of the most data colorable under its

 terms.



 SECTION 10.  Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter,

 decrypted data may be stored in a secure location apart from the situs

 of any user of such data, provided that the sole purpose to which such

 data shall be put shall be to restore data which has been lost or

 corrupted. Any routines or algorithms used to restore used files using

 said decrypted data shall employ  encryption rountines or algorithms as

 required by this chapter.  For the purposes of this section, decryption

 routines or algorithms may be considered lost or corrupted if a

 reasonable belief exists that security employed in the custody of such

 routines or algorithms has been breached.



 SECTION 11.  Reasonable security shall be employed by persons in the

 management of the routines and algorithms used for the  encryption  and

 decryption of data, as required by this chapter. Such secuirty shall

 consist as a minimum in the storage of such routines and algorithms at

 one situs and the nature and location of its associated data at

 another.



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                    BOOK REVIEW:  INFORMATION WARFARE

                   CHAOS ON THE ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAY

                            By Winn Schwartau



 INFORMATION WARFARE - CHAOS ON THE ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAY

 By Winn Schwartau.  (C)opyright 1994 by the author

 Thundermouth Press, 632 Broadway / 7th floor / New York, NY 10012

 ISBN 1-56025-080-1 - Price $22.95

 Distributed by Publishers Group West, 4065 Hollis St. / Emeryville, CA 94608

 (800) 788-3123



 Review by Scott Davis (dfox@fennec.com)



 If you only buy one book this year, make sure it is INFORMATION WARFARE!

 In my 10+ years of existing in cyberspace and seeing people and organizatons

 debate, argue and contemplate security issues, laws, personal privacy,

 and solutions to all of these issues...and more, never have I seen a more

 definitive publication. In INFORMATION WARFARE,  Winn Schwartau simply

 draws the line on the debating. The information in this book is hard-core,

 factual documentation that leaves no doubt in this reader's mind that

 the world is in for a long, hard ride in regards to computer security.

 The United States is open to the world's electronic terrorists.

 When you finish reading this book, you will find out just how open we are.

 

 Mr. Schwartau talks about industrial espionage, hacking, viruses, 

 eavesdropping, code-breaking, personal privacy, HERF guns, EMP/T bombs,

 magnetic weaponry, and the newest phrase of our generation...

 "Binary Schizophrenia". He exposes these topics from all angles. If you

 spend any amount of time in Cyberspace, this book is for you.



 How much do you depend on technology? 



 ATM machines, credit cards, toasters, VCR's, televisions, computers,

 telephones, modems...the list goes on. You use technology and computers

 and don't even know it! But the point is...just how safe are you from

 invasion? How safe is our country's secrets? The fact is - they are NOT

 SAFE! How easy is it for someone you don't know to track your every move

 on a daily basis? VERY EASY! Are you a potential victim to fraud,

 breech of privacy, or general infractions against the way you carry

 on your daily activities? YES! ...and you'd never guess how vulnerable

 we all are!



 This book will take you deep into places the government refuses to 

 acknowledge. You should know about INFORMATION WARFARE. Order your

 copy today, or pick it up at your favorite book store. You will not

 regret it.



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                        WHISPER WHO: A Unix tool



 Here is a handy little tool for you to use on your Unix machine. Follow the

 instructions provided!



 -------cut here-------------------cut here---------------cut here------------



/*****************************************************************************

 *  This program can be changed without too much trouble to a program        *

 *  that logs everybody in and out of a system.  Need to add                 *

 *  signal(SIGHUP,SIG_IGN) to it though, so it continues after you are gone. *

 *  This program whispers to you when somebody logs on or off, and is pretty *

 *  hard to kill. ( you have to send SIGKILL to kill this one.)              *

 *  As is right now, it will not stay active after you logoff. To prevent    *

 *  annoying anyone, just put it in your .profile.                           *

 *                                                                           *

 *  CUT THIS PART OUT OF THIS FILE AND NAME THE TEXT: wwho_1.c               *

 *                                                                           *

 *  To compile:   cc -o wwho wwho_1.c                                        *

 *            or  gcc -o wwho wwho_1.c                                       *

 *****************************************************************************/



#include <signal.h>

#include <stdio.h>

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <utmp.h>

#include <sys/stat.h>

#include <fcntl.h>



#define MAXPROCESSES 40



struct utmp who[MAXPROCESSES];   /* list of all rembered users on-line */

struct utmp u[MAXPROCESSES];     /* list of all users in the utmp file */

int counter = 0;                 /* number of users in memory */



void sig_hand(int sig) {

  register int x;

  x=0;

  switch(sig) {

    case 15: signal(SIGTERM,sig_hand);

    case 3: signal(SIGINT,sig_hand);

    for(x=0; x<counter; x++)

    printf(": Name: %s, Device: %s.\n",who[x].ut_name,who[x].ut_line);

    break;

    }

}



void main(int argc,char *argv) {

    int prio,      /* process id of 'child' process */

    u_handle, /* handle for the /etc/utmp file */

    z;        /* loop control varriable*/

    int pid;     /* process id of 'forked' process */



    if(argc>=2) prio = atoi(argv[1]);  /* if arg, then new prio = arg */

    if(argc < 2) prio = 20;   /* if no arg, then prio = 20 */

    pid = fork();            /* create new process */

    if(pid==-1) {            /* Cannot create new process error */

    printf(": cannot create process\n");

    exit(-1);

	}



    if(pid > 0 ) {   /* if initial program then print intro and exit */



    printf(": Wisper Who is now in effect.\n");

    printf(": Created process id %i\n",pid);

    exit(0);   /* exit copy of program that YOU ran */

	}

    nice(prio);  /* make low priority, be nice */

    signal(SIGQUIT,SIG_IGN); /* Ignore QUIT signal */

    signal(SIGINT,sig_hand);  /* ignore INTERRUPT signal */

    signal(SIGTERM,sig_hand);  /* Ignore TERMINATE signal */



    while(1) {     /* Main part of program.  Never ends */

		int x;

		register int y;



if((u_handle = open("/etc/utmp",O_RDONLY))==-1) { /* open utmp for reading */

printf(": Cannot Open /etc/utmp\n"); /* error in opening */

exit(0);

  }





   x = 0;   /* reset thr number of utmp entries to 0 */



   while(read(u_handle,&u[x],sizeof(u[x])) != 0) {  /* Read utmp file

                                                     * until EOF */

if(u[x].ut_type == USER_PROCESS) {  /* if not an user, then read next entry */

z = new_user(x);                /* check to see if new */

if(z==1) warn_em(x,0,0); /* if new, then warn */

    }

    x++;

 if(x>=MAXPROCESSES) {  /* TOO many process logged in. */

 printf(": Error -- More process are running than there are spaces\n");

 printf(": Error -- allocated for.\n");

 printf(": Error -- change 'MAXPROCESSES xx' to 'MAXPROCESSES %i'.\n",x+10);

 exit(-1);     /* Quit */

 }

 }



  close(u_handle);    /* close utmp */



 for(z=0; z<counter; z++) {         /* compare list to see if anybody */

     int c;                         /* logged out */



      c = 0;                        /* varriable that holds a 1 if *

                                     * still here, else a zero */



      for(y=0; y<x; y++) {          /* Loop to compare utmp file to *

                                     * remembered users */

      if(u[y].ut_type==USER_PROCESS) {  /* if process is a user...*/

      if(strcmp(who[z].ut_name,u[y].ut_name)==0) { /* compare */

      c=1;                            /* if same, break */

      break;

            }

            }

            }

      if(c!=1) warn_em(z,1,z);   /* if gone, warn */



            }

      sleep(10);

            }

}



/* new_user -- function that returns either a 1 or a 0 depending on

               whether that user is in the who list

            -- Pass it the entry number of the user in the utmp file */



int new_user(int y) {

    register int x;



    for(x=0; x<counter; x++) {     /* check to see if just logged in */

        if(strcmp(u[y].ut_name,who[x].ut_name)==0) return(0);

	}

    who[counter] = u[y];

    counter++;

	return(1);

}



/* warn_em  returns a 1 always.  Prints Messages to your device telling you

            whether somebosy logged in or out.

            All Normal Output, besides errors and intro */



int warn_em(int x,int code,int n_who) {

    char buff[9];

    buff[8]=0;

    if(code==0) {

    strncpy(buff,u[x].ut_name,8);

    printf(": %s has just logged in on device /dev/%s.\n",buff,u[x].ut_line);

    } else {

        strncpy(buff,who[x].ut_name,8);

        printf(": %s has just logged off.\n",buff);

        pack_who(n_who); /* make who list smaller */

	}

    return(1);              /* return OK */

}



/* pack_who  -- Packs the list of users on-line, and deletes the one that

                logged out.

             -- Pass it the number that the user was in the on-line list */



int pack_who(int dead) {    /* pack the who list of users on-line */

    register int z;         /* loop control */



  for(z=dead; z<counter-1; z++) {   /* loop to delete use that logged out */

  who[z] = who[z+1];

	}

    counter--;             /* decrement counter */

    return(1);             /* return OK */

}



 --------cut here-------------cut here---------------cut here---------------



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                              HACKER BARBIE



TO: Editors@fennec.com

Subject: 'Hacker' Barbie...



 (LA, California) Mattel announces their new line of Barbie products, the 

 "Hacker Barbie." These new dolls will be released next month. The aim of 

 these dolls is to revert the stereotype that women are numerophobic, 

 computer-illiterate, and academically challenged.

     

 This new line of Barbie dolls comes equipped with Barbie's very own 

 xterminal and UNIX documentation as well as ORA's "In a Nutshell" series. 

 The Barbie is robed in a dirty button-up shirt and a pair of worn-out jeans 

 with Casio all-purpose watches and thick glasses that can set ants on fire. 

 Pocket protectors and HP calculators optional.  The new Barbie has the 

 incredible ability to stare at the screen without blinking her eyes and to 

 go without eating or drinking for 12 hours straight. Her vocabulary mainly 

 consists of technical terms such as "IP address," "TCP/IP," "kernel," 

 "NP-complete," and "Alpha AXP's."

     

 "We are very excited about this product," said John Olson, Marketting 

 Executive, "and we hope that the Hacker Barbie will offset the damage 

 incurred by the mathophobic Barbie." A year ago, Mattel released Barbie 

 dolls that say, "Math is hard," with condescending companions Ken. The 

 Hacker Barbie's Ken is an incompetent consultant who frequently asks Barbie 

 for help.

     

 The leading feminists are equally excited about this new line of Barbie 

 dolls. Naomi Wuuf says, "I believe that these new dolls will finally 

 terminate the notion that women are inherently inferior when it comes to 

 mathematics and the sciences. However, I feel that Ken's hierarchical 

 superiority would simply reinforce the patriarchy and oppress the masses." 

 Mattel made no comment.

     

 Parents, however, are worried that they would become technologically behind 

 by comparison to the children when the Hacker Barbie comes out. "My daughter 

 Jenny plays with the prototype Hacker Barbie over yonder for two days," says 

 Mrs. Mary Carlson of Oxford, Mississippi, "and as y'all know, she now pays 

 my credit card bill. Ain't got no idea how she duz it, but she surely duz 

 it. I jus don't wanna be looked upon as a dumb mama." Mattel will be 

 offering free training courses for those who purchase the Hacker Barbie.

     

 The future Hacker Barbie will include several variations to deal with the 

 complex aspects of Barbie. "Hacker Barbie Goes to Jail" will teach computer 

 ethics to youngsters, while "BARB1E R1TES L1KE BIFF!!!" will serve as an 

 introduction to expository writing.



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                              The WELL: 

             Small Town on the Internet Highway System

   

 by Cliff Figallo (fig@well.sf.ca.us)



 [This document was adapted from a paper presented to the "Public 

 Access to the Internet" meeting sponsored by the John F. Kennedy 

 School of Government at Harvard University in May, 1993.

 You may distribute and quote from this piece as you wish, but

 please include the request that my name and contact information be 

 included with any quotations or distribution.

 Thank you. -- C.F.]



 Introduction



   The Internet serves as a routing matrix for electronic mail 

 messages, file transfers and information searches.  Internet 

 sites, those machines and sub-networks that are "internetworked", 

 have thus far served mostly as file archives, email 

 addresses and administrative caretakers for their locally 

 serviced users.  Historically, these sites have been universities, 

 corporations or military and government installations.  With 

 the popularization and commercialization of the Internet, new 

 models of Internet sites are connecting to the web of high 

 speed data lines.  



   One unique Internet site, accessible by anyone with an Internet 

 account, is The Whole Earth Lectronic Link (hereafter referred to 

 by its popular name, The WELL).  In the future, the Internet will 

 certainly feature many small, homegrown, regional commercial 

 systems like The WELL.  Such systems will pay for their own 

 operations and for their Internet connections through user fees, 

 handling all of the billing and administrative tasks relating to their 

 users, developing their own local community standards of behavior 

 and interaction.  Their users will often leave the "home" system, 

 going out through Internet gateways to other regional systems or 

 searching for information in the myriad databases of the Net.  Internet 

 voyagers will drop in to visit the unique communities they find 

 outside their home systems, sampling the local cultural flavors and 

 meeting and conversing with the individuals who inhabit those 

 systems.  



   The main attractions of these local Internet "towns" will prove to be 

 their characteristic online conversations and social conventions and

 their focus on specialized fields of knowledge or problem solving.  

 The WELL is a seminal example of what these small pioneering 

 towns on the Internet highway system will be like.



   The WELL is a computer-mediated public conferencing and 

 email system linked to the Internet through BARRNet, the 

 regional Internet vendor.  The WELL's  headquarters are 

 located in Sausalito, California.  It is co-owned by Point 

 Foundation (producers of Whole Earth Review and the Whole 

 Earth Catalogs) and Rosewood Stone, a financial investment 

 company owned the founder and ex-owner of Rockport Shoes.



   The WELL was, from its founding in 1985 until January of 

 1992, accessible to its users only via direct or packet switched 

 dialup.  It had carried stored-and-forwarded USENET news 

 groups since soon after startup.  These files were imported via 

 regular phone links with Internet-connected sites.  Among its 

 users were some small minority of students, academics and 

 technical professionals with Internet accounts on other 

 systems.  The feasibility of the WELL connecting to the Internet 

 increased steadily through the 1980s until financial, technical 

 and political conditions allowed it to happen.  It is significant, 

 though, that the character of the WELL developed under 

 conditions of relative network isolation.  Indeed, part of the 

 justification given by BARRNet, the regional Internet service 

 provider, for allowing a commercial system like the WELL to 

 connect through their facilities was the unique character of the 

 WELL as an established system with thriving and interesting 

 discussion, and its perceived value as a an information-

 generating resource for the Net.  The WELL would, they 

 figured, make an interesting and potentially rewarding 

 stopover on any user's Internet Tour.



   The WELL is often associated with the term "online 

 community".  The idea that community can develop through 

 online interaction is not unique to the WELL.  But the WELL, 

 because of its organizational and technical history, has survived  

 primarily through the online personal interaction of its 

 subscribers and staff rather than through successful business 

 strategy developed by its owners and managers.  The 

 discussion and dialog contained and archived on the WELL are 

 its primary products.  The WELL "sells its users to each other" 

 and it considers its users to be both its consumers and its 

 primary producers.  Databases of imported information and 

 libraries full of downloadable software are scarcely present.  

 Third-party services such as stock-trading news, wire services, 

 airline reservation access and software vendor support have 

 never been offered to any significant extent.



   The WELL today counts around 7,000 paying subscribers.  It 

 has a growing staff of over 12 and a gross annual income 

 approaching $2 million.  It is a small but healthy business and 

 has historically spent very little on advertising and promotion.  

 It gets far more than its share of free publicity and notoriety 

 through the Press coverage as compared to much larger 

 commercial systems.  This is so in spite of what most people 

 would consider a "user-hostile" interface and relatively high 

 pricing.



   The WELL had a rather unique upbringing.  I will describe its 

 early growth and the foundations of its character in the rest of 

 this paper.  I do this from the point of view of having been the 

 person in charge for six years, though I took great pains to de-

 emphasize the "in charge" part whenever possible.  I tried to 

 focus more on maintenance and the distribution of responsibility 

 through the user community rather than on control.   Though my 

 record for making the WELL a technical showpiece is not 

 without blemish, my main emphasis was in preserving 

 and supporting the exercise of freedom and creativity by the 

 WELL's users through providing an open forum for their interaction.



   It is my assertion that the actual exercise of free speech and 

 assembly in online interaction is among the most significant 

 and important uses of electronic networking; and that the value 

 of this practice to the nation and to the world may prove 

 critical at this stage in human history.  I regard the WELL as a 

 sample of the kind of small, diverse, grassroots service 

 provider that can and should exist in profusion, mutually accessible 

 through the open channels on the Internet.  



   The possibility that the future "Internet" (or whatever replaces 

 it) may be dominated by monolithic corporate-controlled 

 electronic consumer shopping malls and amusement parks is 

 antithetical to the existence and activity of free individuals in 

 the electronic communications world, each one able to interact 

 freely with other individuals and groups there.



A Very Brief Biography of the WELL



   Founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant as a 

 partnership of Point and NETI , the WELL came online in 

 February of 1985 and began taking paying customers April 1, 

 1985.  It's initial staff of one full-time and one part-time 

 employee grew to 12 paid employees and well over one 

 hundred online volunteers by 1992.   As of this date, The WELL 

 runs on a Sequent multi- processor mini-computer located in a 

 cramped room in a small office building next to the houseboat 

 docks in Sausalito, California.  The WELL has full Internet 

 connectivity which is currently offered for the use of its 

 subscribers at no surcharge.  Most users call in to the WELL 

 over regular phone lines and modems., and most long distance 

 customers reach the WELL using an X.25 commercial packet 

 network for an additional $4.00 per hour.  An increasing 

 number of users are logging in to the WELL via the Internet, 

 many using Internet accounts on commercial gatewayed 

 systems rather than the packet switching nets.



   The WELL's notable achievements are many, not the least of 

 which is that it has survived for eight years while so many 

 other startup systems, though much better-funded, have failed.  

 The Electronic Frontier Foundation was born largely out of the 

 free speech ferment that exists on the WELL and out of 

 discussions and debate that go on there concerning the unique 

 legal and regulatory paradoxes that confront users, managers 

 and owners of systems in this new communications medium.  

 These discussions also attract a population of journalists who 

 find cutting edge ideas and concepts arising constantly in the 

 WELL's forums.  Many other formal and informal organizations 

 and collaborations that are effecting the world today call the 

 WELL home.  



The WELL Story -- a Less Brief Biography



 Birth

 

   The WELL was the conceptual and partnered creation of Larry 

 Brilliant and Stewart Brand.  They agreed to have their 

 respective organizations cooperate in establishing and 

 operating a computer conferencing network that could serve as 

 a prototype for many regional (as opposed to national) 

 commercial systems.   "Let a thousand CompuServe's bloom," is 

 how Brilliant put it.



   Initial funding came from Brilliant's company, Networking 

 Technologies International (NETI) in the form of a leased VAX 

 11/750 computer and hard disks, UNIX system software, a 

 "conferencing" program called Picospan, and a loan of $90,000.  

 Point Foundation, the non-profit parent corporation of Whole 

 Earth Review,  contributed the name recognition of "Whole 

 Earth", the personal attraction of having Stewart Brand to 

 converse with online and the modest but important 

 promotional value of constant mention in the small circulation 

 but influential "Whole Earth Review" magazine.



   Business goals for The WELL were, from its inception, 

 purposefully flexible.  But the idea that interesting discussion 

 would attract interesting discussants was at the core of the 

 theory that drove the WELL's growth.  Initially, many free 

 accounts were offered to people who had, at one time or 

 another, been associated with Whole Earth publications and 

 events, or who were known by Whole Earth staff to be likely 

 productive and attractive participants (referred to, tongue-in-

 cheek, as "shills").  In April of 1985, the WELL began offering 

 subscriptions at $8 per month plus $3 per hour.



Initial Design and Rule making



    The WELL presented its first users with the sole disclaimer:   

 "You own your own words."  The owners of the WELL sought to 

 distance themselves from liability for any text or data posted 

 or stored online by WELL users while, at the same time, 

 providing a free space for creative, experimental and 

 unfettered communication.  An alternative interpretation of the 

 original disclaimer (now referred to as YOYOW) held that rather 

 than only laying responsibility for WELL postings at the feet of 

 the author, the phrase also imparted copyrighted ownership of 

 postings to the author under the implied protection and 

 enforcement of the WELL.  Management and ownership 

 resisted the onus of their serving as legal agent for the WELL's  

 users, recognizing the potential expense and futility of pursuing 

 people for electronically copying and using customers' words.  

 Thus, the evolving interpretation of YOYOW provided fuel for 

 years' worth of discussion on the topics of copyright,  

 intellectual property and manners in electronic space.  



   A general aversion to the making and enforcement of rigid 

 rules has continued at the WELL although incendiary incidents 

 and distressing situations have occasionally brought calls for 

 "more Law and Order" or absolute limits to speech.  WELL 

 management rejected these calls, resisting being put in the role 

 of policeman and judge except where absolutely necessary, and 

 espousing the view that the medium of online interpersonal 

 communication was (and still is) too immature, too formative to 

 be confined by the encumbrances of strict rules and 

 restrictive software.  The imposition by management of 

 arbitrary limitations on language and speech, aimed at 

 protecting the feelings or sensibilities of small groups of people 

 could not possibly protect all people's feelings and sensibilities.  

 Besides, by stifling free and open dialog, we might have lost 

 our chance to discover what kinds of interaction really worked 

 in this medium.  Interaction in public access systems seemed to 

 be much more productive, innovative, educational and 

 entertaining where there were fewer prohibitions imposed by 

 system management.  If limitations were to be imposed and 

 enforced, they could be handled best from within the user 

 population on a "local", not system wide basis.  The creation of 

 private interactive areas where such local rules held sway 

 allowed public forums to retain their openness while providing 

 more regulated "retreats" for those who felt they needed them. 



 Staff-Customer Collaboration

 

    Immediately after opening the system to public access, the 

 small WELL staff and the original participants began the 

 collaborative process of designing of a more friendly interface 

 from the raw Picospan software.  Picospan included a toolbox of 

 customization utilities that could be used to make changes on a 

 system-wide or at-user's-option basis.  Picospan was tightly-

 integrated with the UNIX operating system and could therefore 

 provide transparent access to programs written to operate in 

 the UNIX environment.  The libertarian, anti-authoritarian 

 philosophy of Picospan's author, Marcus Watts, showed through 

 in its design which prevented un-acknowledged censorship by 

 system administrators, forum moderators (hosts) or authors 

 themselves.  Picospan also allowed topics (discussion threads) 

 to be "linked" into several forums at once...a feature that aids 

 the cross-pollination of ideas and groups through the system.  

 The influence that Picospan has had on the WELL's 

 development as a community and hotbed of discussion cannot 

 be underestimated.  Its display of topics as continuously-

 scrolling dialog documents (rather than as fragmented 

 collections of individually-displayed responses) had a 

 tremendous effect on user involvement in ongoing discourse.



 Staff Background



    The background of four of The WELL's non-technical senior 

 managers--people who worked there during its first seven 

 years--must be considered very significant to the formation of 

 the WELL's open and independent culture.



   The first director of the WELL, Matthew McClure and myself, 

 his successor, both spent the decade of the 1970's living in an 

 intentional community of some renown called The Farm as did 

 the WELL's first customer service manager, John Coate, and his 

 successor, Nancy Rhine..  Undoubtedly, this experience of living 

 cooperatively in multi-family situations in a community that 

 reached a peak population of over 1500 adults and children, 

 had a profound influence on the style of management of The 

 WELL.  Principles of tolerance and inclusion, fair resource 

 allocation, distributed responsibility, management by example 

 and influence, a flat organizational hierarchy, cooperative 

 policy formulation and acceptance of a libertarian-bordering-

 on-anarchic ethos were all carryovers from our communal 

 living experience.  John Coate is known for having been integral 

 to the setting of a tone of the WELL where users and staff 

 intermingled both online and at the WELL's monthly office 

 parties.  He has authored a widely-distributed essay on 

 "Cyberspace Innkeeping" based on lessons learned in dealing 

 with customers in his time at the WELL..



 Maintaining a History

 

    An important component to the establishment of community in 

 any setting or medium is a historical record of its environs, its 

 people, and their works and the relationships and organizations 

 that defined the direction of the collective entity.  For a variety 

 of reasons besides the security of backups,  the WELL still has a 

 significant portion of its online interaction saved on archived 

 tape, on its user-accessible disks and in the possession of many 

 of its conference hosts who have made a practice of backing up 

 topics on their home machines before retiring them from the 

 WELL.  WELL users were always vocal in their insistence that a 

 history be kept and went so far as to create an Archives 

 conference where topics judged of historical significance from 

 other areas of the WELL were linked and eventually "frozen"  

 for future reference.  These valuable conversational threads, 

 this "history" of the WELL, contributes to its depth and feeling 

 of place and community.  New users and veterans alike can 

 refer to these archives for background to current discussion 

 and to sample the flavor of the WELL from its early days.  

 When new users, experiencing the same revelations that 

 stirred WELL veterans years ago, bring up their own 

 interpretations of "you own your words", they are referred to  

 the several preserved topics in Archives where lengthy online 

 deliberations on the subject have been preserved..



 Connections

 

    Originally, only direct dial modems could be used to reach the 

 WELL, but by the end of its first year of operation, an X.25 

 packet system was in place allowing long distance users to 

 reach the WELL at reasonable cost.  The WELL kept its San 

 Francisco focus because local callers had cheaper access and 

 could stay online longer for the same cost, but national and 

 international participants were now more encouraged to join in.



    Also, in 1986, Pacific Bell conducted a test of a regional packet-

 switched network for which the WELL was enrolled as a "beta" 

 site.  For most of a year, users from most of the San Francisco 

 Bay Area were able to dial in to the WELL without phone toll 

 charges.  This fortuitous circumstance helped boost the WELL's 

 subscription base and connected many valuable customers 

 from the Silicon Valley area into the growing user pool.



    Over time, the percentage of users from outside of the Bay 

 Area climbed slowly but steadily.  As word spread through 

 frequent unsolicited articles in the press, the WELL became 

 known as a locus for cutting edge discussion of technical, 

 literary and community issues, and it became even more 

 attractive to long distance telecommunicators. 



    On January 2, 1992, the WELL opened its connection to the 

 Internet through the regional provider, BARRNet.  After much 

 debugging and adjustment and a complete CPU upgrade, full 

 Internet service access was offered to WELL customers in June 

 of 1992.  Staff and users opened an Internet conference on the 

 WELL where discussions and Q&A take place and where new 

 features, discoveries and tools are shared.  The Internet 

 conference serves as a "living manual" to the resources, use and 

 news of the Net.



 Community

 

    In a medium where text is the only means of communication, 

 trust becomes one of the most difficult but essential things to 

 build and maintain.  With no audible or visual clues to go by, 

 the bandwidth for interpersonal communication is quite thin.  

 There are, though, ways in which trust can be built even 

 through the small aperture of telecommunicated text.



    By being deliberately non-threatening, owners and managers can 

 eliminate one of the major barriers to trust on the system.  One of the 

 most menacing conditions experienced by new users of public 

 conferencing systems is that of hierarchical uncertainty.  Who holds 

 the Power?  What is their agenda?  What are The Rules?  Who is 

 watching me and what I do?  Do I have any privacy?  How might a 

 "Big Brother" abuse me and my rights?  The WELL Whole Earth 

 parentage brought with it a historical reputation of collaboration 

 between publisher and reader.  Whole Earth catalogs and magazines 

 were widely-known for soliciting and including articles and reviews 

 written by their readers.  Whole Earth customers knew that the 

 publications had no ulterior motives, were not owned and controlled 

 by multi-national corporations and did not spend their revenues on 

 making anyone rich.  Readers supported the publications and the 

 publications featured and came clean with the readers.  We strove to 

 continue that kind of relationship with our customers on the WELL 

 although the immediacy of feedback often made openness a tricky 

 proposition.



    We realized that we were in a position of ultimate power 

 as operators of the system; able to create and destroy user 

 accounts, data, communications at will.  It was incumbent on 

 us, then, to make clear to all users our assumptions and the 

 ground rules of the WELL in order to minimize any concerns 

 they might have about our intentions.  Our aim was to be as 

 much out front with users as possible.  Indeed, John Coate 

 and I took the initiative, posting long autobiographical stories 

 from our communal past, inviting users to join us in problem-

 solving discussions about the system and the business around 

 it, confessing to areas of ignorance and lack of experience in the 

 technical end of the business, and actively promoting the users 

 themselves as the most important creators of the WELL's 

 product.



   Staff members were encouraged to be visible online and to be 

 active listeners to user concerns in their respective areas of 

 responsibility.  Staff took part in discussions not only about 

 technical matters and customer service, but about 

 interpersonal online ethics.  When the inevitable online 

 quarrels surfaced, staff participated alongside users in 

 attempts to resolve them.  Over time, both staff and users 

 learned valuable lessons and a "core group" of users began to 

 coalesce around the idea that some kind of community was 

 forming and that it could survive these periodic emotional 

 firestorms.  The ethical construct that one could say whatever 

 one wanted to on the WELL, but that things worked best if it 

 was said with consideration of others in mind, became 

 ingrained in enough peoples' experience that community 

 understandings developed.  These "standards" were not written 

 down as rules, but are noted conspicuously in the WELL's User 

 Manual and are mentioned online as observations of how 

 things really seem to work.  Productive communication in this 

 medium can take place if it is done with care.



    Beginning in 1986, the WELL began sponsoring monthly face-

 to-face gatherings open to all, WELL user or not.  Initially, 

 these Friday night parties were held in the WELL's small 

 offices, but as attendance grew and the offices became even 

 more cramped, the potluck gatherings, still called WELL Office 

 Parties (or WOPs) moved to other locations, eventually finding 

 a regular home at the Presidio Yacht Club near the foot of the 

 North end of the Golden Gate Bridge.  These in-person 

 encounters have been an integral and important part of the 

 WELL's community-building.  They are energetic, intense, 

 conversation-saturated events where people who communicate 

 through screen and keyboard day after day get to refresh 

 themselves with the wider bandwidth of physical presence.  

 Often, the face to face encounter has served to resolve 

 situations where the textual communications have broken 

 down between people. 



 Collaboration Part II

 

    The WELL was a bootstrap operation from its initial investment 

 in 1985.  As a business venture, it was undercapitalized and 

 struggled constantly to stay ahead of its growth in terms of its 

 technical infrastructure and staffing.  At the same time, it stuck 

 to the ideal of charging its users low fees for service.  The 

 undercapitalization of the WELL and the low user charges 

 combined to force management into a constant state of creative 

 frugality.  From the first days of operation, the expertise and 

 advice of users was enlisted to help maintain the UNIX 

 operating system, to write documentation for the conferencing 

 software, to make improvements in the interface and to deal 

 with the larger problems such as hardware malfunctions and 

 upgrades.



   Over the years, many tools have been invented, programmed 

 and installed at the suggestion of or through the actual labor of 

 WELL users.  In an ongoing attempt to custom design the 

 interface so as to offer a comfortable environment for any user, 

 the WELL has become, if not a truly user-friendly environment, 

 a very powerful tool kit for the online communications 

 enthusiast.  One of the basic tenets of the WELL is that "tools, 

 not rules" are preferred solutions to most people-based  

 problems.  Menu-driven tools were created to give control of 

 file privacy to users, allowing them to make their files 

 publicly-readable or invisible to others.  The "Bozo filter", 

 created by a WELL user, allows any user to choose not to see 

 the postings of any other user.  Some WELL veterans, after 

 years of teeth-gritting tolerance of an abrasive individual, can 

 now be spared any online exposure to or encounter with that 

 individual.



    Other tools have been written to facilitate file transfers, to 

 allow easy setup of USENET group lists, to find the cheapest 

 ways to access the WELL, and to extract portions of online 

 conversations based on a wide range of criteria.  These tools 

 have all been written  by WELL users, who received only free online 

 time in exchange for their work, or by WELL employees who were 

 once customers.



    Free time on the WELL (comptime) has always been awarded 

 liberally by WELL management in exchange for services.  At 

 one time, half of the hours logged on the WELL in a month was 

 uncharged, going to comptime volunteers or staff.  Hosting 

 conferences, writing software, consulting on technical issues 

 and simply providing interesting and provocative conversation 

 have all earned users free time on the WELL.  Much as we 

 would have liked to pay these valuable people for their 

 services, almost to a person they have continued to contribute 

 to the WELL's success as a business and public forum, 

 demonstrating to us that they considered the trade a fair one.



 Conclusion

  

   As can be seen, the WELL developed from its unusual roots in 

 some unique ways.  The purpose of this piece is not to advocate 

 more WELL clones on the Net, but to demonstrate that if the 

 WELL could make it, other systems of the WELL's size and 

 general description could spawn from equally unique 

 circumstances around the country and offer their own special 

 cultural treasures to the rest of the world through the Internet.  

 What has been learned at the WELL can certainly be of value 

 when planning new systems because the WELL experiment has 

 demonstrated that big funding bucks, elegant interface design, 

 optimum hardware  and detailed business planning are not 

 essential to growing a thriving online community and, in the 

 WELL's case, a successful for-profit business.  More important 

 is that the owners and managers of the systems openly foster 

 the growth of online community and that there be a strong 

 spirit of open collaboration between owners, managers and 

 users in making the system succeed.  These critical elements of 

 viable community systems are attainable by local and regional 

 civic networks, small organizations and entrepreneurs with 

 limited funding and technical skills... and some heart.



 *****************************



Cliff Figallo (fig@eff.org) is a Wide Area Community Agent who

also works part time as Online Communications Coordinator 

for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Before coming to work 

at EFF, Cliff was Director of the Whole Earth Lectronic Link for 

six years (Aug '86 through July '92).  Cliff now lives in the San 

Francisco area and works remotely at his job using the 

Internet, Pathways, the WELL, CompuServe and America Online daily.

He can be reached via email at the following addresses:

fig@well.sf.ca.us    fig@eff.org    fig@path.net    fig@aol.com

76711,320@compuserve.com



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                 THE FEMINIZATION OF CYBERSPACE



 by Doctress Neutopia (neutopia@educ.umass.edu)



     During the final year of my doctoral work I discovered the new

 world of Cyberspace.  Having been involved in utopian thought for

 more than fifteen years, inventing my own utopia from the ideas of

 such futurists and architects as Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

 Starhawk, Eiane Eisler, Paolo Soleri, Buckminster Fuller, etc,

 which I call Neutopia, I find the world of virtual reality is the

 perfect place for my Neutopian imagination be to born into reality.

 The central nervous system of Neutopia is the evolving Global Brain

 which we are now seeing come about through information technologies

 and the world of Cyberspace.

     

     Cyberspace is changing the very nature of text.  Electronic

 text takes us into the age of non-text which means writing has

 become solely an electronic experience requiring no paper form. 

 Printed matter is no longer necessary in the world of Cyberspace. 

 In this world today, the power of ideas, and to some degree one's

 writing style and skills is the persuader. In the ideal sense,

 Cyberspace becomes a place for the autonomous individual, a place

 where the integrity of the Self is the determining factor of social

 prestige.  With the elimination of printed matter and the

 decentralized nature of email, a new relationship between

 authoress/author and audience is opening up.  Editors who have had

 the centralized control over the printed word are no longer the all

 powerful controller of literature since in Cyberspace the unknown

 poetess can post a message along side a literary giant.  Because of

 the democratizing aspects of the Usenet open forum, the matter in

 which one gains social status is also changing.  In Cyberspace,   

 literary merit is achieved through the depth and sincerity of one's

 message.  In other words, the old hierarchal structures of language

 and the old gatekeepers of ideas are being broken down as you read

 these words.

 

     Nevertheless, Cyberspace is no paradise on Earth.  Quite the

 contrary!  I don't believe I am being an extremist to say that

 there is a war against the feminist voice occurring in Cyberspace. 

 The Net term for such activity, which most of the postings of the

 discussion groups reflect, is called "flaming."  For me, the flames

 symbolize the "Burning Times" when civilization was moving from the

 Medieval Ages into the Renaissance and the rise the market economy.

 It was during this rebirth of classical thought when thousands of

 innocent women healers and religious leaders were being burned as

 heretics.

  

     A biologist friend has also pointed out to me that in his

 laboratory "flaming" means to sterilized a test tube from bacteria.

 In that sense, I feel that the "flaming" of my posts have been an

 attempt by some people to cleanse the Net from my non-conformist

 "disease".  After all, the Gaia Religion which I have been

 researching is about the role bacteria play in regulating life and

 love!



     Entering into the Computer Age, we find ourselves in another

 social transition.  The technological possibilities for

 revolutionary change on a world-wide level are now available to us.

 That is, if feminist ideology can come to the forefront of the

 dialogue.  Now, of course, as in the "real" world, the patriarchal

 religion of Capitalism is the dominant thought.  Anyone who opposes

 this thought are "flamed" for their "inappropriate behavior".  On

 many occasions, I have been "flamed" for my alternative Neutopian

 Vision, not by one individual, but by various Usenet and Listserve

 groups. 

 

     For example, I am subscribed to a Listserve called

 Leri@pyramid.com.  This group has about 200 people who are

 subscribed. There are two kinds of people on the myriad of

 Listserves, the Writers and the Lurkers.  Lurkers are people who

 compose the reading audience who occasionally voice an opinion, but

 for the most part, they are silent observers.  Of the writers, the

 majority are white upperly-mobile middle-class young men who are

 computer literate.  Many of them are from the scientific class who

 are busy creating the Technocracy.  When I began to point out the

 blatant sexist language and attitudes on Leri, I was "flamed" by

 members of this so called "virtual love commune." 

 

     We are seeing here a rise of a new form of tribalism.  If the

 tribal leaders (the Patriarchal Writers) sense a voice which might

 be threatening to the tribal harmony of the old-boys network, then

 the group attempts to eliminate that voice in opposition. 

 Unfortunately, for the most part, the educational system has not

 taught these young men to analyze and understand the reason why the

 feminist voice is annoying to their Establishment prevailing

 thought. Consequently, the Net has become but another sophisticated

 toy for rich minded college kids to entertain each other as the

 rest of the world starves to death and the global ecology

 collapses.



     There was much discussion which arose on Listserve Leri as to

 what to do about me.  Several writers declared my vision to be a

 "case of insanity." They even were discussing whether it was a case

 of biological or psychological aberration.  Others suggested that

 I needed to go to the self-help section of a book store and find a

 book which would help me fit into the society.  Others felt my

 "unhappy and depressed" character was a result of "inner confusion"

 and that if I changed myself [conform to their way of thinking],

 then I would be "liberated from oppression".  Still others believed

 that I would be saved if I found my way back to Christ or began to

 practice Buddhist meditation or yoga.

  

     Finally, it was decided that the best thing they could do with

 my heresy was to follow the example of the Shaker Community.  The

 worst punishment the Shakers did to a dissenting personality was to

 shun them and so this was what Listserve Leri proceeded to do to

 me.  Other technicians proposed to bar me by setting up the

 technology called "kill filters" so that my email messages would

 not even appear on their screens.

  

     There is also a IRC #leri channel where I began to go to

 explain my philosophy to the students in Real Time. When the

 conversation began to become controversial and conflicting ideas

 were pecking, the boys and the girls who think like boys, would

 type in an /ignore all neutopia messages so that I was blocked from

 the public dialogue.  Another tactic of censorship in IRC is the

 /kick ban which several of the boys threaten to set up so that I

 would not be kicked off the channel if I tried to enter it.  So

 much for democracy on the Net!



     During the holidays, Leri was going to hold a "fleshmeet" in

 New Mexico which all the members of the Leri Listserve were invited

 to so that people could meet one another in the living flesh. 

 However, when I expressed interested in attending the party, the

 hostess said that if I came "she would have me shot."  Then she

 wrote me a personal email with a one line message to the effect of

 "The Patriarchy Wins."  I was experiencing social ostracism for my

 feminist beliefs and it was a very loney and painful experience.



     But the worst treatment of all occurred on a sister list of

 Leri called Aleph@pyramid.com when the archivist said that he was

 deleting my posts from the archives.  This action was so malicious

 because I know this is what has happened to feminist thought

 throughout recorded history.  Women who resist the patriarchy are

 eliminated from the collective memory.  I recall a past life when

 I was being burned at the stake and the governmental/religious

 officials laughed at me as my flesh burned.  Before I fell

 unconscious from the smoke, the sinister officials took out my

 manuscripts which they had confiscated and threw them in the fire. 

 The messages of my life burned along with my body...my soul

 forgotten....my work unacknowledged...my poetic love verse

 destroyed. 

 

     The point is that there is a serious ideological war in

 progress in this underworld of Cyberspace, a place which also

 controls the nuclear weapons of the world through the Computer

 Empire.  This war is the same war which women have been struggling

 against for thousands of years.  As the millennium changes, so too

 is it time to end this war which is draining our vital resources

 that are needed to save the Biosphere from total destruction. It is

 time that women be acknowledged as the natural sovereigns of the

 species so that we will be in a position to use our knowledge and

 wisdom we have in creating a world where all our benevolent dreams

 find a way to self-actualize.



     My mission is to encourage Feminists to play an active role in

 the future of Cyberspace.  Here is a window of opportunity open for

 us to play our role essential in forming the future social

 architecture of Cyberspace.  If we, Feminists, do not act now and

 recruit other like minded Earthlings to take up the cause of the

 "Global Feminization of Cyberspace," then we will be caught in the

 same trap that we are in today.  It is time for us to demand a new

 world where everyone has access to the global resources...a world

 where everybody's spiritual and physical needs are met.  Only then

 will the Net become a vehicle of global emancipation and a home of

 the Neutopian thinker.



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                  RESPONSE TO THE FEMINIZATION OF CYBERSPACE



 By Jason Webb (jwebb@world.std.com)



 I am writing in response to the article THE FEMINIZATION OF

 CYBERSPACE by Doctress Neutopia (neutopia@educ.umass.edu).  The issues

 raised and the accusations made in the article are very serious and

 deserve some discussion.  



 The author cites cases in which her opinions were repressed in several 

 different ways ranging from individual kill files to having her messages

 elminiated from the archives of the group.  It seems to me that the real

 issue at stake is what the purpose of the Listserve groups is. 



 Clearly, if the purpose of the group is to promote the free expression

 of ideas they are not succeeding.  It is true that the internet does eliminate

 discrimination based on physical characteriscics.  Predictably, however, 

 technology alone cannot create a better world: we have to be active in trying

 to create an environment where all ideas can be expressed without the fear of

 being ostracized.



 On the flip side, a few of the authors statements are disturbing

 because they imply that the male species is to blame for all of these

 problems.  For example:



 >When the conversation began to become controversial and conflicting ideas

 >were pecking, the boys and the girls who think like boys, would

 >type in an /ignore all neutopia messages so that I was blocked from

 >the public dialogue. 



 >It is time that women be acknowledged as the natural sovereigns of the

 >species so that we will be in a position to use our knowledge and

 >wisdom we have in creating a world where all our benevolent dreams

 >find a way to self-actualize.



 Girls who think like boys? Natural soverigns of the species?  



 It seems hypocritical that the author complains of experiencing

 ostracism for voicing her feminist beliefs and then goes on to make

 such exclusionary statements herself. 



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



      THE EASY-TO-USE SOLVE THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION THEORY CHART



 By Gordon Fagan (flyer@fennec.com)



 Instructions:

 Write down the total # of persons involved.  Then write down the approximate 

 frame number of the Zapruder film that matches where you believe each shot 

 occurred.  Then it's a simple matter of going through the list and putting 

 an X under each shot number and beside each item that applies to that 

 particular shot.  If it doesn't apply, mark nothing.  If the item applies 

 but not to any particular shot number, then use the 0 shot#.  Mark  it with 

 an X for "conspiracy to kill" or an "O" for involved in the coverup (:It 

 also comes in handy for the "a tiger got him" crowd.:) I've tried to be as 

 thorough as possible, but to make sure everything was covered, I did leave 

 an "others" category with a fill-in-the-blank at the end of each section.  

 As for the exactness of your answers, use as close of approximations as you 

 feel comfortable with. Include all overlap, ie: if you believe Oswald fired 

 shot #4 but was under the command/control of Naval Intelligence - mark 

 Oswald and Naval Intelligence for shot #4.  For simultaneous shots, give 

 them both the same frame number.  It's pretty much self-explanatory once 

 you get into it.  Enjoy. 





  The JFK Conspiracy Theory Outline Form

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------|

  Total number of persons involved

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------|

 Conspiracy to Assassinate: __________

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------|

 Conspiracy to Coverup: __________

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------|

||||Shot# Reference line|||||||| 0  |  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  5 |  6 |  7 |  8 |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Approx. Zapruder frame of shot#|    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

-------(:note: if you believe in more than 8 shots, see your doctor:)-------|

shot# fired from:

    (0 means spotter/involved non-shooter)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

TSBD-6th floor - east end      |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

TSBD-6th floor-other           |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

TSBD-roof                      |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

TSBD-other                     |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

GK-black dog man position      |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

GK-badgeman position           |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

GK-other                       |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Dal-Tex                        |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Dal. County Records Bldg       |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Dallas County Court Bldg       |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

storm drain                    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

umbrella man                   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

other:_______________________  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

other:_______________________  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|



shot# Fired by: (Include all overlap)

    (0 means involved in/knew about but fired no shots)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Lee Harvey Oswald              |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Cuban (anti-Castro)            |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Cuban (pro-Castro)             |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Russian (anti-communist)       |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Russian (KGB/Pro-communist)    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Marseille professional         |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

other professional             |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Mafia                          |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

CIA                            |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

FBI                            |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Naval Intelligence             |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Lyndon Johnson                 |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Clay Shaw                      |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

David Ferrie                   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Roscoe White                   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

J.D Tippit                     |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Jack Ruby                      |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

umbrella man                   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

George Hickey (S.S) - AR-15    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

William Greer (S.S) - driver   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

nazis                          |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

UFO's/MJ-12,etc.               |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

government conspiracy/coverup  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

non-govt. conspiracy/coverup   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

other:_______________________  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

other:_______________________  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|



shot# to hit:                                                

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

John Kennedy                   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

John Connally                  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

James Tague                    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

grass                          |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

sidewalk/road                  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

limousine                      |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

street sign                    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

targetting "rice" bag          |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

other:_______________________  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

other:_______________________  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |

----------------------------------------------------------------------------|



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



 The original Hacker Crackdown text file, hacker.crackdown, has been expanded

 and worked upon, and is now available in many formats, including ASCII (as

 before), TeX DVI, PostScript, etc.  Look in:



 ftp://ftp.eff.org/pub/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Hacker_Crackdown/

 gopher://gopher.eff.org/00/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Hacker_Crackdown/

 http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Hacker_Crackdown/



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 

                          MEEKS DEFENSE FUND



From Meeks Defense Fund <fund@idi.net>

Subject: Details on Brock Meeks Case



Dear Net Citizen:

 

 The recent Internet posting launching a fund raising drive in

 order to help Brock Meeks defray the legal expenses of a lawsuit

 brought against his news wire, CyberWire Dispatch, has drawn

 several inquiries for a summary of the issues involved in this

 case.  In response, we have put together the following summary. 

 (Please note, too, that the case was featured in the April 22

 (Fri.) issue of the Wall St. Journal (page B1))



 Sometime during February of this year, an electronic solicitation

 began appearing on the Internet from a company identified only as

 the "Electronic Postal Service" (EPS).



 The solicitation from EPS said the service, "will pay you money

 to receive commercial e-mail. EPS estimates you will be paid an

 average of 6.5 cents per commercial e-mail message.  It is

 estimated that the average commercial e-mail receiver can make

 $200.00 to $500.00 a year and likely more.  There is absolutely

 no charge, periodic charge, hourly charge or phone charge to

 receive or review EPS commercial e-mail.  The sender bears all of

 the cost.



 You are provided with a free EPS mailbox and you may access this

 EPS mailbox through a toll free phone number so there are no

 phone line charges... In addition... EPS offers you... full

 Internet access including network Internet e-mail remote log-in,

 file transfer capability and much more."



 To sign up you were required to call an 800 number or send for

 information to the EPS Internet account (eps@world.std.com).  You

 had to include your name and address.

 

 Brock called and asked for the EPS information.  It never came.

 Instead, he received an unwanted and unsolicited direct mailing

 from a company called Suarez Corporation Industries (SCI).  The

 mailing came in the form of a 6 page letter signed by Benjamin

 Suarez.  That mailing claimed that for a price of $159, Suarez

 would send you a book and software that could help you create a

 "net profit generation system" capable of earning anywhere from

 $30,000 to $1 million per year.



 Brock began investigating why he received the SCI mailing and

 soon found out that Suarez had obtained his name from the request

 for EPS information. More investigation found that the EPS

 account was registered to Suarez Corporation Industries.  Brock

 then looked into the background of this company.



 During his investigation into SCI, Brock discovered that state

 and federal enforcement agencies had brought actions against SCI

 result of their direct mailing practices.

 

 In his article, Brock expressed his personal disapproval of the

 SCI business activities. SCI objected to the article and has

 filed a defamation lawsuit claiming Brock made defamatory remarks

 and sought to disparage his products "and otherwise tortiously

 (sic) interfere with the plaintiff's ability to develop" EPS. 

 Suarez claims the Dispatch article lost him business and he is

 seeking compensatory and punitive damages and demanding an

 injunction to block Brock from writing further about SCI or its

 founder, Benjamin Suarez.



 The April 22 (page B1) issue of the Wall St. Journal says lawsuit

 "is one of the first U.S. libel cases to arise out of the

 free-for-all on the Internet... If it succeeds, some legal

 experts say it could spawn other complaints."

 

 For those who don't know Brock, he has a long history as a

 journalist writing in the on-line field, having written for Byte,

 Wired and other journals over the years.  He lives and works

 today in the Washington, D.C. area writing during the day for a

 communications trade journal.  Cyberwire Dispatch is his own

 creation.  The suit against him was filed in Ohio.  Without

 the generous offer of legal support from his current lawyers, who

 have offices in Ohio, Brock's situation would be even more dire.

 

 The Meeks case raises legal issues that may have far-reaching

 implications for freedom of speech and free expression on the

 internet.  If journalists are unable to pursue important

 investigative issues without fear of reprisal, then

 all of us will suffer.  This is exactly the type of chilling

 effect hat the First Amendment was intended to avoid and the

 reason we need your support. 

 

 Of course defamation laws are to be applied to the Net, but how

 they are applied -- and this case will be an important first step

 in that process -- could determine just how open and free people

 will feel to speak their minds.

 

 This is NOT a case in which a writer on the Internet has, in

 fact, libeled someone else.  Brock absolutely denies the charges

 against him.  And every lawyer that Brock has consulted and

 looked at the text Brock wrote, and the charges against him,

 believe that he ha not written anything that can fairly be

 characterized as libelous.

 

 The Legal Defense Fund is formed to assure that Brock is well

 defended. 



 As a reminder, contributions can be made in two ways, either

 tax-deductible or non-deductible.

 

 A special thanks goes to the Point Foundation for agreeing early

 on in the process to assist in organizing and serving as a

 collection agent for the Fund.

 



 If you have any questions, you can contact the Fund at

 Fund@idi.net.





 For tax-deductible contributions send those checks to:

  

  Meeks Defense Fund

  c/o Point Foundation

  27 Gate Five Road

  Sausalito, CA 94965

  

 For those who don't care about the tax deductible status, send

 contributions to:

  

Meeks Defense Fund

 c/o IDI

 901 15th St. NW

 Suite 230

 Washington, DC 20005

 

THE BROCK MEEKS DEFENSE FUND COMMITTEE

 

 Samuel A. Simon

 President, Issue Dynamics, Inc.*

 ssimon@idi.net   

 

 John Sumser

 Editor/Executive Director

 Whole Earth Review/ Point Foundation

 jrsumser@well.sf.ca.us



 Mitch Kapor

 Chair, Electronic Frontier Foundation*

 mkapor@eff.org

 

 David Farber

 The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications Systems

 University of Pennsylvania*

 farber@central.cis.upenn.edu 

 

 Philip Elmer-DeWitt

 Senior Writer

 TIME Magazine*

 ped@panix.com



 Marc Rotenberg

 Electronic Privacy Information Center*

 Rotenberg@epic.org  



 Nicholas Johnson

 Former FCC Commissioner*

 1035393@mcimail.com



 Jerry Berman

 Electronic Frontier Foundation*

 jberman@eff.org



 Mike Godwin

 Electronic Frontier Foundation*

 

####################################################################

#      Meeks Defense Fund       |   Internet:   fund@idi.net       #

# ---------------------------------------------------------------- #   

#  c/o  IDI                     c/o Point Foundation               #

#  901 15th St. NW              27 Gate Five Road                  #

#  Suite 230                    Sausalito, CA  9465                #

#  Washington, DC  20005                                           #

####################################################################    



 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



                            HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH



 From: Emmanuel Goldstein (emmanuel@well.sf.ca.us)

 To: Editors@fennec.com



 HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH



 The First U.S. Hacker Congress



 Yes, it's finally happening. A hacker party unlike anything ever seen 

 before in this country. Come help us celebrate ten years of existence 

 and meet some really interesting and unusual people in the process. 

 We've rented out the entire top floor of a midtown New York hotel, 

 consisting of several gigantic ballrooms. The conference will run 

 around the clock all weekend long. 



 SPEAKERS AND SEMINARS: Will there be famous people and celebrity 

 hackers? Of course, but the real stars of this convention will be 

 the hundreds of hackers and technologically inclined people journeying 

 from around the globe to share information and get new ideas. 

 That is the real reason to show up. Seminars include: 

 social engineering, cellular phone cloning, cable TV security, 

 stealth technology and surveillance, lockpicking, boxing of all sorts, 

 legal issues, credit cards, encryption, the history of 2600, 

 password sniffing, viruses, scanner tricks, and many more in the 

 planning stages. Meet people from the Chaos Computer Club, Hack-Tic, 

 Phrack, and all sorts of other k-rad groups.



 THE NETWORK: Bring a computer with you and you can tie into the huge 

 Ethernet we'll be running around the clock. Show off your system and 

 explore someone else's (with their permission, of course). We will 

 have a reliable link to the Internet in addition. Finally, everyone 

 attending will get an account on our hope.net machine. We encourage 

 you to try and hack root. We will be giving away some valuable prizes 

 to the successful penetrators, including the keys to a 1994 Corvette. 

 (We have no idea where the car is, but the keys are a real 

 conversation piece.) Remember, this is only what is currently planned. 

 Every week, something new is being added so don't be surprised to find 

 even more hacker toys on display. We will have guarded storage areas 

 if you don't want to leave your equipment unattended.



 VIDEOS: We will have a brand new film on hackers called 

 "Unauthorized Access", a documentary that tells the story from 

 our side and captures the hacker world from Hamburg to Los Angeles 

 and virtually everywhere in between. In addition, we'll have 

 numerous foreign and domestic hacker bits, documentaries, 

 news stories, amateur videos, and security propaganda. There 

 has been a lot of footage captured over the years - this will 

 be a great opportunity to see it all. We will also have one 

 hell of an audio collection, including prank calls that put 

 The Jerky Boys to shame, voice mail hacks, and even confessions 

 by federal informants! It's not too late to contribute material!



 WHERE/WHEN: It all happens Saturday, August 13th and Sunday, 

 August 14th at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City 

 (Seventh Avenue, between 32nd and 33rd Streets, right across 

 the street from Penn Station). If you intend to be part of 

 the network, you can start setting up Friday night. 

 The conference officially begins at noon on Saturday and will 

 run well into Sunday night.



 ACCOMMODATIONS: New York City has numerous cheap places to stay. 

 Check the update sites below for more details as they come in. 

 If you decide to stay in the hotel, there is a special discounted 

 rate if you mention the HOPE Conference. $99 is their base rate 

 (four can fit in one of these rooms, especially if sleeping bags 

 are involved), significantly larger rooms are only about $10 more. 

 Mini-suites are great for between six and ten people - total cost 

 for HOPE people is $160. If you work with others, you can easily 

 get a room in the hotel for between $16 and $50. 

 The Hotel Pennsylvania can be reached at (212) PEnnsylvania 6-5000 

 (neat, huh?). Rooms must be registered by 7/23/94 to get the 

 special rate.



 TRAVEL: There are many cheap ways to get to New York City in August 

 but you may want to start looking now, especially if you're coming 

 from overseas. Travel agencies will help you for free. Also look in 

 various magazines like Time Out, the Village Voice, local alternative 

 weeklies, and travel sections of newspapers. Buses, trains, and 

 carpools are great alternatives to domestic flights. Keep in touch 

 with the update sites for more information as it comes in. 



 WANTED: Uncommon people, good music (CD's or cassettes), creative 

 technology. To leave us information or to volunteer to help out, 

 call us at (516) 751-2600 or send us email on the Internet at: 

 2600@hope.net.



 VOICE BBS: (516) 473-2626



 INTERNET: 

       info@hope.net     - for the latest conference information 

       travel@hope.net   - cheap fares and advisories 

       tech@hope.net     - technical questions and suggestions 

       speakers@hope.net - for anyone interested in speaking at the 

                           conference 

       vol@hope.net      - for people who want to volunteer 

          

 USENET NEWSGROUPS: 

       alt.2600               - general hacker discussion 

       alt.2600.hope.announce - the latest announcements 

       alt.2600.hope.d        - discussion on the conference 

       alt.2600.hope.tech     - technical setup discussion



 REGISTRATION: Admission to the conference is $20 for the entire weekend 

 if you preregister, $25 at the door, regardless of whether you stay for 

 two days or five minutes. To preregister, fill out this form, enclose $20, 

 and mail to: 2600 HOPE Conference, PO Box 848, Middle Island, NY 11953. 

 Preregistration must be postmarked by 7/31/94. This information is only 

 for the purposes of preregistration and will be kept confidential. Once 

 you arrive, you can select any name or handle you want for your badge.



 NAME: _______________________________________________________________



 ADDRESS: ____________________________________________________________



 CITY, STATE, ZIP, COUNTRY: __________________________________________



 PHONE (optional): ____________ email (optional): ____________________



 IMPORTANT: If you're interested in participating in other ways or 

 volunteering assistance, please give details on the reverse side. 

 So we can have a better idea of how big the network will be, please 

 let us know what, if any, computer equipment you plan on bringing and 

 whether or not you'll need an Ethernet card. Use the space on the back 

 and attach additional sheets if necessary.



 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



     TV & MOVIE MANIA RADIO SHOW HITS THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY



 By Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com)



 LOS ANGELES -- In a first for an entertainment-oriented show, a

 version of the popular "Professor Neon's TV & Movie Mania" radio

 program begins worldwide distribution directly to listeners this

 week via the Internet (or as it is becoming popularly known,

 the "Information Superhighway").



 "The Internet now includes over 20 million users in more than 30

 countries, and is growing at an enormous rate," pointed out the

 show's producer, Lauren Weinstein of Vortex Technology.

 "Professor Neon's TV & Movie Mania has also broadcast via

 over-the-air stations, but it's apparent that the time has finally

 arrived when the global facilities of the Internet can bring this

 audio show to an even wider audience.  Nobody has ever used the

 Internet to transmit a show like this before," he added.



 "Professor Neon's TV & Movie Mania" is a unique show which

 features a look at a broad universe ranging from classic to

 current television, films, and videos, with a special emphasis on

 the unusual, odd, silly, strange, bizarre, cult, surreal, and

 weird.  The shows include reviews, interviews, and a wide range of

 special audio clips, trailers, and many other features.  



 The interview guest for the debut Internet version of the show is

 Robert Justman, a man whose work has greatly influenced classic

 television programs ranging from "The Outer Limits" (on which he

 was assistant director) to both the original "Star Trek" and "Star

 Trek: The Next Generation" (on which he was associate producer and

 co-producer, respectively).  Many of the most familiar aspects of

 these programs were the result of his ideas, and he speaks

 candidly with the show's enigmatic host, Professor Neon, about the

 production of these programs in this fascinating interview. 



 Professor Neon has featured programs focusing on topics ranging

 from "Plan 9 From Outer Space" (with guest "Vampira" who starred

 in the classic cult film), to Forrest J. Ackerman (publisher of

 "Famous Monsters" magazine), to shows focused on topics from "The

 Twilight Zone" to "The Three Stooges". 



 The half hour Internet version of the program is being distributed

 biweekly on the Internet via the Internet Multicasting Service in

 Washington D.C., on the "Internet Town Hall" channel, and is also

 available as a file for retrieval by any Internet user from the

 many Internet Multicasting / Internet Talk Radio archive sites

 around the world.  Users retrieving the audio files can then play

 them on virtually any workstation, PC, Mac, or other computer

 with even simple audio facilities.



 The most recent show, as well as other information regarding the

 program, can also be heard by calling Professor Neon's TV & Movie

 Mania Machine" on (310) 455-1212.



 The Internet version of the show is freely distributable via

 computer networks and BBS systems.  Use by over-the-air

 broadcasters requires the permission of Vortex Technology.  For

 more information regarding accessing the show via the Internet,

 please use the contact below.  Inquiries regarding other access

 and versions of the show for broadcast use are also invited.



 CONTACT: Lauren Weinstein at Vortex Technology, Woodland Hills, CA.

          (818) 225-2800 (9:30-5:30 PDT)

          lauren@vortex.com



 Notes to Internet folks:



 Information regarding the show, including current guest schedule, etc.

 is also available via FTP from site "ftp.vortex.com" (in the "tv-film-video"

 subdirectory) or via gopher from site "gopher.vortex.com" (under the

 "TV/Film/Video" menu item).



 For a list of Internet Multicasting Service / Internet Talk Radio archive

 sites to obtain (via FTP) the audio file for playback, send a message

 (content is not important) to:



         sites@radio.com



 The debut of the Internet version of the show will run via Internet

 Multicast from Interop on Thursday, May 5.  FTP to site "ftp.media.org"

 or "www.media.org" for schedule information.  The audio file of the show

 should become available in the archive sites for retrieval within a few

 days, though exact timing is variable.  The filenames will probably

 be "mania1.au" for the audio and "mania1.txt" for the accompanying

 descriptive text file, though the archive maintainers may change

 the names at some point to fit their overall naming system.  If you

 have trouble locating the files after a few days, please let us know.

 If you have any other questions regarding the program, feel free to

 email or call.



 In two weeks, our interview guest for the next show will be Joel Engel, the

 author of the definitive Rod Serling biography: "The Dreams and Nightmares

 of Life in the Twilight Zone," and of the newly released and highly

 controversial new book, "Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man

 Behind Star Trek."



 If you have any questions for Mr. Engel please email them to: 



    neon@vortex.com



 as soon as possible.  Thanks much!



  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%



.

