|
The Letter S Can you match the following suspiciously similar surnames with their site descriptions? 1. suck 2. spiv 3. stim 4. salon 5. slate 6. spanq
a. A daily dose of RealAudio blabber about Web sites Answers: 1-b, 2-f, 3- e, 4-c, 5-d, 6-a
The Rimm Porn Study '96 In February, U.S. Department of Justice attorneys slid to a new ethical low when they filed a debunked and deceptive cyberporn study as evidence of smut on the Net in the Communications Decency Act lawsuit. Perhaps they forgot that lawyers are barred from submitting misleading documents to a court. The research paper by former Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate Marty Rimm had appeared on the cover of the July 4, 1995 TIME Magazine, which Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) waved on the Senate floor as justification for Internet censorship. It might have worked, except for the efforts of academics, reporters and lawyers on the WELL conferencing system who exposed Rimm's dubious claims and unethical "research" practices. However, since Carnegie Mellon administrators endorsed Rimm's study, they continue to stonewall any internal investigation of its many disturbing ethical violations.
OK, It Was Clever Once... ...but cut it out. Nobody's tricked by people tipping the META fields in their favor by filling them up with naughty words repeated over and over. It's not nice to fool Mother Internet.
SPAM 
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM. These annoying mass e-mailed or Usenet
posted advertisements, were the scourge of the Net in '96, hawking
everything from dubious legal services to blueprints of Fat Man & Little
Boy. Online SPAM hunters particularly slugged it out with self-anointed
SPAM King, Jeff Slaton, whose hated SPAM practices re-surface from
time to time. If only Letter Man were here, to help turn SPAM KING into
SPANKING.
Senator Exon
Hoarding Domain Names Throughout the year, we waited on the edge of our chairs to see the fruits of Procter & Gamble's domain-name-grabbing spree of 1995. The company, makers of a wide range of hygiene products, seized names for said products, then went on to claim names for dozens of embarrassing afflictions...including pimples.com, dandruff.com and diarrhea.com. To date, they've only colonized a few of the sites; most just send you back to the company home page.
Prophecies of Doom Like anxious Californians waiting for the big one to strike, at press time we were still anticipating the apocalyptic Internet breakdown that so- called experts keep predicting. Outside of the 19-hour AOL hiccup and some mischievous rats, the Net has proved as resilient as Tony Danza's acting career.
Web Sites Hacked  What started in 1995 as a good joke when hackers marred a Web site for the movie Hackers, became the political statement of the moment this year as unknown hackers defaced the home pages of the Dept. of Justice and the C.I.A. (cleverly renaming the organization the "Central Stupid Agency"). Other victims included the Nation of Islam and security expert Tsutomu Shimomura. In early October President Clinton signed the The National Information Infrastructure Protection Act which among other things made it a felony to trespass in a computer system.
Bye, Bye, anon.penet.fi Beloved anon.penet.fi, oh how thou hast been violated. On August 30, frustrated by the Finnish court's insistence that the anonymous remailer's database be made available to them (to determine the true name of a penet.fi user), owner Johan Helsingius pulled the life-giving plug. "It was neither accusations nor harassment, but the fact that a recent legal change left the privacy of e-mail in a rather unclear state," Helsingius explained to IU. Among the 500,000 penet.fi users cut-off from the remailer: users of alt.abuse.recovery, misc.kids.health and soc.support.depression.treatment.
Encryption Woes Although PGP and other powerful encryption technologies (technologies that privatize forms of electronic communication) are already in the hands of the world, the White House and Capitol Hill refuse to pass legislation allowing companies (like Lotus) to incorporate them, unrestricted, into their softwares. And it's killing American business abroad. The Feds, the CIA, the DoJ, they all want back door "keys" into all manners of communication. Just give it up you bunch of snoops!
MSNBC--Denied! In June, InterNIC made good on its threat to shut down over 9,000 sites that were delinquent in paying their domain name fees. Unfortunately, they made a wee mistake in their first stab at net.discipline: they pulled the plug on the day of MSNBC's much- ballyhooed debut, in spite of the fact that MSNBC had ponied up the $100.
Pretty Good Privacy Hallelujah! January 11, 1996, marked the end of the ridiculous three- year long government investigation of Phil Zimmermann, the author of Pretty Good Privacy encryption software. With little explanation and much embarrassment, the Feds decided not to indict the beleaguered software-consultant-cum-hero on criminal charges of "exporting munitions" when PGP was published on the Net, and the cat was let out the bag on FTP servers around the world. To this day, Zimmermann is a poster child for privacy rights, and PGP's dual key system ensures strong and simple cryptography for the average citizen.
|
After all the fanfare died down, Web users realized that Microsoft's Slate was nothing more than a traditional newsstand magazine formatted in HTML. Readers rejected the idea of paying for it--but don't think that'll stop Slate from making its way into your home. As Stale.com, a brilliant parody of the Michael Kinsley-edited publication, explained, "You will read it because it demands to be read. Ignore us now, but sooner or later, [Slate] will be bundled into your operating system and you'll have no choice."
Le Grande Secret Bowing to arguments from the late French president's wife, a Parisian court on Jan. 17 banned a tell-all book penned by Francois Mitterrand's longtime personal physician. But by the time the court acted, 40,000 copies of "Le Grand Secret" already had been sold. One delighted reader, after devouring the intimate details of his former leader's bout with prostate cancer, decided to scan in the pages and use the accompanying publicity to hype his "cyber-cafi." He was later arrested-- ostensibly on unrelated charges.
Bill Buffoonery Georgia House Bill 1630 was perhaps the most bone-headed piece of legislation to be passed into law in 1996. In a nutshell, the law makes it illegal for Georgia netizens to maintain false identities (ie. numerical CompuServe addresses) and makes it difficult or illegal to link to another site without permission.
Cookie Technology It sounds innocuous enough, but basically the cookie functions as yet another privacy invader on the Net. They essentially allow server access to where ever the client has been on the Web, which comes in handy for snooping marketers and results in a lot of unsolicited sales pandering. It's mostly harmless, but we think the tech is crumby.
Virtual Rape? REDO ME Stories of "virtual rape" started making the rounds in 1996, most notably in Sherry Turkle's book, Life on the Screen--the idea being that assault on your cyberspace persona could be as psychologically traumatic as a "real life" rape, proving that we carry both the best and worst of our psyches into the online arena.
It's Deja News All Over Again 1996 was the year that the Net community slapped itself on the forehead with a vengeance. Posts to newsgroups usually expire within a week or two, and netizens have long assumed that their childish flames and bad poems lay down decently in their graves and died at that time. However, Deja News, the largest Usenet archive in existence, provides posts back to May 1995, and the service will soon archive back to 1979. Privacy forums boiled over with indignation throughout the year as people fumed about this "invasion" of privacy--often prompting the response, "Well, if you didn't want people to read it, why'd you post it to a worldwide network of computers?"
24 Hours in Cyberspace A valiant attempt to prove that people use the Internet for more than trading doctored GIFs of Teri Hatcher, this much ballyhooed event/site/over-priced coffee table book proved that people will basically ignore such valiant attempts.
Domain Name Disputes 
Nothing makes for a better story than a good old fashioned domain
name dispute. The typical scenario goes something like this: Innocent
individual reserves domain name with Internic. Big company decides its
time to get on the Internet and finds that their preferred domain name
is being used by innocent individual. Big company has big law firm send
threatening letter to individual. Individual being somewhat savvy creates
a stir, making big company look like a bully. Big company complains to
Internic. Internic preferring to be sued by individual than big company
defers the dispute to its new dispute policy that greatly favors big
company.
The Church of Scientology vs. The Net  Scientologists have been up in arms ever since a mysterious user, Scamizdat, posted secret copyrighted scriptures to the tempestuous Usenet group alt.religion.scientology (a.r.s.). Filing one massive lawsuit after another, the Church has locked horns with a number of ISPs and operators of anonymous remailers in an attempt to disclose the true name of the culprit. Despite any hard evidence, the Church has picked on netizen Grady Ward for the violation. Backed by thousands of other netizens, Ward and anti-Church activists have retaliated in kind, filing million dollar counterclaims, and posting site after site exposing Scientology scandals and bullying tactics. The battle dates back to a.r.s.' beginnings in 1991, but has never been more hard fought than in 1996. And 1997 looks to be as bloody.
Arbiters of Cool  When is enough, enough? There's Cool Site of the Day, Crappy Site of the Day, Same Site of the Day, Site of the Moment. Curses! May a horrible insect swarm consume the next person to post a new "site of the day" page.
The Net Stinks of IPO Wall Street's love affair with the Net resulted in a lot heartbreak in 1996. With horseblinders on, investors madly sought out and gobbled up Internet stocks as though there were no tomorrow. In late 1995, Netscape set the pace with its initial public offering at a price of $28 a share. Two months later, the stock rocketed to $150 a share, and later split 2-for-1 (and hit a 52 week low of $32.13 a share). Following its lead, a slew of other tech companies went public, most of them young, overvalued and deep in the red. Even Wired Ventures took a disastrous shot at going public--arrogantly valuing itself at $447 million (while losing and estimated $12 million annually), this was one of the few tech stocks Wall Street actually balked at.
|
| 2 |
The Browser Wars
Ignore the cola wars, Coke vs. Pepsi and the burger wars, McDonalds
vs. Burger King, this year all the excitement was generated in the third
installment of the consumer products battle trilogy, the Browser Wars,
Netscape vs. Microsoft. Time was that Netscape Navigator ruled the
browser market. Riding high on the millions earned from their lucrative
IPO and enjoying a virtual monopoly (the AOL Browser? Please), the Jim
and Marc show was the toast of the town. Then Bill stepped up to the
plate. The first version of the Explorer browser reeked, but Gates and
Co. retreated, retooled, and by the time 3.0 was released, Microsoft
had created a virtual copy of Navigator (just as Window 95 aped the
Mac OS). Internet magazines ran elaborate cover stories reporting
breathlessly from the front lines of this virtual war. With virtually
identical products--the major difference being whether you like
watching an asteroid war behind a giant monolithic "N" or a single
meteorite orbiting a half globe/half "e" as you twiddled your thumbs
waiting for that 56k site map to squeeze itself through your 14.4
modem--the two mortal enemies turned to content alliances to lure
customers. Now with both companies feverishly pushing 4.0 versions to
the market, its time for us to let them in on a little secret--the winner
will be the one that continues to give it away for free. As long as their
both free, users will just grab which ever icon is more convenient to
double click on. And while these two behemoths continue to battle it
out to see who will take Browser of the Year honors at next year's gala
C/Net Awards, we'll be sitting on the sidelines sipping a cold RC, eating
a Wendy's burger and rooting for Lynx.
| 1 |
The CDA
February 8, 1996, or Black Tuesday--it was the day President Clinton
signed the loathed Communications Decency Act into law. Rather than
sit on their hands, the Net sprung into action and took the U.S.
Government to task. Challenging the constitutionality of the law, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, with the American Civil Liberties Union
and 18 other plaintiffs, filed suit on February 26. The world turned their
Web pages black in protest and thus began the massive Blue Ribbon
campaign to halt American censorship of the Net. It was not all for
naught. On June 12, a three judge panel in Philadelphia ruled the CDA
in violation of rights protected by the First and Fifth Amendment, and
thus, unconstitutional. The Government responded by filing a Notice of
Appeal on July 1. And then a second challenge to the Act, filed by the
online newspaper, The American Reporter, also found the CDA in
violation of the First Amendment on July 29. The one-two punch! All
suing parties will consolidated as the case heads to the Supreme Court
for one last cage-match brawl, where only one person will be left
standing. Stay tuned.
| 100-76 | 75-51 | 50-26 | 25-1 |
 
|