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notes on RRE, spam, Lexis-Nexis, Wired, Microsoft, etc
``` As a periodic reminder, you can unsubscribe by sending a message like so:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: unsubscribe
Now that school has gotten back under way, I am about to send out updated versions of some old messages that teachers or students might find useful. Feel free to forward them anyplace they might be appropriate.
Along with the recent messages about spam, I should have included an extra reminder to be nice to system administrators, especially when reporting apparent net abuse originating at their sites. System administrators rarely do anything wrong, and they often receive unjustified flames. Keep in mind that spammers sometimes forge addresses from other sites on their messages so their own ISP won't get the blame. It's true -- the Internet provides equally powerful tools to both saints and creeps.
A few RRE readers sent bewildered responses to the nominations of left-wing hate groups on the net. Let me just repeat that I don't endorse everything I send to the list. I have a variety of motivations for sending the stuff, and I assume RRE readers have ten times as many motivations for reading it.
About the LEXIS-NEXIS P-TRAK alert: Maybe you can help me resolve a mystery that continues to bother me. LEXIS-NEXIS, in an official statement available on the Web at http://www.lexis-nexis.com/lncc/p-trak/p-trak.html , asserts the following:
Contrary to some messages that have been posted to some Internet discussion and news groups, the P-TRAK file does not contain any credit histories, bank account information, personal financial data, mother's maiden name or medical histories. This misinformation has been posted over and over again to various news groups.
As I have mentioned, I have seen many versions of the same basic alert, some of them nastier than others, and most of these versions do mistakenly mention mother's maiden name. But I have never seen any version of the alert that mentions credit histories, bank account information, personal financial data, or medical histories. Nor has anybody else that I have talked to about the matter. Has anybody else seen such alerts? I'm thinking that, given how many versions of the alert I have seen and the great diversity of RRE readers who send me stuff like this, if alerts of that description were really posted "over and over again to various news groups", surely I would have seen them. This matters in part because L-N did a big public relations campaign around the issue, and their version of the story appeared in many news articles, including several which were framed in terms such as "rumors on the Internet".
The October 1996 issue of Internet World includes several useful articles about where, if anyplace, the next order of magnitude of Internet bandwidth is coming from. Much of the issue felt a little stale to me, since I knew most of its news months ago just from being wired to the net all the time. But I got a decent sense of completeness from reading the feature articles. Also, the October 1996 issue of Wired, despite its ridiculously overhyped interview with Walter Wriston, is interesting for Steve Steinberg's article on "netheads versus bellheads", which basically reports the latest rage -- attacks against ATM by Internet technical people. Like Steve, I hadn't heard about this until recently, having swallowed the standard line that ATM is where broadband Internet is headed. My antennae had gotten cautiously aroused by the hype for broadband Ethernet in the untrustworthy Red Herring. But when I heard John Curran's devastating technical critique of ATM at the Telestrategies conference, I knew something big was up. What I find most interesting about Steve's article, though, is how he's able to draw on a whole long series of binary oppositions to contrast the workings of ATM to the Internet philosophy, so that ATM ends up sounding, not just technically suboptimal, but politically anachronistic. In the same way that the evangelists of unrestrained capitalism have developed the rhetorical technology to construct devastating arguments in a few simple phrases against anything related to government involvement in the economy, it is now amazingly straightforward, rhetorically speaking, to place the telephone companies and their technical architectures in the same bin as the Soviet Union and other such symbols of centralized planning. I'm jealous, of course. I'm always looking for ways to bridge the gap between technical language and social language. I don't buy the dichotomies that makes this so easy for the Wired folks, but I do envy them. (To be fair, Steve's article does end by sketching, albeit all too briefly, how the nethead/bellhead dichotomies are breaking down in practice.) Also of note in the October 1996 Wired is David Kline's article on "The Embedded Internet". Today's privacy problems are chump change compared to what we'll have when TCP/IP is flowing through the veins of every electrical device on the planet.
A note on Microsoft...
The other evening I went to a presentation by some guys from Microsoft about their company's Internet strategy. The meeting was organized by the local Software Industry Council, and the audience was mostly technical people with a lot of Internet expertise. The main presentation was by a technical guy who talked very fast with Powerpoint slides for well over an hour. At one point, having worked up a head of steam, he put up this one slide onto which various Internet-related Microsoft software packages rolled, one after another. They were, shall we say, numerous, and they covered a lot of ground. Halfway through the parade of packages, I realized that the guy was trying to intimidate us.
You know what it reminded me of? My colleague Chandra Mukerji just finished a book about the gardens of Versailles. It has always been a mystery why these humongous, extravagent gardens proliferated in early modern France. Chandra's theory, which she explains at some length, is that the gardens symbolized the consolidation of the French state's control over the physical territory of the country. No longer did state control of territory consist simply of an array of outposts -- the early modern French state perfected the technology to really take control over the territory between the outposts as well, so that (among other things) national borders became more meaningful than previously. The gardens at Versailles included demonstrations of these technologies, e.g., for earth-moving, and they were elaborately and carefully designed for the purpose of giving tours to visiting heads of state, with the intention of impressing them with France's ability to control its territory -- and, if need be, theirs as well. Nowadays, it seems to me, the territories are made out of technical standards, and we call these tours "demos". Back in the early 18th century, one can well imagine the visiting royalty and their ministers scoffing amongst themselves that they earthworks at Versailles constituted mere bluffery -- what we could call announceware.
But that scoffing, then as now, was itself largely for show. The animals are frightened, and for good reason. In a weird way, the scariest news I've heard about Microsoft lately was a footnote to the humongous PR campaign around its lame political magazine, Slate. It was mentioned, inter alia, that Slate would be sold in hardcopy exclusively at that other rapidly expanding hothouse of hyperfocused marketing -- yes! -- Starbuck's Coffee. Okay, both companies are from Seattle. The deeper point, though, is that while the rest of the computer industry scrambles to erect barricades against the rising tide of Microsoft hegemony within the computer business, Microsoft's strategy now encompasses virtually the whole industrial system. Companies in virtually every sector of the economy know that they need to establish a major alliance with a computer company in order to take suitably rapid advantage of emerging IT-driven strategic opportunities in their own industry, and when they wake up and look around for where the power in the computer industry is -- they see Microsoft. The Starbuck's deal really is a footnote. But then there are the thirty other deals. ```
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