(news)letter
"Say the thing with which you labor."
Thoreau
from the porter.micro.press
Volume 1, Number 6 February 21, 1994
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Once I went to a friend's house and worked on her computer. She
wanted things to happen differently and, thinking I could set it
up the way she wanted, I busied myself manipulating this and
that, making wonderful progress, thank you, until, suddenly,
"things weren't as they should be." Everything was gone! Huge
files, in the blink of an eye, became invisible!
Panic set in. Where did these files go and why couldn't I
find them? One rule I've learned about computer files, they don't
just disappear. You might erase them but they don't erase
themselves. I knew I hadn't erased them or destroyed the disk,
but something had gone very wrong. Would she have to re-write her
thesis from scratch?
I couldn't even begin to figure out what had happened. My
brain was locked completely up. I paced the floor. I tried not to
let on that I had no clue but I'm not very good at hiding fears
of that calibre. Calmer heads prevailed though, corrections were
made, and as soon as I had corrected the problem (through outside
intervention) I got my silly butt out of there.
The corrective was very simple, and I'll never forget the
shame I felt at not figuring it out for myself. Panic seized my
brain and prevented me from seeing my hand in front of my face.
The Rabbit in the Headlight Syndrome. All too often we assume the
worst when faced with what we don't know. This was made clear to
me during this past week, not only with what I have read but with
what I have done.
I have been trying this week to get access on the Internet
to a feature known as the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). If the Chat
feature of a public Bulletin Board System (BBS) is addicting, how
much more so that on the Internet. With a BBS you might carry on
a conversation with four or five other people simultaneously; on
the Internet there are thousands of users from all over the world
on several hundred channels. To quote an FAQ (which answers
'Frequently Asked Questions' about a topic):
IRC gained international fame during the late Persian Gulf
War, where updates from around the world came across the
wire, and most people on IRC gathered on a single channel to
hear these reports. IRC had similar uses during the coup
against Boris Yeltsin in September, 1993, where IRC users
from Moscow were giving live reports about the unstable
situation there.
So you might see why much of the work this week has been spent
reading various computer manuals and instruction sets, with an
increasing state of excitement as I got closer and closer to
nailing down this IRC access. I want to be in on this game.
And yet behind all of this manipulation is a fear that I'll
do something extremely stupid and thoughtless and thereby crash
the system I'm on. This fear prevents one from discovering the
system's potential. Computers are dumb brutes. The computer
industry loves to convey the image that a computer is a fragile
thing, like a dream, and must be handled with kid gloves. Your
IBM goes down and you take it to the repairman and she takes it
in the backroom, operates on it behind the curtain while you
wander the aisles looking at the new software, the magazines
devoted to arcana, and the neat toys available. What's Ms.
Repairman doing back there to your machine?
She's pulling it apart and slapping it back together like
you would never guess. You might have heard that static
electricity can damage the inside components, so you wonder if
the repair room is vacuum-sealed, if the repairman wears lint-
free gloves and carries one of those breathing guards over her
mouth. This is not an unreasonable mental image to get of the
repairman and her work. This is what the industry wants you to
think. The more firmly entrenched are the fears of the inside of
a computer, the more service you bring them.
Spend a little time with the masters of this knowledge, the
high priests of the computer innards, and you begin to think of a
computer not as a holy of holies with entrance to neophytes
forbidden, not even as a television, but more as a bicycle. You
can fix your own flat tire. You can adjust your own spokes. You
can go buy a better seat and replace the old one. When you see a
repairman slam through a basic repair you begin to lose fear of
the computer and its internal problems. You haven't been able to
work all morning because the computer is on the fritz, the
repairman is so busy he's working seventy hour weeks all the year
long, and when he gets there he makes short order of your
problem. Not back in some vacuum-sealed room, not wearing lint-
free gloves, but right there in front of you, with the attitude
of a harried auto mechanic replacing a flat for a ditzy customer.
This came back while working to get access to the IRC. I had
a running e-mail conference with the helpdesk and I didn't feel
that they really wanted to help me -- after all, they're not too
keen about seeing my online hours jump drastically when I become
addicted to the cyberspace society that's newly available. I kept
asking for help and not receiving it, and finally I posed my
problem and asked, "am I doing this right or am I in danger of
damaging the entire infrastructure of Western Civilization as we
know it?" Well that brought me an answer, not only to my problem
(with a satisfyingly complete answer), but to the larger question
-- "if only it were that easy."
Sure there are commands that one has to watch out for,
commands that can mass erase the boatload of information in your
storage. And you might do that, accidentally. But it's not
likely, especially if you know the least little bit about the
commands that are dangerous. And you think that an inexperienced
net trawler like myself is going to crash a system? Not hardly --
the folks running it know better -- I couldn't crash a network if
I tried. And even if I did know how, I wouldn't dare -- I'm just
too paranoid to do something like that.
The Federalist Papers Two, Number One
A criminal hacker, on the other hand, might take what he could
from a system, crash it, then call the system operator to brag
about his prowess. I spent some time this week reading a book I
took off of the net, Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown. This
is the story of a concerted effort by computer security personnel
of various agencies and affiliations to crush computer hackers,
to send a message that hacking will not be tolerated. Because the
laws through which the computer cops took action were unclear,
this crackdown served as a breeding ground not only for new laws
regarding computer systems, but new computer policing groups and
individual rights watchdogs as well.
The prey in The Hacker Crackdown are those who exploit
computers. The impetus for the hunt was ostensibly a breakdown of
the AT&T long distance switching stations on January 15, 1990.
Though AT&T technicians discovered that the flaw was in their own
software, too many computer cops wanted to believe that hackers
were responsible. For many hackers publicly bragged that they
could have caused the damage, and AT&T was a favorite target
(many hackers devote much energy to gain illicit long distance
access and so avoid charges). Publicity was garnered for the
computer cops, hackers were arrested, and as usually happens in
PR pushes like this, life tried to resume as it had existed
before. But too many important people were given the shakedown,
and though hackers don't enjoy the sympathy of the public, they
lost the battle but won the war.
One problem was that the authorities had no ground rules for
their crackdown. Rights, wrongs and penalties, were not clearly
delineated. Just because a hacker has committed fraud, does that
allow the cops to impound every electronic gadget in the house?
Why would AT&T consider an obsolete, thirteen page document
stolen from its electronic files as worth $79,449? What makes
BellSouth systems passwords and connections worth $701,640? The
public's conception of the malicious hacker is often offset by
the computer cop's inflation of the damage that the hackers
committed. Neither, it seems, can be trusted.
They are each, computer hackers and the security that chases
them, wrought of the same cloth. Though they sit on different
sides of the issue, they share the same modem love. The end of
Sterling's book features a summit meeting between the computer
cops and various freedom representatives (read "hacker friends")
and mutual respect was tendered from each group to the other.
They began to see eye to eye.
The dominant issue of the book is the need for the
responsible drafting of laws for the Information Age. During the
hacker witch hunt, two men on opposite sides of the continent
were questioned by the police and scared enough by the specter
off Big Brother on the Internet that they decided to make a
stand. Mitch Kapor and John Barlow formed the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF), a group devoted to the individual's cyberspace
rights. The EFF has been quite a force in helping to protect
hackers, and in fact has taken the upper hand on the legal
battlefield. But so many questions have yet to be formulated
about important issues, much less asked in court. Boundaries
between right and wrong are still being formed. The Hacker
Crackdown is a fascinating political case study in an area
defined more by reaction than forethought.
'Auld Lang Syne,' Arranged and Performed by La Cosa Nostra
With the opening of peace talks between representatives of the
Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the English government, the
battle lines might soon be redrawn in troubled Belfast. I don't
know much about the war that wracks Northern Ireland -- to me
it's always been an ideological struggle between Freedom and
Oppression. I was given two different views of that struggle this
week, the first in the movie In the Name of the Father, the
second in the current issue of Harper's (February 1994).
In the Name of the Father portrays an Irish-English struggle
that is definitely Freedom vs. Oppression. Gerry (Daniel Day-
Lewis) and his friends -- even his father -- are jailed on bogus
charges of bombing a pub in England. This is a somewhat
schizophrenic film, undecided whether to be a "coming of age"
film or a political statement. It accomplishes the former very
well; the latter often seems as an afterthought, a chance to show
the Daniel Day-Lewis strut. What a weird situation though -- can
you imagine sharing a jail cell with your father? This movie is
heartbreaking. Even after an IRA assassin confesses to the crime
and assures the English investigators that Gerry and company had
no connection with the crime, they still remain in prison. And in
the end, a good portion of their lives have been wasted by the
outright evil of the English government. Boo! Hiss! I came away
absolutely shocked at the injustice that these people underwent.
I only wish we could assume that such injustices were rare.
Scott Anderson, in "Making a Killing: The high cost of peace
in Northern Ireland," provides a more sinister look at the city
of Belfast and comes to a novel reason why the war continues.
Belfast is controlled, he writes, by various paramilitary groups
devoted to different purposes (the IRA for freedom from England,
the Ulster Defense Association supporting English rule, as two
examples), and run not by ideological heroes but godfathers of
the Mafia sort. England sends money to help build up Belfast, and
through that money the syndicates get rich (via kickbacks,
protection rackets, employment schemes and the like). For these
warlords, fighting and a fractured city profits much more than
the prospect of peace. As one IRA commander makes clear, "It will
always be IRA policy that the British have to leave Northern
Ireland. But maybe it's better that they don't leave just yet"
(54). Just as in the movie, the root of the problems can be found
in the obstinacy of the powerful.
"He was Mocked of the Wise Men"
Re-reading one of my favorite authors, I came across a tale of
one of the most obstinate powerful men in the New Testament. In
Par Lagerkvist's Herod and Mariamne the author tells the story of
the King of the Jews. Herod was so cruel that he ordered the
execution of children when he was told of the birth of a child
who would be king. Lagerkvist is an intensely spiritual writer
and though often, as in the case of Mariamne, his characters fall
a trifle flat, he does bring Herod to life. As the king of
Jerusalem Herod is an unwelcome outsider who relies on terror to
keep control:
All unawares he bore the desert within him, and at times he
felt its vast desolation. But he possessed also his people's
wild joy in life -- joy in violence, blood and battle; joy
in rampant horses trampling bleeding enemies underfoot; joy
in killing and the resulting lust for living...
8-9
Mariamne is a Jewish maiden, descendent of the Maccabees, with
whom Herod falls in love. Mariamne has an unsettling affect on
Herod -- as cruel as he is he only has to see her and he goes all
soft on the inside. He releases prisoners because she asks him to
and when he tells her he loves her and wants to marry her, she
takes the offer seriously. The inhabitants of Jerusalem adore
her, she is their saint, and by marrying the tyrant she might
change him, make him a good king for her people. One thing she
cannot do, even after they wed, is love the man. Herod knows this
and it burns him up inside. Not receiving her love bothers him
immensely, even if he doesn't know the meaning of what he misses.
What interested me was Mariamne's dilemma. Of course the
story is set 2000 years ago and a woman's freedom to marry was
quite different. Maybe unrealistically Lagerkvist gives her the
personal freedom to make her own decision. Either go with the
tyrant and provide a buffer between the ruler and the terrified
subjects, or not. By agreeing to wed him she loses her family --
her kin want nothing to do with her. She is, to them, committing
treason. Mariamne changes Herod's ways for a while, but Herod's
rage at not receiving her love controls him. He has her murdered
and becomes more vicious than before. He will always be the
terror; Mariamne was merely a flower, blooming only to be picked,
fading, and finally dying.
In the end, Herod is Everyman. "An emblem of mankind:
mankind that replenishes the earth but whose race shall one day
be erased from it" (116). We will leave no monuments everlasting;
we kill the only thing we really love; only too late do we
realize our most horrific mistakes. Alackaday. Not much hope for
Northern Ireland in that scenario, is there?
Quote of the Week
In The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling defines a term you'll be
hearing more and more in the future:
Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation
appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic
device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in
some other city. THE PLACE BETWEEN the phones. The
indefinite place OUT THERE, where the two of you, two human
beings, actually meet and communicate.
(1)
Now that you know where it is, this 'cyberspace,' your
imagination can run free with the implications of an "invisible
community." Imagine, for example, how a civil war might be fought
. .
