Computer underground Digest    Wed  Apr 22, 1998   Volume 10 : Issue 25
                          ISSN  1004-042X

      Editor: Jim Thomas ([email protected])
      News Editor: Gordon Meyer ([email protected])
      Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
      Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish
      Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
                         Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
                         Ian Dickinson
      Field Agent Extraordinaire:   David Smith
      Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest

CONTENTS, #10.25 (Wed, Apr 22, 1998)

File 1--Call for Papers - Special Issue of SP&E
File 2--Congress May Soon Vote on Spawn of CDA Censorship Bills
File 3--"Spam King" abdicates
File 4--REVIEW: "Digital Fortress", Dan Brown
File 5--Internet porn restriction moving ahead in Congress
File 6--Re: "tagging color printers" (CuD 10.22)
File 7--Re: File 1--proposal of technical solutions to spam problem
File 8--for CuD
File 9--Islands in the Clickstream. Densities. April 11, 1998
File 10--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 7 May, 1997)

CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION ApPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.

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

Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 07:58:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Gene Spafford <[email protected]>
Subject: File 1--Call for Papers - Special Issue of SP&E

Call for Papers
Special issue of "Software Practice & Experience"
Experiences with Computer and Network Security
July 1, 1998

Later this year or early next year, there will be a special issue
of the journal "Software Practice & Experience," with Gene
Spafford as the guest editor; if there are enough articles, a
second issue may also be published.  This special issue will be
devoted to experiences with computer and network security.

The purpose of Software- Practice & Experience is to convey the
results of practical experience (whether successful or not) that
might benefit the computing community. The key criterion for a
paper is that it make a contribution from which other persons
engaged in software design and implementation might benefit.
Originality, although important, is secondary, especially in cases
where apparently well known techniques do not appear in the
readily available literature.

Papers describing both `systems' and `applications' software in
any computing environment are acceptable. Typical topics include
software design and implementation, case studies, studies
describing the evolution of software systems, critical appraisals
of systems, and the practical aspects of software engineering.
Theoretical discussions can be included, but should illuminate the
practical aspects of the work, or indicate directions that might
lead to better practical systems.

This special issue is specifically devoted to issues of computer
and network security software.  We are seeking high-quality
articles relating to the above-mentioned themes.  This includes
papers on at least the following topics:
  * access control systems
  * auditing systems and analysis
  * misuse and instrusion detection systems
  * applications of cryptography
  * secure messaging systems
  * information protection systems
  * security of mobile code
  * security of browsers and related technology
  * security testing and assurance
  * firewall construction and testing
  * experiences with new security programming paradigms
  * development and experience with "hacking tools"
  * experiences with patching security flaws

Papers may be of any length, ranging from a short note (perhaps a page) to
a full treatment of a substantial software system (say 40 pages). To submit
a paper to this special issue of the journal, please submit 3 paper copies
of your paper, double-spaced, to:
       SP&E Special Issue Submissions
       c/o Prof. Eugene Spafford
       Department of Computer Sciences
       Purdue University
       West Lafayette, IN 47907-1398

Articles should be submitted when ready, and preferably by July 1,
1998 so as to allow sufficient time for peer review and any
required edits and resubmission.  Expected publication of the
issue will be December 1998.

If you are interested in being added to the list of potential
reviewers for this issue, or if you have questions concerning
submissions, contact Spaf at <[email protected]>

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

Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 17:44:12 -0500 (EST)
From: [email protected]
Subject: File 2--Congress May Soon Vote on Spawn of CDA Censorship Bills

CYBER-LIBERTIES UPDATE
April 7, 1998


7Congress May Soon Vote on Spawn of CDA Censorship Bills

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Congress May Soon Vote on Spawn of CDA Censorship Bills

The Senate Commerce Committee recently approved two bills that may soon
go to a floor vote that reconstruct the unconstitutional provisions of
the 1996 Communications Decency Act and remove power from parents and
local communities to decide how to help children use the Internet
safely.

The ACLU dubbed the bills "spawn of CDA," saying in a letter to the
committee that the proposals fly in the face of the Supreme Court's
landmark ruling in ACLU v. Reno and will restrict protected speech on
the Internet.

Ignoring these warnings, the Commerce Committee passed Senate Bill 1619,
the Internet School Filtering Act, by a unanimous voice vote. The bill,
sponsored by Sen.  John McCain, R-AZ, requires all public libraries and
schools that receive federal funds for Internet access to use blocking
software.

The second bill, S. 1482, was sponsored by Senator Dan Coats, R-IN.
Dubbed "Son of CDA," its thrust is identical to the ill-fated
Communications Decency
Act, which was unanimously overturned last year by the United States
Supreme Court in
Reno v ACLU. The lone dissenter in that voice vote was Sen. Ron Wyden,
D-OR, who criticized the "one-size-fits-all Washington approach" to
regulating the Internet.

Congress is obviously enjoying the free political ride these bills
provide, with little thought for the taxpayers who will ultimately pay
the price when the courts strike them down, said Ann Beeson, ACLU Staff
Attorney.

In an ACLU letter to the Senate Committee about the Internet Filtering
Act, the group said, "blocking software restricts access to valuable,
protected online speech about topics including safe sex, AIDS and even
web sites posted by religious groups such as the Society of Friends and
the Glide United Methodist Church."

The ACLU is also working with 37 organizations that are members of the
Internet Free Expression Alliance (IFEA) on efforts to dissuade Congress
from passing the laws.

The ACLU and IFEA members continue to emphasize that parents and
teachers, not the government, should provide minors with guidance about
accessing the Internet.

The Coats bill, which attempts to narrow the CDA's restrictions to
speech that is "harmful to minors," is also unconstitutional, the groups
said, because such speech is "unquestionably protected by the
Constitution when communicated among adults."

The bill would impose criminal penalties on any sites with a commercial
component that provide access to inappropriate material without
requiring age verification.  The definition of commercial distributor
could include any site from amazon.com to individual home pages that
have banner advertisements.

The bill also "fails to make any distinction between material that may
be harmful to a six-year-old but valuable for a 16-year-old, such as
safer-sex information," the ACLU letter said.

Some Congressional staff members believe the bills may go to a floor
vote shortly after Congress spring recess.

Take action against these bills by sending a message to Congress that
you oppose these bills.  You may send a fax in just a few moments by
visiting the In Congress section of the ACLU Freedom Network web
page,  online at: <http://www.aclu.org/congress/IC031298.html>

More information can also be found online at the Internet Free
Expression Alliance home page, online at <http://www.ifea.net>

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Update is a bi-weekly e-zine on cyber-liberties cases and
controversies at the state and federal level. Questions or comments can
be sent to Cassidy Sehgal at [email protected]. Past issues are archived
at:  <http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/updates.html>

To subscribe to the ACLU Cyber-Liberties Update, send a message to
[email protected] with "subscribe Cyber-Liberties" in the body of your
message. To terminate your subscription, send a message to
[email protected] with "unsubscribe Cyber-Liberties" in the body.

FOR GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE ACLU, WRITE TO [email protected].
SEE US ON THE WEB AT <http://www.aclu.org> AND AMERICA ONLINE KEYWORD:
ACLU

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

From: "Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro" <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 22:36:30 +0000
Subject: File 3--"Spam King" abdicates

Thursday April 16 11:17 AM EDT

"Spam King" abdicates

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - "The Spam King," one of the most notorious
junk e-mailers on the Internet, says he has abdicated his throne and
promises never to sin again.

But not everyone believes him.

Sanford Wallace, 29-year-old president of Cyber Promotions Inc.,
abruptly announced his decision to a legion of long-time adversaries
who frequent a newsgroup dedicated to fighting bulk e-mail promotions.


The term "spamming" was derived from a "Monty Python" sketch in which
a waitress offers diners a choice of "spam, spam, spam, spam and
spam."

As the Internet's so-called Spam King, Wallace once boasted that his
Philadelphia-based firm was sending out 25 million promotional e-mails
daily on behalf of himself and his clients.

But in his parting message, posted last weekend, he said he had not
only abandoned the practice but would support anti-spam legislation.

"I will never go back to spamming," he wrote. "I apologize for my past
actions."

He added that although there was money in spamming, profits were
outweighed by risks.

Some anti-spam activists welcomed the news as a sign that the battle
had turned in their favor. But others remained suspicious, recalling
that Wallace had once previously promised to desist and form a direct
mailing standards organization.

His latest change of heart followed a futile six-month attempt to get
his operation back online after an angry service provider cut him off.
He also had been saddled with expensive legal settlements, ending with
a judgment against him last week over unsolicited faxes.

Wallace could not be reached for comment. ^REUTERS@

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

Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 08:38:02 -0800
From: "Rob Slade" <[email protected]>
Subject: File 4--REVIEW: "Digital Fortress", Dan Brown

BKDGTLFT.RVW   980222

"Digital Fortress", Dan Brown, 1998, 0-312-18087-X, U$24.95/C$33.95
%A   Dan Brown [email protected]
%C   175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY   10010
%D   1998
%G   0-312-18087-X
%I   St. Martin's Press
%O   U$24.95/C$33.95 212-674-5151 fax 800-288-2131 www.stmartins.com
%P   384 p.
%T   "Digital Fortress"

Dear Dan,

Thanks for getting St. Martin's to send along the book.  I enjoyed it
a lot.  Your characters are great, and the device of having the
physical "street" action run in parallel with the cerebrations going
on in Crypto was quite effective.  It lost a little when the action in
Crypto got physical, and at times the street activity skated a bit
close to farce, but that's a fine line with thrillers anyway.  You
have a fine touch with dialogue, and the misunderstandings caused by
specific messages was particularly realistic.  (Although, if I may
say, the people who staff your command center are a bit thick: I got
it sixteen pages before they did.)

However, I suspect that whoever suggested the review project to you
didn't tell you the whole story.  The books reviewed here are
critiqued on the basis of technology, including the fiction.  And on
that score, well, there are a few things you might want to reconsider
on your next effort.

I will say that you have included a good presentation of ciphering,
although you sometimes seem to get codes and ciphers confused.
("Without wax" is a code, and therefore not subject to decryption.)
You have also stressed the importance of key lengths, which, along
with the algorithm used, is critical to determining the strength of
encryption.  Cryptographic key length is usually expressed in bits,
but you often refer to keys with different lengths of characters.  A
character is usually measured as a byte, or eight bits.
(Incidentally, ASCII characters were original defined as seven bits,
so there are only 128, not 256.)  Let me point out, though, that
*adding* a single bit (not character) to a key length is generally
considered to double the key space, essentially doubling the time
necessary to crack a given key.

Let's start with arithmetic.  If your TRANSLTR superdecrypter is able
to crack a 64 *character* key in ten minutes, a 65 character key will
take about a day.  A 66 character key will need about four months.
However, in the book, a 10,000 bit key, which is equivalent to 1,250
bytes and roughly twenty *times* as long as your 64 byte key, only
takes an hour.  A key length a hundred times as long as the 10,000
bits takes only three hours.

Sticking with calculations, I note that your command center, dominated
by a 30' by 40' video wall, required the excavation of 250 metric tons
of earth.  If so, the room is less than eight feet from front to back,
even if it was earth that was excavated and not rock, as one might
expect at 214 feet down.  In the same vein, TRANSLTR is housed in
something no more than twenty three feet across and eight stories
deep.  But if we assume that the three million processors in it are no
more advanced than, say, Pentiums, then the processors themselves are
going to occupy a solid block of space ten feet thick and five stories
high, even if the "spray-seal" doesn't add too much bulk.  (I assume
that by "VSLI" you mean VLSI, very large scale integration?)  This
disregards the space needed for memory, support chips, the boards
themselves, cabling, interfaces, catwalks, and the oft-mentioned
generators and cooling system, never mind enough air to support a
fire.

(While we are on the subject, we might as well mention chemistry: fire
consumes oxygen, it doesn't usually release it.)

A short detour via linguistics.  Japanese ideographs are, as you say,
based on Chinese ideographs.  The similarity is not confined to the
form of the symbols, though: enough of the meaning should come through
in either language.  (Of course, if you have the actual symbols, it
should be clear which language is being used.  The biggest problem
would be in determining representation for the symbols.  Unicode,
anyone?)

And, finally, to computers.  Just to get these points out of the way,
Grace Murray Hopper's moth was found in the Mark II, not the Mark I,
and was not the first use of the term "bug" (although it may have been
the origin of the use of "debugging").  PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is
not an algorithm, although it is one of the most widely used
implementations.

First of all, you can't weld ceramic, and secondly, if you do weld the
computer shut, you have rendered it instantly obsolete.  Even Deep
Blue got rebuilt between matches.  Next, it makes no sense to say that
the computer uses quantum states "rather than" binary for storage.
Binary is, in a basic sense, a quantum state, and quantum physics
could be used to build devices that store binary information.  (All
information can be stored in a binary system.)  Also, I know about
silicon, CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor), and gallium-
arsenide but ... titanium-strontium?  And, OK, I know titanium burns,
but you have to get it pretty darn hot in order to do so.

Yes, some languages are similar enough that it makes it easy for
someone who has learned one to learn the other.  However, it doesn't
mean that you automatically know how to use a third.  When programs
are created, though, they are generally compiled into machine
language.  (Certainly programs in Pascal and C are.)  That means it
doesn't matter what languages you know: typing source commands into
the keyboard isn't going to affect the running program.  Some
scripting languages use the source files, but Pascal and C don't
qualify.  But the difference between source and object code raises
another point: the net would not automatically adopt an encryption
standard without having the source code and a description of the
algorithm to examine.  The source code for PGP is available, and many
people compile their program directly from the source, not trusting an
already compiled version.  Therefore, a "trap-doored" Digital Fortress
would be detected almost immediately.  (The publication of the
Skipjack algorithm did result in the detection of a bug: ironically
the bug would have let the public use non-escrowed keys with it,
rendering the government's attempt to read messages much more
difficult.)  Your email tracer doesn't make any sense: if you can't
find the guy, how can you find his site?  Also, even if you could link
back to him somehow, as I get everlastingly tired of repeating, you
can't send programs in text messages (at least, not without it being
blindingly obvious).

More importantly, it doesn't matter how powerful your computer is, you
can't decrypt a message with a key if you don't know the algorithm.
Key length is important, but so is the algorithm used.  A 56 bit
(that's seven bytes, by the way) key can be very strong in one
algorithm, and relatively weak in another.  Also, the importance of
public-key encryption does not lie simply in the strength of the
algorithm.  It is the "public" aspect that is so important.
Correspondents who have not met can be completely sure of the
authentication of the other without ever knowing identities.  A
fraudulent "North Dakota" would not be a problem to someone who really
knew about encryption.

Finally, there is my field, viruses.  It makes no sense to create a
virus for a one-of-a-kind computer, since viruses, as you eventually
do point out, are meant to reproduce.  Most of what you say about
viruses makes no sense, including "mutation strings" and "rotating
cleartext."  Viruses do not infect data, or, if they do, they just
corrupt it, rather than continuing to spread.  I suppose you can
"cross-breed [viruses] into oblivion," but it's easier to delete than
overwrite them.  And finally, what you have isn't a virus, and, no, it
isn't a worm either.  (Worms reproduce, too.)  What you have is the
classic, common or garden trojan horse.  The bane of greedy net
surfers everywhere.

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998   BKDGTLFT.RVW   980222

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

Date: Thu, 2 Apr 1998 14:20:54 -0800
From: "(--Todd Lappin-->)" <[email protected]>
Subject: File 5--Internet porn restriction moving ahead in Congress

Internet porn restriction moving ahead in Congress

   WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - Legislation to restrict
pornography on the Internet, backed by conservative lawmakers but
opposed by civil libertarians, is picking up momentum,
Congressional staff members said on Thursday.
  Last month, the Senate Commerce Committee approved a bill
authored by Dan Coats, Republican of Indiana, that would require
commercial Internet sites containing material deemed harmful to
minors to prohibit access by children.
  Within a few weeks, a companion bill will be introduced in the
U.S. House of Representatives by Republicans Mike Oxley of Ohio
and Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania, an Oxley staffer said.
  "Senator Coats has done a good job of building momentum," the
staffer said.

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

From: "Frank Knobbe" <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 23:07:17 -0600
Subject: File 6--Re: "tagging color printers" (CuD 10.22)

> Date--06 Apr 1998 15:29:44 -0400
> From--Mark Atwood <[email protected]>
> Subject--File 3--US Govt wants to "tag" color printers

[...]

> "In addition, Castle said, practical and realistic measures to tag
> scanners and printers must be considered, in order to identify the
> source of the counterfeit notes."
>
> In other words, he wants every color printer to embed some sort of
> signature into its output, so that the "authorities" can determine
> where it came from.
>
> I remember, back in high school civics, one of the bits of patriotic
> propaganda that was dispenced to us, was that the USSR required all
> photocopiers to embed a machine id and page number into its output,
> so that the "authorites" could control their use as publishing
> tools.
>
> Now the USA wants to do the same thing.

[...]

Great! I'm so curious to see how they are gonna tackle this issue. Put
an ID on top of the page? Sure, go right ahead, I have to use my
scissors anyway to cut out the Lincoln's.

The only way this would work, would be to overlay the copy with a fine
barcode type output, where the lines stretch across the whole page.
Which means the ID changes when the fuser gets old'n'dirty. Plus,
imagine how many people would return that copier because "it's broke
and procudes crappy output".

How about mandatory copier paper with a watermark? All you need to do
is equip the copier's paper cassette with a padlock.

Of course, alternatively you could try to improve security with newer
dollar bills that have additional security features such as holograms,
etc. but that would be too easy....


The world is going crazy, and it's not gonna get better...

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

Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 10:47:04 -0500
From: Neil Rickert <[email protected]>
Subject: File 7--Re: File 1--proposal of technical solutions to spam problem

"Vladimir Z. Nuri" <[email protected]> writes:

>the software problem

>   Currently the large mass of internet sites use a mail program called
>   Sendmail developed chiefly by Eric Allman. Will all due respect to the
>   author and maintainers, IMHO the program is an embodiment in awkward
>   and monolithic legacy software. It features many extremely arcane
>   syntax rules and inscrutable conventions.

Vladimir has misdiagnosed the problem.  Granted, most systems use
sendmail, and granted, sendmail uses methods that many consider
arcane and inscrutable.  But that is mostly a matter of internal
design, and has very little to do with spam.

If Vladimir wants to criticize, he should get to the heart of the
matter, which is the SMTP protocol.  This protocol requires no sender
authentication (other than a simple syntax check), and could not
easily be extended to prevent spam.

The nucleus of the problem really goes back to the way the network
has evolved.  In its early days most computing was done by multi-user
systems.  Thus there was a core of trustworthy machines administered
by technically compentent professionals, most of whom had a sense of
ethics and public responsibility.  Most of the network protocols were
designed under the assumption that the machines you would communicate
were trustworthy.  However, we now have a network composed mostly of
individual machines, too often untrustworthy, and usually run by
novices and in some case by unethical novices (spammers, for
example).

There is little hope of resolving the spam situation unless we
recognize the nature of the problem.  The best solution would be a
return to the idea of a central core of trustworthy machines.  This
would still allow a network of mostly individual machines.  But it
would require that each individual machine forward outgoing mail to a
core machine that is capable of identifying it.  And each non-core
machine would only accept email from its own users or from a core
machine.  And each core machine would only accept email from other
core machines or from machines it could identify and authenticate.
Then you would have to design new protocols which carried
authentication information in the message envelope.

Spam is only partly a technical problem.  It is partly a social
problem.  We could not re-establish a core of trustworthy machines
without setting up social conventions to accredit those machines, and
to identify which they are.  And we could not find a technical
solution to network problems such as spam without some concept of
trustworthy machines.

>   One of the deficiencies in sendmail is the inability to reject email
>   based on header information alone.

The alternative would be like having a "big brother" or "post office
nanny" machine attached to your mailbox, which automatically shreds
mail if it does not begin with "Dear person" and end with "Yours
sincerely."  We don't need such a machine.  Automated rejection of
email on the basis of header information is *evil*.  What is needed
is some sort of authentication information, including an estimation
of the degree of trust to be placed in the purported origin of the
message.  This information should be transported in the envelope
(separate from the message content and headers), so that it can be
dynamically updated as the mail is tranferred between machines.

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

Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 21:05:20 -0400
From: Jonathan Wallace <[email protected]>
Subject: File 8--for CuD

FEDERAL COURTS USE CENSORWARE; FREE SPEECH ADVOCATES OBJECT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Jonathan Wallace daytime: 212-513-7777 evening:
718-797-9808 email: [email protected]


New York, April 22, 1998--The Censorware Project
<http://www.spectacle.org/cwp>, an organization which battles the
use of blocking software by public institutions including schools
and libraries, announced today that it has learned that federal
courts are using the WebSENSE censorware product, at least in the
Eighth, Ninth and Tenth judicial circuits (covering twenty-two
states and Guam).  WebSENSE <http://www.websense.com> was
installed by the Administrative Office of the Courts, apparently
without the knowledge or consent of the judges themselves.

"I am really disturbed that the federal court administrators have
installed censorware, especially in light of federal judge Leonie
Brinkema's  recent decision  in the Loudoun County, Virginia
case," said James Tyre, a First Amendment attorney who is a
founding member of the Censorware Project.  "In that decision,
available at http://www.venable.com/ORACLE/opinion.htm, the judge
suggested that blocking a web site in a library is like pulling a
book from the shelves. It is particularly shocking that the
Administrative Office of the Courts thinks that federal judges
need to be protected against the Internet--and that our tax money
is being spent to buy censorware for this purpose.  It would be
ironic indeed if Judge Brinkema is prevented by WebSENSE from
visiting the very sites at issue in the Loudoun County case,
blocked by X-Stop, a competitor of WebSENSE."

One site erroneously blocked by the WebSENSE product under its
"Hacking" category is http://www.digicrime.com -- a humorous site
created by security experts to educate the public about computer
crime.  "WebSENSE apparently took the site for a real computer
crime site," Tyre said.  "DigiCrime is not just one bad block out
of 200,000: it is one of 54 hand-picked sites by the makers of
WebSENSE itself included in the downloadable demo versions  of
the product.  Although The Censorware Project has not done a full
analysis of WebSENSE, one must seriously question its claims to
accuracy if  it cannot even get its demo blocks right."  WebSENSE
also reportedly blocks A Different Light Bookstore,
http://www.adlbooks.com/, specializing in gay or lesbian
literature. The company claims that the product blocks 200,000
sites.

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

Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 16:07:31 -0500
From: Richard Thieme <[email protected]>
Subject: File 9--Islands in the Clickstream. Densities. April 11, 1998

Islands in the Clickstream:
Densities


Steven Hawking noted in a netcast from the White House that the next
generation of humans will live inside a common sense world of quantum
physics the way we have lived inside a Newtonian landscape. "Common sense"
is simply what we're taught to see, he said, which is why new truths always
appear at the edges of our thinking.

Or, as George Bernard Shaw put it, " All great truth begins as blasphemy."


Is it any wonder we are all beset by "cognitive dissonance" and see our
reality-frames flickering the way clairvoyants (excuse me, "remote
viewers") see images of distant sites? One moment we are living happily
inside Newtonian space, walking down a straight sidewalk toward a
right-angled corner when  poof!  with a puff of smoke, we experience
ourselves bent along a trajectory like light pulled by an immense
gravitational tug. Then we remember that how light bends IS gravity and
what we thought was a "pull" is simply the topography of energy wrinkling
and sliding into whorls of various densities.

In a museum the other day I watched a marble spiraling down a funnel of
smooth wood, circling toward the vortex. I thought of light travelling
along the curves and bumps of space-time ("the universe is shaped like a
potato," Einstein said, "finite but unbounded.") I thought of gravitational
lenses, created when galaxies that are closer to us magnify and distort
more distant galaxies.

Einstein predicted sixty years ago that a massive object would bend and
intensify light, generating multiple images or stretching an image into an
arc. When everything lines up just right, the distortion becomes a perfect
circle, like the galaxy pictured last week in Science News (Vol. 153, No.
114).

That's the long view. Turn the telescope around to see what's happening
right here in our own digital neighborhood.

Web sites are best characterized not by size but by density. A map of
cyberspace would look like millions of galaxies and a map of the traffic
between sites would look like a photo of electromagnetic energy across the
entire spectrum.

A browser is a knowledge engine that organizes information in flux so it
appears momentarily frozen. A site such as Yahoo that links links is a kind
of gravitational lens that boosts distant clusters into the foreground. If
we could see ourselves interacting in cyberspace, we too would look like
energy pouring through our monitors and moving at the speed of light toward
densities around which our interests coalesce. Our monitors like worm holes
let us bypass the long way around.

Organizational structures, including web sites, are dissipative structures
like whirlpools that retain their shape while exchanging energy and
information. Humans too are modular structures of energy and information
that interface over the Internet. That map of the energies of cyberspace is
really a map of our Mind.

Not quite common sense yet, is it? Words slip, slide, decay with
imprecision, T. S. Eliot said of his efforts to fix in poetic form the
world he discerned. In the world of printed text, the illusion that words
and meanings are fixed is magnified. The same words in pixels are obviously
transitory. Our media too function like gravitational lenses, magnifying
meanings intrinsic to their nature. The digital world builds a "common
sense reality" congruent with the quantum world, communicating by its very
nature that words, meanings, and all things slip, slide away.

We build this island for ourselves in the always sea and comfort ourselves
with the illusion that we are on dry land.

The trajectories of the energies of our lives - how they are organized,
aimed, and spent- are determined by our deepest intentionality. How we
intend to live our lives is how we wind up living them.

Cyberspace is a training ground for learning to live and move at the speed
of our minds, the speed of light, to inhabit a landscape that morphs or
changes shape according to our will, intention, and ultimate purpose.

The "sites" in our minds grow denser when our intentions coalesce like
millions of marbles rolling simultaneously toward a single vortex. Space,
time and causality may be woven into the very fabric of our minds, as Kant
said, but in a quantum landscape, causality is a very different animal. An
effect can precede its own cause.

Which is exactly how our minds operate.

Consciousness is always consciousness for or toward some end, always an
arrow aimed toward a potentiality or possibility. As a mental construct,
the image comes first. The effect precedes the cause and causes the effect
to come into being. That's why some think consciousness is the origin as
well as the goal of evolution.

A recent reflection on maps, filters, and belief systems ("Imaginary
Gardens - Filters. Filters of Filters.") brought from a reader an account
of the moment he realized how much the Mercator projection exaggerated the
size of the European community. He recalled the first time he looked at
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map that looks at the world from the North
Pole rather than the equator. From that point of view, the world is seen as
a single unified landmass. The world has never looked the same to him since


Consciousness manifests itself in a visible medium like the Internet so we
can see it. We can never see the thing itself, because there is no thing
there.  Nothing. But we can see some of the infinite ways it manifests
itself.  Working and playing on the Internet is one way to practice
handling ourselves in a quantum world that is fluid, modular, and
interactive, a trans-planetary world, a trans-galactic world emerging on
the edge of the grid in which we have been living. That grid contained
reality in nice neat boxes. But the grid is flexing, morphing like an
animation even as we look at it, turning into another of its many
possibilities.  Seen, of course - it's only common sense, isn't it?- from
just one of its infinitely many points of view.




**********************************************************************

Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by
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