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The Spot and Other Lousy Web Serials
No More Monkey Business Donna Rice Hughes, best known as the seductress who sunk Gary Hart's 1988 presidential campaign, resurfaced this year as communications director for "Enough is Enough," an anti-porn group that, beside having a name that recalls a Dick Van Patten sitcom, targeted the Internet.
Ace Up Their Sleeves Of course online casinos are using specially designed logarithms to provide fair gambling odds. Did you ever have any doubts?
Traci Lords for Congress 
Considering how hotly debated the issue of online pornography has
become, an anonymous government worker's nomination of Traci Lords
for Congress made complete sense in 1996. The campaign Web
headquarters asked potential voters, "Who could be a better choice
than one who entered the fray at the remarkable age of 15?"
Panix Attack Unidentified hackers paralyzed New York service provider Panix by flooding its servers with streams of packets bearing fake return addresses.
IU's Dissed List While most people we contact for interviews are receptive, there were a couple of people this year that deemed us not worthy: Mario Cuomo, Perry Farrell, Michael Moore, Laurie Anderson, Bob Allison and Jennifer Aniston.
Please Come to Boston After meeting his dream girl in a chat room, a 15-year-old Illinois boy hopped on his bike to visit her--in Boston. Soon realizing that the 1,000-some mile bike ride might be impractical, he decided to take buses instead. After two days on the road, the boy walked 20 miles from a bus terminal to the girl's house, almost. Police stopped the boy a block from the girls house and the boy was returned home to his parents without ever seeing the girl. Asked about the young Romeo' trip afterward, the would-be Juliet said "I was really shocked. I thought 'He must be psycho.'"
HTML Code is Art Overlooking a federal copyright provision that gives Web page ownership to the HTML coder, a number of corporations were surprised to learn that they didn't own the Web page they paid for.
Alien Autopsy Before Fox released its "Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?" television special, netizens were hard at work, scrutinizing alien autopsy footage posted online. Impassioned debate occupied all too much time and bandwidth, as UFOlogists, special effects experts and ex-government officials sought out the truth. Thankfully, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims set the record straight--the Internet footage is fraudulent. Really?
The Smut Catcher An Occidental College student displayed a list of users caught downloading dirty GIF files and file names from the Internet. But not before long, his sys-admin asked him to discontinue his "Smut- Catching" ways.
The Slow Death of iGuide At the start of the year Delphi, or iGuide as it was soon ot be redubbed, was set to re-debut as a now well-financed challenger to AOL backed by communication heavyweights MCI and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. By the end of the year iGuide was little more than a glorified online version of TV Guide. Media junkies and Murdoch bashers got a kick out of watching the ill-fated venture slowly hemorrhage. Some of the highlights:
The McSpotlight 
McDonald's got McScrewed by the Net in 1996, as the press gave
more and more media attention to the McSpotlight Web page and the
McLibel mailing list. The site and list were initiated to galvanize anti-
McDonald's sentiment on the Net, particularly in response to the
company's suit against two Brits, Dave Morris and Helen Steel.
McDonald's filed a lawsuit against the pair in 1990 for libeling the
company via pamphlets they released in the U.K.. The pamphlets
charged the food chain with exploitative labor practices and animal
cruelty, among other things. This grassroots movement proved that the
Net is mightier than the sword, the pen and the Big Mac himself.
The Net Made Me Do It! last December, teenagers from the hoity-toity Chicago suburb of Lake Forest Ill., were charged with creating and passing counterfeit $20 bills in a Kenosha, Wisc., Taco Bell. The teens said they had gotten the idea, which involved a copying machine, tea bags, lemon-lime flavored drink mix and a microwave oven, off the Internet. Shocked high school officials said that the students couldn't have learned such a thing on the school computers due to usage restrictions, but promised to "take all security precautions one can take, vis a vis technology, to screen out any objectionable or inappropriate materials."
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Love in the Void
The Off-Broadway play Love in the Void debuts. The script? Forty-five pages of Courtney Love's bizarre Usenet postings. Rumors persist of a national dinner theater tour with Linda Lavin taking over the title role.
Net Phones They'd be great if there were anyone on the other end of the line. Unfortunately, the software for phoning over the Net isn't interoperable and has the sound quality of two Dixie cups wired with string between clubhouses.
AOL's Hell in '96 It's the service everyone loves...to hate. The past year was not kind to AOL, as it struggled with security flaws, outages, severe stock falls, lawsuits, unforgiving hackers and chat room sex and murder scandals. Poor AOL, although not responsible for all of this bad press, was caught in the middle of just about everything that could and would go wrong with the Net in '96.
AltaVista Ads AltaVista Technology
Hyping AOHell REDO ME In March 1996, Boardwatch Magazine directed readers to the mags FTP site for a copy of AOHell. But rather than finding the much hyped hacker software there, visitors to the site received a statement from editor/publisher Jack Rickard, sounding somewhat Clintonesque as he explained that, although he agrees in principle with the philosophy of the software, he does not advocate using it to make life miserable for AOL users. Oh well. We hear the only thing AOHell's really good for is swearing in chat rooms, anyway.
These People Are Perverts! "Naked studs?" "Nude celebrities?" These are just a few of the searches that you'll find people looking for at Magellan's search voyeur, which lets you randomly snoop on 20 searches that are being conducted at that moment.
Just Please No Candice Bergen Ads Stay with us on this one. First AT&T announced their WorldNet Internet service. Then MCI shockingly announced a service that would match the AT&T offer. Then in another startling announcement Sprint announced a service that would match the AT&T and MCI offers.
No One With an IQ Under 80 Admitted The World Wide Web Consortium, with 22 industry organizations, authored the Platform for Internet Content (PICS), a labeling protocol that essentially allows users to create their own rating systems for the Web. The PICS standard boasts "self-regulation," yet it still concerns many users who believe it's just one more step toward Net censorship. Let's face it, with or without PICS, Congress' porn-bustin' cronies are going to try to censor the Net. Sen. Exon can hardly grasp the Net as a concept--is he really going to comprehend and embrace something called "PICS protocol?"
The Smut Watchers 
The Surfwatch and Cyber Patrol logos were perverted by content
providers who were honored by the fact that they had been deemed
"objectionable" by the site-blocking softwares. Others sites weren't as
enthralled, particularly "objectionable" URLs that discussed issues of
AIDS, safe sex, gun rights, feminism and homosexuality.
Iran Embargo? In mid-August, a U.S. National Science Foundation official briefly blocked crucial international links to Iran. However, nobody gave him permission. Civil libertarians were up in arms, calling the move unconstitutional.
Cyber Cafes Cyber cafes went from geek to chic back to geek in all but one year's time. It was nice to be able to access e-mail, Usenet and the Web away from the home or the office. But the Net's explosive popularity turned connected coffee shops into horrible newbie ghettos.
Foul-Mouthed Judge In open defiance of the Communications Decency Act, retired Texas judge Steve Russell let Capitol Hill have it with an obscenity-filled editorial that even made IU blush. The American Reporter was the first to publish the piece, which called Congress a bunch of @#$% as well as a bunch of @#$%. Wow! |
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