Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet

by Electronic Frontier Foundation

Chapter 14: CONCLUSION — THE END?

The revolution is just beginning. New communications systems and digital technologies have already meant dramatic changes in the way we live. Think of what is already routine that would have been considered impossible just ten years ago. You can browse through the holdings of your local library — or of libraries halfway around the world — do your banking and see if your neighbor has gone bankrupt, all through a computer and modem. Imploding costs coupled with exploding power are bringing ever more powerful computer and digital systems to ever growing numbers of people. The Net, with its rapidly expanding collection of databases and other information sources, is no longer limited to the industrialized nations of the West; today the web extends from Siberia to Zimbabwe. The cost of computers and modems used to plug into the Net, meanwhile, continue to plummet, making them ever more affordable. Cyberspace has become a vital part of millions of people's daily lives. People form relationships online, they fall in love, they get married, all because of initial contacts in cyberspace, that ephemeral ``place'' that transcends national and state boundaries. Business deals are transacted entirely in ASCII. Political and social movements begin online, coordinated by people who could be thousands of miles apart. Yet this is only the beginning. We live in an age of communication, yet the various media we use to talk to one another remain largely separate systems. One day, however, your telephone, TV, fax machine and personal computer will be replaced by a single ``information processor'' linked to the worldwide Net by strands of optical fiber. Beyond databases and file libraries, power will be at your fingertips. Linked to thousands, even millions of like-minded people, you'll be able to participate in social and political movements across the country and around the world. How does this happen? In part, it will come about through new technologies. High-definition television will require the development of inexpensive computers that can process as much information as today's workstations. Telephone and cable companies will cooperate, or in some cases compete, to bring those fiber-optic cables into your home. The Clinton administration, arguably the first led by people who know how to use not only computer networks but computers, is pushing for creation of a series of "information superhighways" comparable in scope to the Interstate highway system of the 1950s (one of whose champions in the Senate has a son elected vice president in 1992). Right now, we are in the network equivalent of the early 1950s, just before the creation of that massive highway network. Sure, there are plenty of interesting things out there, but you have to meander along two-lane roads, and have a good map, to get to them. Creation of this new Net will require more than just high-speed channels and routing equipment; it will require a new communications paradigm: the Net as information utility. The Net remains a somewhat complicated and mysterious place. To get something out of the Net today, you have to spend a fair amount of time with a Net veteran or a manual like this. You have to learn such arcana as the vagaries of the Unix cd command. Contrast this with the telephone, which now also provides access to large amounts of information through push buttons, or a computer network such as Prodigy, which one navigates through simple commands and mouse clicks. Internet system administrators have begun to realize that not all people want to learn the intricacies of Unix, and that that fact does not make them bad people. We are already seeing the development of simple interfaces that will put the Net's power to use by millions of people. You can already see their influence in the menus of gophers and the World-Wide Web, which require no complex computing skills but which open the gates to thousands of information resources. Mail programs and text editors such as pico and pine promise much of the power of older programs such as emacs at a fraction of the complexity. Some software engineers are taking this even further, by creating graphical interfaces that will let somebody navigate the Internet just by clicking on the screen with a mouse or by calling up an easy text editor, sort of the way one can now navigate a Macintosh computer — or a commercial online service such as Prodigy. Then there are the Internet services themselves. For every database now available through the Internet, there are probably three or four that are not. Government agencies are only now beginning to connect their storehouses of information to the Net. Several commercial vendors, from database services to booksellers, have made their services available through the Net. Few people now use one of the Net's more interesting applications. A standard known as MIME lets one send audio and graphics files in a message. Imagine opening your e-mail one day to hear your granddaughter's first words, or a "photo" of your friend's new house. Eventually, this standard could allow for distribution of even small video displays over the Net. All of this will require vast new amounts of Net power, to handle both the millions of new people who will jump onto the Net and the new applications they want. Replicating a moving image on a computer screen alone takes a phenomenal amount of computer bits, and computing power to arrange them. All of this combines into a National Information Infrastructure able to move billions of bits of information in one second — the kind of power needed to hook information "hoses" into every business and house. As these "superhighways" grow, so will the "on ramps," for a high- speed road does you little good if you can't get to it. The costs of modems seem to fall as fast as those of computers. High-speed modems (9600 baud and up) are becoming increasingly affordable. At 9600 baud, you can download a satellite weather image of North America in less than two minutes, a file that, with a slower modem could take up to 20 minutes to download. Eventually, homes could be connected directly to a national digital network. Most long-distance phone traffic is already carried in digital form, through high-volume optical fibers. Phone companies are ever so slowly working to extend these fibers the "final mile" to the home. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is working to ensure these links are affordable. Beyond the technical questions are increasingly thorny social, political and economic issues. Who is to have access to these services, and at what cost? If we live in an information age, are we laying the seeds for a new information under class, unable to compete with those fortunate enough to have the money and skills needed to manipulate new communications channels? Who, in fact, decides who has access to what? As more companies realize the potential profits to be made in the new information infrastructure, what happens to such systems as Usenet, possibly the world's first successful anarchistic system, where everybody can say whatever they want? What are the laws of the electronic frontier? When national and state boundaries lose their meaning in cyberspace, the question might even be: WHO is the law? What if a practice that is legal in one country is "committed" in another country where it is illegal, over a computer network that crosses through a third country? Who goes after computer crackers? What role will you play in the revolution?

Appendix A: THE LINGO

Like any community, the Net has developed its own language. What follows is a glossary of some of the more common phrases you'll likely run into. But it's only a small subset of net.speak. You an find a more complete listing in "The New Hacker's Dictionary," compiled by Eric Raymond (MIT Press). Raymond's work is based on an online reference known as "The Jargon File," which you can get through anonymous ftp from ftp.gnu.mit.ai.mit as jarg300.txt.gz in the pub/gnu directory (see chapter 7 for information on how to un-compress a .gz file).

ASCII Has two meanings. ASCII is a universal computer code for English letters and characters. Computers store all information as binary numbers. In ASCII, the letter "A" is stored as 01000001, whether the computer is made by IBM, Apple or Commodore. ASCII also refers to a method, or protocol, for copying files from one computer to another over a network, in which neither computer checks for any errors that might have been caused by static or other problems.

ANSI Computers use several different methods for deciding how to put information on your screen and how your keyboard interacts with the screen. ANSI is one of these "terminal emulation" methods. Although most popular on PC-based bulletin-board systems, it can also be found on some Net sites. To use it properly, you will first have to turn it on, or enable it, in your communications software.

ARPANet A predecessor of the Internet. Started in 1969 with funds from the Defense Department's Advanced Projects Research Agency.

backbone A high-speed network that connects several powerful computers. In the U.S., the backbone of the Internet is often considered the NSFNet, a government funded link between a handful of supercomputer sites across the country.

Baud The speed at which modems transfer data. One baud is roughly equal to one bit per second. It takes eight bits to make up one letter or character. Modems rarely transfer data at exactly the same speed as their listed baud rate because of static or computer problems. More expensive modems use systems, such as Microcom Network Protocol (MNP), which can correct for these errors or which "compress" data to speed up transmission.

BITNet Another, academically oriented, international computer network, which uses a different set of computer instructions to move data. It is easily accessible to Internet users through e-mail, and provides a large number of conferences and databases. Its name comes from "Because It's Time." "

Bounce What your e-mail does when it cannot get to its recipient — it bounces back to you — unless it goes off into the ether, never to be found again.

Command line On Unix host systems, this is where you tell the
machine what you want it to do, by entering commands.

Communications A program that tells a modem how to work. software

Daemon An otherwise harmless Unix program that normally works out of sight of the user. On the Internet, you'll most likely encounter it only when your e-mail is not delivered to your recipient — you'll get back your original message plus an ugly message from a "mailer daemon.

Distribution A way to limit where your Usenet postings go. Handy for such things as "for sale" messages or discussions of regional politics.

Domain The last part of an Internet address, such as "news.com."

Dot When you want to impress the net veterans you meet at parties, say "dot" instead of "period," for example: "My address is john at site dot domain dot com."

Dot file A file on a Unix public-access system that alters the way you or your messages interact with that system. For example, your .login file contains various parameters for such things as the text editor you get when you send a message. When you do an ls command, these files do not appear in the directory listing; do ls -a to list them.

Down When a public-access site runs into technical trouble, and you can no longer gain access to it, it's down.

Download Copy a file from a host system to your computer. There are several different methods, or protocols, for downloading files, most of which periodically check the file as it is being copied to ensure no information is inadvertently destroyed or damaged during the process. Some, such as XMODEM, only let you download one file at a time. Others, such as batch-YMODEM and ZMODEM, let you type in the names of several files at once, which are then automatically downloaded.

EMACS A standard Unix text editor preferred by Unix types
that beginners tend to hate.

E-mail Electronic mail — a way to send a private message to
somebody else on the Net. Used as both noun and verb.

Emoticon See smiley.

F2F Face to Face. When you actually meet those people you been corresponding with/flaming.

FAQ Frequently Asked Questions. A compilation of answers to these. Many Usenet newsgroups have these files, which are posted once a month or so for beginners.

Film at 11 One reaction to an overwrought argument: "Imminent death of the Net predicted. Film at 11."

Finger An Internet program that lets you get some bit of
information about another user, provided they have first
created a .plan file.

Flame Online yelling and/or ranting directed at somebody else.
Often results in flame wars, which occasionally turn into
holy wars (see).

Followup A Usenet posting that is a response to an earlier
message.

Foo/foobar A sort of online algebraic place holder, for example: "If you want to know when another site is run by a for- profit company, look for an address in the form of foo@foobar.com."

Fortune cookie An inane/witty/profund comment that can be found around the net.

Freeware Software that doesn't cost anything.

FTP File-transfer Protocol. A system for transferring files
across the Net.

Get a life What to say to somebody who has, perhaps, been spending a
wee bit too much time in front of a computer.

GIF Graphic Interchange Format. A format developed in the
mid-1980s by CompuServe for use in photo-quality graphics
images. Now commonly used everywhere online.

GNU Gnu's Not Unix. A project of the Free Software
Foundation to write a free version of the Unix operating
system.

Hacker On the Net, unlike among the general public, this is not a bad person; it is simply somebody who enjoys stretching hardware and software to their limits, seeing just what they can get their computers to do. What many people call hackers, net.denizens refer to as crackers.

Handshake Two modems trying to connect first do this to agree on how to transfer data.

Hang When a modem fails to hang up.

Holy war Arguments that involve certain basic tenets of faith, about which one cannot disagree without setting one of these off. For example: IBM PCs are inherently superior to Macintoshes.

Host system A public-access site; provides Net access to people outside the research and government community.

IMHO In My Humble Opinion.

Internet A worldwide system for linking smaller computer networks together. Networks connected through the Internet use a particular set of communications standards to communicate, known as TCP/IP.

Killfile A file that lets you filter Usenet postings to some extent, by excluding messages on certain topics or from certain people.

Log on/log in Connect to a host system or public-access site.

Log off Disconnect from a host system.

Lurk Read messages in a Usenet newsgroup without ever saying anything.

Mailing list Essentially a conference in which messages are delivered right to your mailbox, instead of to a Usenet newsgroup. You get on these by sending a message to a specific e- mail address, which is often that of a computer that automates the process.

MOTSS Members of the Same Sex. Gays and Lesbians online.
Originally an acronym used in the 1980 federal census.

Net.god One who has been online since the beginning, who knows
all and who has done it all.

Net.personality Somebody sufficiently opinionated/flaky/with plenty of
time on his hands to regularly post in dozens of
different Usenet newsgroups, whose presence is known to
thousands of people.

Net.police Derogatory term for those who would impose their
standards on other users of the Net. Often used in
vigorous flame wars (in which it occasionally mutates to
net.nazis).

Netiquette A set of common-sense guidelines for not annoying others.

Network A communications system that links two or more computers. It can be as simple as a cable strung between two computers a few feet apart or as complex as hundreds of thousands of computers around the world linked through fiber optic cables, phone lines and satellites.

Newbie Somebody new to the Net. Sometimes used derogatorily by net.veterans who have forgotten that, they, too, were once newbies who did not innately know the answer to everything. "Clueless newbie" is always derogatory.

Newsgroup A Usenet conference.

NIC Network Information Center. As close as an Internet- style network gets to a hub; it's usually where you'll find information about that particular network.

NSA line eater The more aware/paranoid Net users believe that the National Security Agency has a super-powerful computer assigned to reading everything posted on the Net. They will jokingly (?) refer to this line eater in their postings. Goes back to the early days of the Net when the bottom lines of messages would sometimes disappear for no apparent reason.

NSF National Science Foundation. Funds the NSFNet, a high-speed network that once formed the backbone of the Internet in the U.S.

Offline When your computer is not connected to a host system
or the Net, you are offline.

Online When your computer is connected to an online service,
bulletin-board system or public-access site.

Ping A program that can trace the route a message takes from
your site to another site.

.plan file A file that lists anything you want others on the Net to know about you. You place it in your home directory on your public-access site. Then, anybody who fingers (see) you, will get to see this file.

Post To compose a message for a Usenet newsgroup and then send it out for others to see.

Postmaster The person to contact at a particular site to ask for
information about the site or complain about one of
his/her user's behavior.

Protocol The method used to transfer a file between a host
system and your computer. There are several types,
such as Kermit, YMODEM and ZMODEM.

Prompt When the host system asks you to do something and
waits for you to respond. For example, if you see
"login:" it means type your user name.

README files Files found on FTP sites that explain what is in a given
FTP directory or which provide other useful information
(such as how to use FTP).

Real Soon Now A vague term used to describe when something will
actually happen.

RFC Request for Comments. A series of documents that
describe various technical aspects of the Internet.

ROTFL Rolling on the Floor Laughing. How to respond to a
particularly funny comment.

ROT13 A simple way to encode bad jokes, movie reviews that give away the ending, pornography, etc. Essentially, each letter in a message is replace by the letter 13 spaces away from it in the alphabet. There are online decoders to read these; nn and rn have them built in.

RTFM Read the, uh, you know, Manual. Often used in flames
against people who ask computer-related questions that
could be easily answered with a few minutes with a
manual. More politely: RTM.

Screen capture A part of your communications software that
opens a file on your computer and saves to it whatever
scrolls past on the screen while connected to a host
system.

Server A computer that can distribute information or files automatically in response to specifically worded e-mail requests.

Shareware Software that is freely available on the Net. If you
like and use the software, you should send in the fee
requested by the author, whose name and address will be
found in a file distributed with the software.

.sig file Sometimes, .signature file. A file that, when placed in
your home directory on your public-access site, will
automatically be appended to every Usenet posting you
write.

.sig quote A profound/witty/quizzical/whatever quote that you include in your .sig file.

Signal-to-noise The amount of useful information to be found in a given ratio Usenet newsgroup. Often used derogatorily, for example: "the signal-to-noise ratio in this newsgroup is pretty low."

SIMTEL20 The White Sands Missile Range used to maintain a giant collection of free and low-cost software of all kinds, which was "mirrored" to numerous other ftp sites on the Net. In the fall of 1993, the Air Force decided it had better things to do than maintain a free software library and shut it down. But you'll still see references to the collection, known as SIMTEL20, around the Net.

Smiley A way to describe emotion online. Look at this with your head tilted to the left :-). There are scores of these smileys, from grumpy to quizzical.

Snail mail Mail that comes through a slot in your front door or a
box mounted outside your house.

Sysadmin The system administrator; the person who runs a host
system or public-access site.

Sysop A system operator. Somebody who runs a bulletin-board
system.

TANSTAAFL There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.

TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The particular system for transferring information over a computer network that is at the heart of the Internet.

Telnet A program that lets you connect to other computers on
the Internet.

Terminal There are several methods for determining how your
emulation keystrokes and screen interact with a public-access
site's operating system. Most communications programs
offer a choice of "emulations" that let you mimic the
keyboard that would normally be attached directly to
the host-system computer.

UUCP Unix-to-Unix CoPy. A method for transferring Usenet postings and e-mail that requires far fewer net resources than TCP/IP, but which can result in considerably slower transfer times.

Upload Copy a file from your computer to a host system.

User name On most host systems, the first time you connect you
are asked to supply a one-word user name. This can be
any combination of letters and numbers.

VT100 Another terminal-emulation system. Supported by many
communications program, it is the most common one in
use on the Net. VT102 is a newer version.

Appendix B: General Information About the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a membership organization that was founded in July of 1990 to ensure that the principles embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are protected as new communications technologies emerge.

From the beginning, EFF has worked to shape our nation's communications infrastructure and the policies that govern it in order to maintain and enhance First Amendment, privacy and other democratic values. We believe that our overriding public goal must be the creation of Electronic Democracy, so our work focuses on the establishment of:

o new laws that protect citizens' basic Constitutional rights as they use new communications technologies,

o a policy of common carriage requirements for all network providers so that all speech, no matter how controversial, will be carried without discrimination,

o a National Public Network where voice, data and video services are accessible to all citizens on an equitable and affordable basis, and

o a diversity of communities that enable all citizens to have a voice in the information age.

Join us!

I wish to become a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I enclose:

$__________ Regular membership — $40 $__________ Student membership — $20

Special Contribution

I wish to make a tax-deductible donation in the amount of $__________ to further support the activities of EFF and to broaden participation in the organization.

Documents Available in Hard Copy Form

The following documents are available free of charge from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Please indicate any of the documents you wish to receive.

___ Open Platform Proposal - EFF's proposal for a national telecommunications infrastructure. 12 pages. July, 1992

___ An Analysis of the FBI Digital Telephony Proposal - Response of EFF-organized coalition to the FBI's digital telephony proposal of Fall, 1992. 8 pages. September, 1992.

___ Building the Open Road: The NREN and the National Public Network - A discussion of the National Research and Education Network as a prototype for a National Public Network. 20 pages. May, 1992.

___ Innovative Services Delivered Now: ISDN Applications at Home, School, the Workplace and Beyond - A compilation of ISDN applications currently in use. 29 pages. January, 1993.

___ Decrypting the Puzzle Palace - John Perry Barlow's argument for strong encryption and the need for an end to U.S. policies preventing its development and use. 13 pages. May, 1992.

___ Crime and Puzzlement - John Perry Barlow's piece on the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the world of hackers, crackers and those accused of computer crimes. 24 pages. June, 1990.

___ Networks & Policy - A quarterly newsletter detailing EFF's activities and achievements.

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