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On April 5th you asked Ian Clarke of FreeNet many questions about this new project, which is designed to permit almost totally anonymous Internet posting of almost any kind of material. Here are his answers.

Who is liable?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by tcd004

You said that this: "allows information to be published and read without fear of censorship because individual documents cannot be traced to their source..."

I'm all for an open forum for free speech, but this seems almost reckless. In most venues of speech, accountability for someone's words is fundamental. The Internet has opened up the possiblity of free speech without accountability to a small degree, and look at what has happened. Do you fear any legal repercussions to your group for creating this forum based on this fact?

Ian:

Thanks for your question tcd004. The problem is that it is sometimes impossible to have free speech unless it can be delivered anonymously, since the threat of retribution can be a very effective deterrent against people stating their opinions. I would even go so far as to say that a forum which forced people to identify themselves was not permitting true free speech (This is why Slashdot allows "Anonymous Cowards" to have their say). I should further point out that there is no reason that people cannot digitally sign information they place in Freenet to indicate that they are the authors of a piece of information, but we don't force people to do that. Someone could even build up an anonymous reputation by signing all of their work with the same private key.

My personal feeling is that liable, and liable law, assumes that people will believe everything they read. This might, to an extent, be true in this time of centralized media, but my hope is that systems like Freenet (and indeed SlashDot) will encourage people to make judgments about the reliability of information themselves rather than relying on a corruptible centralized source.

Why the name FreeNet?
(Score:4, Insightful)
by K8Fan

Maybe I'm just showing my age, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?

Here is part of the Detroit Freenet FAQ:

* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net is a free, public-access community computer system. Free-Nets can serve populations of any size, from large metropolitan areas to small cities and towns. They offer a wide spectrum of on-line information services to the public, including community and government databases and worldwide electronic messaging. They don't charge for their services, so everything on them is free. Free-Nets also have an interactive aspect, in that users can dialogue with information providers. While there are many Free-Nets around the world, each Free-Net is tailored to meet the needs of the local community, so no two Free-Nets are identical.

Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.

Ian:

Basically our experience is that while other systems and projects have used the term "Freenet" in the past, for the most part it had fallen out of common usage (if you don't believe me just take a look at the current contents of alt.freenet - which is primarily spam). We believe that since we are developing a "Free Network", the abbreviation of "Freenet" is too good not to use, and since it isn't really in common-usage anywhere else right now, we have resurrected it.

Poisoning the waters
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Mike Schiraldi

What protection is there against someone poisoning the system with malicious data? For example, let's say MPAASoftRIAAOL Corp. sets up a system of computers all over the place with wildly different IPs, and they feed either random or specially crafted bogus data into the system.

This is sort of analogous to renaming Barry_Manilow.mp3 to DaveMatthewsBand.mp3 and putting it on Napster. How do we prevent it? Some sort of decentralized, everyone-is-created-equal moderation system?

Ian:

You raise an interesting point, and one which has created much discussion on the mailing list since these "cancer" attacks are probably the most difficult to defend against in any system, particularly if it is decentralized like Freenet. Right now, the way Freenet works limits the damage that can be done with such a node, but in the future we plan to implement mechanisms which will make such an attack even less effective. Basically Freenet avoids becoming dependent on any particular node since requests will be spread almost equally among all Freenet nodes (by the nature of the dynamic caching and mirroring). This means that even if 0.1% of the total number of Freenet nodes are corrupted, at most about 0.1-0.4% of requests will be affected by it. Right now whenever someone requests some data in Freenet, in a sense they are voting for it, and all of the nodes which were involved in retrieving it. This is less than ideal since you don't actually know what you will get until it is too late (much like voting in the real world!). We plan to implement a mechanism to address this, where you can "undo" your vote if you aren't happy with the result, and thus Freenet gets a much more accurate idea of the quality of different types of information, and the quality of the nodes used to retrieve it. This will mean that a malicious node of the type you describe will eventually be ignored by the rest of Freenet, so hopefully the threat you describe won't be an issue when we release Freenet 1.0.

Bandwidth and Piracy
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Valdrax

In your own FAQ, you pretty much sidestep the entire issue that FreeNet would become a humongous "warez" distribution system by saying that it's merely a more efficient means of doing what others have been doing before. Ignoring the seeming subtle endorsement of piracy through the system, I'll raise an important question for adminstrators of FreeNet nodes.

In your FAQ, you say that it is very hard for FreeNet node admins to know what is on their site. With the inevitable proliferation of "warez" on the site, how will the system avoid getting bogged down with hundreds of illegal copies of popular pieces of software?

For example, when Diablo 2 finally comes out in the stores, what would prevent servers from being overloaded with:

/software/games/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/RPGs/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/rpg/Diablo2.iso
/warez/l337gam3z/Diablo2.iso
/fr33gam3z/war3z/rpg/diabloII.crack.iso
/mywarez/ObfuscatedDistributionKey/Diablo2.image ...etc.?

You could literally have hundreds of 650 Mb images of games floating around jamming up everyone's nodes. With the lack of searchability, no one would know what keys hook into what files. Without this knowledge, warez people might keep uploading copies to different keys, thus flooding the system. In essence, does not the lack of protection against piracy and the seemingly intentional goal of keeping admins from controlling their system threaten to bring down the entire network under the burden of warez and junk?

Ian:

The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie. restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons), and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce copyright. As for whether Freenet will be "overloaded" with Warez junk, well current methods of distributing Warez work fine already, but as for Freenet - the system will contain whatever information people request. If people request Warez, then there will be Warez on Freenet, if they request pornography, then there will be pornography on Freenet, and if they request political documents then there will be political documents on Freenet. Freenet makes no distinction, and if it did it could not claim to permit true freedom of information. If you want to know more about why we just might be able to live without copyright take a look at our philosophy page.

Regarding your comment about large files clogging up Freenet, right now, inserting a huge file into Freenet probably won't work, since a node won't store a file which exceeds its disk-cache limit. We also plan to make large files need to justify themselves in-terms of the number of hits they receive, so that they don't displace loads of smaller files.

Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by griffjon

It's pretty scary when Wired slams you with the headline, "Alternative Net Protects Pirates", which contained in the story gems such as:

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and "privacy nuts."

And, failing Monday's piece in the Nando Times , that's actually been the best article so far. The New Scientist is running "out of control: The Internet is about to get even harder to police" in their current issue, and ABCNews.com did a one-paragraph style summary of this article, with the lead of "An Internet system designed to guarantee anonymous free speech on the Web could be used by child pornographers and terrorists, according to New Scientist magazine," which then proceeds to all but call you and the other programmers pedophiles in a grammatical burp.

My question is, if this is to be successful (which I for one am all in favor of, I'm in close contact with Brandon and Steven, two of the FreeNet programmers, and am very much in support of the existence of this), FreeNet can't come off as a tool for criminals and miscreants, lest you attract more attention than you'd like from the Fed-types. Now, you may say that because it's open-source and already available, etc., that the Feds can't put it down, but if it is branded as an evil tool for child pornographers (like it is currently), it will never gain the popularity and user-base needed to make it sufficiently robust against machine removals.

To get something called a tool for privacy nuts by Wired is pretty bad--and the rest of the press has been worse; is there any plan to get this project out of the gutter?

Ian:

Well, we actually have had more good press than you suggest, the recent Wall Street Journal article was very positive, as was an early Brave GNU World article (see our publicity page for links). As for the bad press, well I think whenever you do something really new you are always going to encounter resistance. I think most of these journalists were trying to stir up some controversy, which is what journalists do. Interestingly many of these journalists have explained that they are often given a brief by their editors before they have even spoken to me on what tone the article will have. You rapidly develop a thick skin when you are involved in this kind of project, although for the most part I have been reasonably happy with the press coverage we have received.

Re: Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Eric_Scheirer

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and 'privacy nuts.'"

I stand by my quote in that article, although naturally it's a little short on context. Let me make clear that I am in favor of privacy, security, and anonymity when appropriate, and I despise the current attempts to make the WWW more corporate-controlled via both code and law. I don't think there's anything wrong with Freenet, I just don't think it will ever take off in the mainstream.

The fact is that most of the things that most people like to use the WWW for--such as e-commerce and Slashdot--cannot be built on Freenet, since it has no cookies and no memory. Given this, I can't see anything happening with Freenet except that it becomes a huge storehouse for illegal porn, pirated MP3s and 3l33t w8r3z.

It's a shame, because the potential political benefits that it raises, by allowing dissident speech in repressive countries, is great.

I guess my question for the Freenet developers would be: I am not a pirate, a privacy nut, a political dissident, or someone trying to spread illegal trade secrets. What does Freenet offer me? And are these benefits broad enough to a broad enough segment of the world population to create the momentum needed for Freenet to work sociologically as well as technically?

-- Eric Scheirer
MIT Media Laboratory

Ian:

Brandon (one of the other core Freenet developers) did e-mail you twice to answer the comments you made in Wired, he still awaits your response on the matter. Ok, what does Freenet offer someone who doesn't care about anonymity? One point that many people miss is that it is actually a very efficient way to distribute information due to its dynamic caching and dynamic mirroring. Freenet will move information to where it is in-demand, and will duplicate popular information automatically so that you should never encounter "The SlashDot Effect" with Freenet. In other words, your ability to publish information is no longer limited to the Bandwidth you can pay for. Because of this it should actually be a better way to distribute information than, say, the WWW or Usenet, even ignoring the fact that the information can't be censored. TheCarp mentions this below.

Wireless Freenet
(Score:4, Interesting)
by john187

I think Freenet would dovetail nicely with wireless network technology. I system of Freenet servers 1-2 km apart could blanket metropolitan areas and eliminate dependency on ISP's for network service.

What are your thoughts on this? Are any hardware people interested in looking at this problem? Building some prototypes?

Ian:

I agree completely, we have actually kept the protocol packet-based for just this sort of reason. I think Freenet would be perfect for a distribute decentralized radio network, and it would be a very exciting project.

Reversed priorities?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mattr

If files live longer the more they are thrashed, will this not just breed thrasher bots and crowd out data from clients with less connectivity? How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.

Also, I take it you are comfortable with already having divulged the identities of the entire first wave of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems like your most vulnerable time is now.

I've long considered the value of a peer to peer system for countries underdeveloped in the areas of infrastructure and rights. Unfortunately it seems that social engineering is steadily on the side of repression. Wouldn't the best way to get FreeNet into such environments be to make it a source of economic strength? In other words, your growth metric might look much better if you include authorship, copyright, and microcashpayment management. I can't see the Declaration of Independence sticking in the current system for long.. but it is in both a good library and a good bookstore.

Basically you have built a distribution system which in its optimal configuration has no delivery time since you already have the commodity on your hard drive... make it work for business as well and it may reduce prices and take on a life of its own.

Ian:

Well there is certainly more than one question here!

Firstly, the issue of "thrashing" or flooding Freenet is covered in the FAQ - I refer you to section 4.2. To summarize, the dynamic caching mechanism makes it very difficult to artificially make data more popular (since Freenet will just cache it on a node right beside you, and all of your requests will be soaked up by it).

As for divulging the addresses of the first few people to set-up Freenet nodes (I assume you refer to our "Inform.php" mechanism) that is merely a mechanism to "boot-strap" Freenet for testing purposes. Once Freenet is up and running properly we will have no need for such a mechanism, but it is useful in the early stages (and people have the option to switch it off in the config file if they really care that much). I should make it clear that Freenet now is still at an early stage of development. The project is lucky to have some very talented and hard-working developers, particularly Brandon Wiley and Oskar Sandberg who have really helped turned this from a dream into a reality, but we still have much work to do. Data modification, Content Hashed Keys, local data encryption, the list of ideas which we want to implement before a 1.0 release is long - but this is indicative of the cutting-edge nature of the project.

In terms of making it possible to sell information using Freenet, or a Freenet-like system, I suspect that might be missing the point we are making! Never say never though...

Kiddy porn, rape movies, snuff films.
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jinker

No matter what zealots tell you, no freedom is absolute. Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.

My thoughts when I first heard about this project were extremely positive for the first five seconds or so. I was going to set up a server, and suggest all my other bandwidth-rich friends do the same. Then I thought about what would be going to and from my server.

Anonymity has its place from time to time, but usually in the cases of an abuse by a higher power against an individual. But in the general case, I feel that freedom of speech entails the responsability of accountability.

If I'm going to say that I hate Virgos, and all Virgos should be locked up and treated as the inhuman beasts that they are, I should have the conviction to do so without a pointy hood over my head.

If I'm going to be distributing porn, I should be able to do it with a clean conscience. If I wanted to post naked pictures on a Web site, I'd be in some way traceable. And if I wasn't identifiable, there at least would be a mechanism in place (an e-mail to my upstream provider) to curb my freedom of speech if I was posting vile material.

The ideal of individual freedom falls apart in the environment of actual individuals who abuse it.

I'm not saying in any way that this should be a legal matter, or that the product should be banned, just that in the case that it turns out like I expect it to (the majority of traffic for illicit files, both violating copyright and basic human decency) I will have no respect, even a measure of contempt for the people that do run the servers. THEY will be the ones I will hold accountable for the 'free speech' being exercised on the network. And if they were to be sued off the net by the RIAA, Church of Scientology and MPAA, I can't say I'll be surprised, or all that upset.

What arguments can you make FOR free, anonymous access to kiddie porn, snuff films and rape/torture erotica? Why should *I*, a server operator, nurture these sorts of activities in an ideal environment?

Ian:

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you. On the other hand, if you want to help build a system which will help humanity share information, even though some of that information will be distasteful to you personally, then set up a Freenet node. See our philosophy page for more information on this.

some technical questions.
. (Score:4, Interesting)
by Cuthalion

Once something is put on freenet it cannot be removed. What does this mean? No censorship, but also misinformation stays in the system just as long as correct information, so long as it can 'trick' people into requesting it (by seeming to be relevant, for instance). This can be exploited intentionally to censor (some things are nearly unfindable on search engines because of 'key' collisions - the band 'Reload', for instance), or unintentionally - I write something, post it, and five minutes later learn that I was mistaken. Oh well! People will just have to decide for themselves what is truth. Even if I DO post a retraction, there is no way to verify that a trusted entity (such as the original author) retracted it.

As a medium for sharing artistic works (e.g., music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts, (e.g., hardware specs, controvertial news items, etc.) this seems a major shortcoming. Is there any solution to this problem in place or in progress? I ask because I feel that this is not adequately discussed in the FAQ.

Ian:

As I mention above we are working on improving the way that people can "vote" for the validity of information - I hope that this will address some of the concerns you raise. Having said that, you can't really drownout information on Freenet in the manner you suggest. If you have the key, you can get the data unless it has died out due to never being requested.

The whole area of choosing appropriate keys for the data you wish to insert is a huge, and ripe for further research. For some things, like MP3s, or poems, choosing an appropriate key is pretty easy ("music/mp3/artist/album/track" or "poem/poet/title" for example). It merely requires a standard way to refer to these things - and since it is in everybody's interest to use the same standard, hopefully good standards will emerge quite quickly. Other things are less easy. When people created the Internet, they probably never thought it might be used the way we are using it now - and they didn't need to. Similarly, Freenet is a platform upon which we hope others will build.

Re: Why compete?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by TheCarp

Actually....the Freenet Has a huge technical advantage over http protocols. The thing is... it's not just hard to track down who wrote it (unless they sign their name...it's only anonymous if you want it to be) and where it's stored...

It has cacheing built in. When you request something, it propagates. This means more copies exist. So if a document is REALLY popular, then no one server is bogged down with distributing it.

Imagine some really popular band that believes in mp3 distribution puts out a new mp3. Now everyone 80% of college students go to download it.

WHat happens? After the first few downloads at each college...the local university freenet server will have a copy of the mp3 and will be serving it to that university.

None of the requests for it will be going outside the local university network. Its the basic equivalent of everyone in the world being behind multiple layers of http cacheing proxy, except somewhat better (its built into the protocol)

Ian:

What can I say? Cool - you get it! Just to reiterate though, Freenet is an experiment. It is quite different from projects like Linux and Mozilla, which are essentially open source re-implementations of technology which has already been proven (and, incidentally, I am a big supporter of both of these projects). There aren't really any precedents which we could follow in designing Freenet, certainly nothing that came close to what we wanted to achieve. The difficulty with Freenet is that we can only *really* test it by encouraging people to use it on a reasonably wide scale. There is much further work to be done on Freenet, it is really only at the beginning of its testing phase right now - so please don't expect it to change the world just yet - but please do try it out!

--------------------------

You may also be interested to note that we have released Freenet 0.1beta.

All the best,

- Ian

ATKeiper asks: "DNA evidence has been used in criminal trial proceedings for years, perhaps most notoriously in the Simpson murder trial. Now, however, people are just starting to awaken the possibility that DNA might prove or disprove settled or forgotten cases. The son of Sam Sheppard, the doctor on whom the film The Fugitive was based, is trying to use DNA evidence to prove his dad's innocence. This week, a company announced it will use DNA profiles to investigate unsolved crimes. Genetic data has been used to determine whether Thomas Jefferson had an affair, and to examine a mystery of the French monarchy. Can Slashdot readers think of other historical debates which DNA evidence might help resolve definitively?"

Brian De Palma can direct fun movies, even good movies, but never go into one of his movies expecting too much. Written by the brothers who gave us Predator and Wild Wild West, his awful latest Mission to Mars opened this weekend. YRO authors Michael and Jamie were so appalled by this piece of work that they insisted on panning it together, and Jon Katz added his own, slightly hopeful voice to the flaying. Read more for serious spoilers ...

Review 1: Jamie and Michael

Michael: I don't want to keep you in suspense here: movies just don't get much worse than this. And I've seen both Waterworld and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , so I think I know what I'm talking about. When Brian De Palma says on the movie's official site, "I tried to avoid all the cliches of science fiction movies and to give a whole new look and approach to this fantastic story," all I can think of is that someone needs to call the FBI because the movie he made was obviously switched with someone else's fifth or sixth-rate NYU-film-school production before it reached the theaters.

Jamie: People are going to say we're taking this too seriously, and maybe I did expect too much going in. But I really hate seeing wasted potential.

Michael: The whole premise of the film is based upon a scene where one astronaut makes a zero-gee sculpture of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies rotating freely and circularly in the shape of a DNA helix. Newton's first law? Anyone? Anyone? Brian De Palma was a physics major? I can see why he switched careers.

Jamie: Thanks for pointing out that URL, Michael. When I read this, I don't feel so bad for slamming the film:

"The various things that happen to the Mars One and Two crews in this film all come out of the physics of what could happen in the situations presented in the story. So, it is realistic and extremely authentic."

Ha. The scriptwriters must have had a quota of a scientific impossibility every ten minutes, and they made their quota easily. Spacesuit thrust jets at shoulder-level. A plot device that depends on the concept of inertia, followed by an attempted rescue that defies the law of inertia.

This was kind of like watching The Poseidon Adventure, and then suddenly halfway through the movie everyone discovers that they can breathe water and eat plankton. No explanation, that's just the way it is. They all swim out of the ship into the Pacific and then climb ashore, wading up onto the Chicago beach.

Michael: We are of course treated to many close-up shots of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies along the way, including several gratuitous close-up and pan shots where we focus in on the "m"'s and the bag to make sure that we do, indeed, realize that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies and not some inferior brand X chocolate candies, but real, honest-to-god, M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies. If you didn't realize they were M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies, we'll later spill them all over the floor and stare at them for about 20 seconds straight, with a statistically unlikely distribution where the vast majority of the candies land with the "m" up, just to make sure that we notice that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Also plugged: Isuzu, Pennzoil, SGI, Barq's Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, several others that I don't recall just now. The product placement was offensive enough that if I was writing this review I'd make a really big deal of it. Oh, I guess I am. Like watching two hours of commercials.

The "plot," if one must call it that, was as exciting as watching paint dry. Or maybe watching a "cinematic blend of texture and movement" as your clothes whirl around in the dryer. There's a lot of stilted acting, some manufactured crises, and a mysterious alien thing. "Hey look! I can spin the camera around so it looks like I'm in a rotating ring! Let's just spin! For about 3 minutes! We're spinning! Whoo-hoo! Just like a dryer!"

Jamie: Yes; there's homage to 2001 , and then there's a dull recycling of a special effect that was cool 30 years ago.

Michael: Finally we meet an alien. It's glowing, it's got baby blue eyes, it smiles at us, some beatific music swells, and then it hands us some M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies to munch on while it explains, with a handy diorama, just why it has been living in a big human face on Mars for the last few hundred million years.

Jamie: Don't forget the tear. The big sad crystal tear dangling sadly from the sad, sad alien eye. Did I mention it was sad? It was crying, it was so sad. You could tell it was sad because it was crying a big crystal tear. Also the fact that we'd just watched its entire planet destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. So there were two ways you could tell the alien was sad: the tear, and the incineration of its homeworld.

I had thought at first that the alien was a hologram, but later, it takes the humans' hands and it looks awfully real. Except for the fact that it looks awfully fake and computer-generated. Or maybe this alien race just happens to look like big nine-foot fake computer-generated holograms.

Inside, by the way, the Cydonia "face on Mars." This is the structure photographed in 1976 by the Viking probe, which caused wild speculation that it was an artificial construct. Unfortunately for De Palma, it was almost two years ago that high-resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor showed it was just another rocky plateau.

Let me spoil the big secret: the aliens are us. We're them. Obviously the scriptwriters graduated from a Kansas high school, because it turns out that the Precambrian explosion was actually seeded by DNA from Mars, thereby producing fish, alligators, brontosauruses, woolly mammoths, and (six hundred million years later) humans. But meanwhile, apparently, the Martians are us. We're them.

So there's a big weird mystery that the astronauts have to solve, which they do by looking at a rotating computerized graphic of a DNA molecule on a spacecraft that can't take off because all its computers are fried.

Michael: The electromagnetic pulse was selective, you see. Important things like wave analyzers and radar guns and remote-controlled toy cars were EMP-protected, while unimportant things like navigation computers were not.

Jamie: Right. Anyway, in the future, all astronauts are required to memorize the entire human genome, because they can look at the graphic which shows human DNA at the atomic level, recognize that two chromosomes [sic] are missing, and (I'm not making this up) enter the missing atomic structure of the chromosomes that were left out. They complete the graphic picture and open up the door to the giant white room which ripped off both 2001 and THX-1138 .

How did the Martians know what the proper DNA sequencing for those two chromosomes were? How did they know how many chromosomes humans have?

Because they're us, we're them. They created multicellular life, and apparently evolution is not random natural selection at all because this weird holographic Martian DNA doesn't change in 600 million years.

I can't stand movies that go back and forth between hard science and the worst kind of pseudoscience. Give me one or the other, OK? But don't base the plot around science and then expect me to suspend scientific disbelief every ten minutes.

One more example. There's a tense moment inside the THX-1138-style white room where Gary Sinese takes off his spacesuit. But he knows it's OK because he watched the air pressure rise: 6psi, 7psi, etc., and as he cracks his gloves off, another character is saying excitedly "12psi, 13psi." So they know that 14psi is Earth normal and we're expected to keep in mind the difference between Mars air pressure and Earth air pressure.

But for the last hour, the plot has hinged on this guy stranded on Mars for a year, who has stayed alive and healthy by growing plants in a canvas greenhouse.

OK, forget the fact that there's no water in the Martian atmosphere - none. Forget the sunlight being half Earth's and filtered through canvas. Forget canvas not producing a greenhouse effect by any stretch of the imagination. Forget all that; he has some magic beans that let him grow a splashy leafy warm wet jungle inside a canvas greenhouse. OK.

This canvas greenhouse is tethered to the Martian dirt by ropes. It flaps in the Martian wind. It looks about as airtight as, well, a Boy Scout tent. And everyone inside it gets to take their helmets off because it is an Earth-pressure atmosphere. Inside the canvas tent. Mars-pressure outside. Earth-pressure inside. Pressure differential between the two: one ton per square foot. Canvas and rope are going to (a) hold down a thousand tons of force and (b) flap in the breeze. Right!

Michael: Don't forget the temperature differential: Mars' average temperature is something like -70 Fahrenheit. Much colder at night, of course. But I guess the magic greenhouse can fend off -70 degree temperatures too. I wish my military-issue shelter half had been made of that material!

Jamie: And finally, at the end of the film, the astronauts climb into the return vehicle and blast off for Earth. As the credits roll they begin starving to death, because it's a six-month minimum journey and it's already been established they have no food. What a happy ending.

Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars , was an advisor to this film and he must have held his nose all the way through it. Zubrin is a rocket scientist who has spent the last ten years telling anyone who would listen about a very realistic, practical system for getting people to Mars within ten years. I know he must have had his reasons for signing on but he must be a little embarrassed now that he's seen the finished product.

The reason this movie offends me so much is because it treats the red planet, and space travel in general, with disrespect. It tries to be realistic, but whenever the science gets in the way of Hollywood, Hollywood wins. It did have some powerful moments, true, and they were especially moving if you believe (as I do) that space exploration is important. But when a science-fiction film jettisons the science, it turns into campy space opera - which makes the good parts just that much harder to take.

Michael: This movie looks like it was stitched together from a couple of thoughts the director had and thought were cool. (The studio probably thought they were being slick, capitalizing on Mars enthusiasm generated by NASA missions, so they rushed it through production, never figuring NASA would just hurl probes at the planet like a bunch of lawn darts.) There's zero consistency between those parts, not even hand-waving, you just jump from one to the next with no explanation whatsoever.

Maybe you could justify spending $2 on a non-new-release movie rental of Mission to Mars, assuming it's even released on video, which I honestly think would be a sick joke. But $30, which is what it costs for two people to attend a movie and buy a soda in Manhattan? I'd rather gouge my eyes out. This one definitely gets two thumbs down, and if I had more thumbs, they'd be down too, unless they were holding a bag of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Other Reviews:

• Salon: Disney, We Have a Problem
• Rotten Tomatoes has a great pick of choice quotes from dozens of reviewers around the U.S.

Review 2: JonKatz

I had two primary responses to Mission. The first was disbelief that Brian De Palma -- the same man who made Wiseguy, and Scarface, among others -- could have made it. The second was awe at the impact of sophisticated animation on movies. It's now possible for a movie to be beautiful, even awe-inspiring and touching at times, and still be a lousy movie. To me, that was the real fate of Mission To Mars.

The characters were so noble, self-sacrificing and one-dimensional, they were practically cartoons. And what Kubrick and Lucas have done so brilliantly -- remember that space and sci-fi ultimately revolve around very human people and stories -- DePalma forgot. He was so busy evoking awe that any sense of humanity was drowned out.

In fact, DePalma's efforts made me appreciate Lucas especially, who I was beginning to resent for all of his mega-hyping. Whatever Lucas's failings, in all of his movies, you're occasionally blown away by the idea of what might be out there, while still identifying with the hapless humans who are trying to sort it out. DePalma gives us instead some God-like alien life force powerful enough to run the universe, but too dumb to figure out the motives of the encroaching humans. And not a single line of dialogue uttered by any star in this movie made them appear real or relevant. Still, the movie was gorgeous, which is why it will sharply disappoint some people. Three or four space scenes, and some of the scenes on Mars, were really jaw-dropping, and made the movie quite worth seeing.

But DePalma seemed way over his head with the subject matter. High-class science fiction isn't all that easily to replicate, it turns out. In terms of character and narrative, Mission to Mars was a stinker. But I won't be surprised if people with imagination and heart will go see it and be touched.

Brian De Palma can direct fun movies, even good movies, but never go into one of his movies expecting too much. Written by the brothers who gave us Predator and Wild Wild West, his awful latest Mission to Mars opened this weekend. YRO authors Michael and Jamie were so appalled by this piece of work that they insisted on panning it together, and Jon Katz added his own, slightly hopeful voice to the flaying. Read more for serious spoilers ...

Review 1: Jamie and Michael

Michael: I don't want to keep you in suspense here: movies just don't get much worse than this. And I've seen both Waterworld and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , so I think I know what I'm talking about. When Brian De Palma says on the movie's official site, "I tried to avoid all the cliches of science fiction movies and to give a whole new look and approach to this fantastic story," all I can think of is that someone needs to call the FBI because the movie he made was obviously switched with someone else's fifth or sixth-rate NYU-film-school production before it reached the theaters.

Jamie: People are going to say we're taking this too seriously, and maybe I did expect too much going in. But I really hate seeing wasted potential.

Michael: The whole premise of the film is based upon a scene where one astronaut makes a zero-gee sculpture of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies rotating freely and circularly in the shape of a DNA helix. Newton's first law? Anyone? Anyone? Brian De Palma was a physics major? I can see why he switched careers.

Jamie: Thanks for pointing out that URL, Michael. When I read this, I don't feel so bad for slamming the film:

"The various things that happen to the Mars One and Two crews in this film all come out of the physics of what could happen in the situations presented in the story. So, it is realistic and extremely authentic."

Ha. The scriptwriters must have had a quota of a scientific impossibility every ten minutes, and they made their quota easily. Spacesuit thrust jets at shoulder-level. A plot device that depends on the concept of inertia, followed by an attempted rescue that defies the law of inertia.

This was kind of like watching The Poseidon Adventure, and then suddenly halfway through the movie everyone discovers that they can breathe water and eat plankton. No explanation, that's just the way it is. They all swim out of the ship into the Pacific and then climb ashore, wading up onto the Chicago beach.

Michael: We are of course treated to many close-up shots of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies along the way, including several gratuitous close-up and pan shots where we focus in on the "m"'s and the bag to make sure that we do, indeed, realize that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies and not some inferior brand X chocolate candies, but real, honest-to-god, M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies. If you didn't realize they were M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies, we'll later spill them all over the floor and stare at them for about 20 seconds straight, with a statistically unlikely distribution where the vast majority of the candies land with the "m" up, just to make sure that we notice that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Also plugged: Isuzu, Pennzoil, SGI, Barq's Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, several others that I don't recall just now. The product placement was offensive enough that if I was writing this review I'd make a really big deal of it. Oh, I guess I am. Like watching two hours of commercials.

The "plot," if one must call it that, was as exciting as watching paint dry. Or maybe watching a "cinematic blend of texture and movement" as your clothes whirl around in the dryer. There's a lot of stilted acting, some manufactured crises, and a mysterious alien thing. "Hey look! I can spin the camera around so it looks like I'm in a rotating ring! Let's just spin! For about 3 minutes! We're spinning! Whoo-hoo! Just like a dryer!"

Jamie: Yes; there's homage to 2001 , and then there's a dull recycling of a special effect that was cool 30 years ago.

Michael: Finally we meet an alien. It's glowing, it's got baby blue eyes, it smiles at us, some beatific music swells, and then it hands us some M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies to munch on while it explains, with a handy diorama, just why it has been living in a big human face on Mars for the last few hundred million years.

Jamie: Don't forget the tear. The big sad crystal tear dangling sadly from the sad, sad alien eye. Did I mention it was sad? It was crying, it was so sad. You could tell it was sad because it was crying a big crystal tear. Also the fact that we'd just watched its entire planet destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. So there were two ways you could tell the alien was sad: the tear, and the incineration of its homeworld.

I had thought at first that the alien was a hologram, but later, it takes the humans' hands and it looks awfully real. Except for the fact that it looks awfully fake and computer-generated. Or maybe this alien race just happens to look like big nine-foot fake computer-generated holograms.

Inside, by the way, the Cydonia "face on Mars." This is the structure photographed in 1976 by the Viking probe, which caused wild speculation that it was an artificial construct. Unfortunately for De Palma, it was almost two years ago that high-resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor showed it was just another rocky plateau.

Let me spoil the big secret: the aliens are us. We're them. Obviously the scriptwriters graduated from a Kansas high school, because it turns out that the Precambrian explosion was actually seeded by DNA from Mars, thereby producing fish, alligators, brontosauruses, woolly mammoths, and (six hundred million years later) humans. But meanwhile, apparently, the Martians are us. We're them.

So there's a big weird mystery that the astronauts have to solve, which they do by looking at a rotating computerized graphic of a DNA molecule on a spacecraft that can't take off because all its computers are fried.

Michael: The electromagnetic pulse was selective, you see. Important things like wave analyzers and radar guns and remote-controlled toy cars were EMP-protected, while unimportant things like navigation computers were not.

Jamie: Right. Anyway, in the future, all astronauts are required to memorize the entire human genome, because they can look at the graphic which shows human DNA at the atomic level, recognize that two chromosomes [sic] are missing, and (I'm not making this up) enter the missing atomic structure of the chromosomes that were left out. They complete the graphic picture and open up the door to the giant white room which ripped off both 2001 and THX-1138 .

How did the Martians know what the proper DNA sequencing for those two chromosomes were? How did they know how many chromosomes humans have?

Because they're us, we're them. They created multicellular life, and apparently evolution is not random natural selection at all because this weird holographic Martian DNA doesn't change in 600 million years.

I can't stand movies that go back and forth between hard science and the worst kind of pseudoscience. Give me one or the other, OK? But don't base the plot around science and then expect me to suspend scientific disbelief every ten minutes.

One more example. There's a tense moment inside the THX-1138-style white room where Gary Sinese takes off his spacesuit. But he knows it's OK because he watched the air pressure rise: 6psi, 7psi, etc., and as he cracks his gloves off, another character is saying excitedly "12psi, 13psi." So they know that 14psi is Earth normal and we're expected to keep in mind the difference between Mars air pressure and Earth air pressure.

But for the last hour, the plot has hinged on this guy stranded on Mars for a year, who has stayed alive and healthy by growing plants in a canvas greenhouse.

OK, forget the fact that there's no water in the Martian atmosphere - none. Forget the sunlight being half Earth's and filtered through canvas. Forget canvas not producing a greenhouse effect by any stretch of the imagination. Forget all that; he has some magic beans that let him grow a splashy leafy warm wet jungle inside a canvas greenhouse. OK.

This canvas greenhouse is tethered to the Martian dirt by ropes. It flaps in the Martian wind. It looks about as airtight as, well, a Boy Scout tent. And everyone inside it gets to take their helmets off because it is an Earth-pressure atmosphere. Inside the canvas tent. Mars-pressure outside. Earth-pressure inside. Pressure differential between the two: one ton per square foot. Canvas and rope are going to (a) hold down a thousand tons of force and (b) flap in the breeze. Right!

Michael: Don't forget the temperature differential: Mars' average temperature is something like -70 Fahrenheit. Much colder at night, of course. But I guess the magic greenhouse can fend off -70 degree temperatures too. I wish my military-issue shelter half had been made of that material!

Jamie: And finally, at the end of the film, the astronauts climb into the return vehicle and blast off for Earth. As the credits roll they begin starving to death, because it's a six-month minimum journey and it's already been established they have no food. What a happy ending.

Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars , was an advisor to this film and he must have held his nose all the way through it. Zubrin is a rocket scientist who has spent the last ten years telling anyone who would listen about a very realistic, practical system for getting people to Mars within ten years. I know he must have had his reasons for signing on but he must be a little embarrassed now that he's seen the finished product.

The reason this movie offends me so much is because it treats the red planet, and space travel in general, with disrespect. It tries to be realistic, but whenever the science gets in the way of Hollywood, Hollywood wins. It did have some powerful moments, true, and they were especially moving if you believe (as I do) that space exploration is important. But when a science-fiction film jettisons the science, it turns into campy space opera - which makes the good parts just that much harder to take.

Michael: This movie looks like it was stitched together from a couple of thoughts the director had and thought were cool. (The studio probably thought they were being slick, capitalizing on Mars enthusiasm generated by NASA missions, so they rushed it through production, never figuring NASA would just hurl probes at the planet like a bunch of lawn darts.) There's zero consistency between those parts, not even hand-waving, you just jump from one to the next with no explanation whatsoever.

Maybe you could justify spending $2 on a non-new-release movie rental of Mission to Mars, assuming it's even released on video, which I honestly think would be a sick joke. But $30, which is what it costs for two people to attend a movie and buy a soda in Manhattan? I'd rather gouge my eyes out. This one definitely gets two thumbs down, and if I had more thumbs, they'd be down too, unless they were holding a bag of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Other Reviews:

• Salon: Disney, We Have a Problem
• Rotten Tomatoes has a great pick of choice quotes from dozens of reviewers around the U.S.

Review 2: JonKatz

I had two primary responses to Mission. The first was disbelief that Brian De Palma -- the same man who made Wiseguy, and Scarface, among others -- could have made it. The second was awe at the impact of sophisticated animation on movies. It's now possible for a movie to be beautiful, even awe-inspiring and touching at times, and still be a lousy movie. To me, that was the real fate of Mission To Mars.

The characters were so noble, self-sacrificing and one-dimensional, they were practically cartoons. And what Kubrick and Lucas have done so brilliantly -- remember that space and sci-fi ultimately revolve around very human people and stories -- DePalma forgot. He was so busy evoking awe that any sense of humanity was drowned out.

In fact, DePalma's efforts made me appreciate Lucas especially, who I was beginning to resent for all of his mega-hyping. Whatever Lucas's failings, in all of his movies, you're occasionally blown away by the idea of what might be out there, while still identifying with the hapless humans who are trying to sort it out. DePalma gives us instead some God-like alien life force powerful enough to run the universe, but too dumb to figure out the motives of the encroaching humans. And not a single line of dialogue uttered by any star in this movie made them appear real or relevant. Still, the movie was gorgeous, which is why it will sharply disappoint some people. Three or four space scenes, and some of the scenes on Mars, were really jaw-dropping, and made the movie quite worth seeing.

But DePalma seemed way over his head with the subject matter. High-class science fiction isn't all that easily to replicate, it turns out. In terms of character and narrative, Mission to Mars was a stinker. But I won't be surprised if people with imagination and heart will go see it and be touched.

cmuncey writes "This ABCNEWS.com story by Lee Dye brings up a problem I never knew about - noise in space vehicles. In all the SF movies you get vast silent space, (broken perhaps by John Williams music, or the sound of the wookie winning at chess) but the reality is noisier, and sometimes prevents communication, work, and sleep. Both of the Russian built modules for the International Space Station are noisier than NASA safety guidelines allow (like a noisy city street) and there have been reports of permanent hearing damage on Mir. The article explains why, and what can be done about it. "

hobgadling writes "According to ABC News, physicists at CERN in Geneva have recreated a "quark-gluon plasma", also known as the primordial soup, the state of the universe right after the big bang. The article here says that more experiments will have to be done at Brookhaven National Labs to prove this. " Brookhaven will be starting research in this area this summer - with much more powerful instrumentation.

gatech writes "After hitting Yahoo yesterday those crackers set their sights on several more sites including CNN.com, Amazon.com, and eBay.com. Here is the story at ABCNews.com."

Comment: 02/08 23:26 by michael : So far, the best explanation I've seen for the massive network problems is here. Is it paranoid to note that we're being hit with unprecedented attacks, with no known motive, at the same time as the government is pushing for yet another expansion of their surveillance powers? People are focusing on how it's being done. Nobody seems to be asking who.

Graz writes "MSNBC has an article about a blind guy that can navigate around obstacles using camera input into his brain." It's not much, but it's way better than nothing. Looks a little bit painful, though. Update: See this ABC story with a slightly different take on the same subject.

Willie_the_Wimp writes "A venture capitalist is turning Mir into a vacation getaway. I thought this story was really interesting. With all the Silicon Valley millionaires sprouting like poppies, I bet they will have a waiting list a mile long. I know the risks, but sign me up! "

Today's TBTF has interesting data and links on the state of X-ray astronomy; ABCNews has an overview. For five months, the orbiting Chandra observatory has been producing great data and potential desktop art. Now, by focusing on a small area of sky, Chanda has resolved what was formerly just known as "X-rayglow" into distinct sources (photo), many of which even Hubble can't find in visible light. The American Astronomical Society will talk about this and other Chandra findings in a live webcast today at 2P.M. EST. For a two-year overview of our universe's secret life in invisible radiation, check out All-Sky Monitor Movies. And oh yeah, in visible-light news, microlensing provides strong evidence for stellar-size black holes being numerous.

webword writes "Here's how those cool scenes from the Matrix were filmed (go here). Not that I want actually buy one of these cool cameras, but I hunted around to find out how to get one and how much they cost. You can get one here. This brings up a quick question: How are people keeping up with the latest and greatest filming techniques?" What? An advance in cinematography that doesn't involve a farm of Linux machines?

kman writes "I just read the news on ABCNews that Gateway Sells Rights to Amiga Name - Personal computer maker Gateway Inc. signed a deal to sell its Amiga trademarks and computer systems to closely held Amino Development Corp. " Ah, the saga of Amiga continues - terms were not disclosed, but Gateway has decided to "wrap Amiga's software engineering function into Gateway's product development systems" making it sound like GW is considering continuing to make the "information appliances" they were originally planning.

Anonymous Coward writes "I got up early and was surprised that Boris was trying to trump Y2K! You can read ABC's scoop here."

Yes, it's "year-end double-bonus interview week" on Slashdot. First, L0pht Heavy Industries. Yes, the world's most publicized infosec group, the one trotted out by TV and other mainstream media reporters whenever they want pithy (but authoritative) quotes about hacking and cracking and that sort of thing. The L0pht guys have heard all the (ho-hum) obvious questions already. They expect extra-smart ones from you, and we don't doubt for a second that you'll provide them. ;-) One question per post, please.

The Associated Press said in this story that Toys R Us has been telling customers that they are unable to keep their promise that all orders placed by December 10th would be received by customers in time for Christmas. A report on ABCNews.com claims that this is a "universal" problem, not just with Toys R Us, but I didn't have any problem with the online merchants I used this year, none of which were Toys R Us. What about you? Did all the gifts you ordered online this year get there in time for Christmas?

MRcow writes "A story at ABCnews.com says the Hubble Space Telescope that was recently repaired by the crew of space shuttle Discovery is having its computer system upgraded. The new system will be 'three linked computers that run on the Intel 486 microchip.' It says older processors are used because they have to be tested for radiation and such. That makes me wonder if the computers are going to be "linked" and if so, how? Maybe a Beowulf cluster on Hubble? Talk about 'geeks in space'." The processors on the Hubble are being upgraded from what I understand are 1980s versions. The new hard drive is going to be a whopping 10 gigs with three 486 processors. The processors and drive have to be specially shielded and made to handle heat/cold extremes.

karma vs Dogma writes "ABC ran a couple of stories tonight on the "Evils of Crackers/Hackers". Read the summaries of the World News Tonight story and the 20/20 story. I am just wondering where they keep getting these huge figures on the costs of replacing one html document with another."

karma vs Dogma writes "ABC ran a couple of stories tonight on the "Evils of Crackers/Hackers". Read the summaries of the World News Tonight story and the 20/20 story. I am just wondering where they keep getting these huge figures on the costs of replacing one html document with another."

Kinthelt writes "For the first time, an animal of one species gave birth to another species. Not only that, but they also used a frozen embryo. " The species was an American short-haired cat birthing an African wildcat. Similar size and weight ranges which helped the birth go successfully. I've heard that this is the method they are considering using for mammoth birthing - using an African or Indian female elephant to implant a woolly mammoth embryo. It's going to be a lot harder to create that embryo though, unlike the wildcat which was created naturally.

Seth Finkelstein writes "According to a story in the Boston Globe, eBay is suing an auction-indexing company. eBay says its auction data is unique, and legal claims include 'trespassing, copyright infringement, and false advertising.'" The suit was filed "under a California statute originally written to fight 'cracking'" - I wonder if that's how trespassing got listed as a charge.

Here's a little more background on this lawsuit. In early October, an ABC News story described how the auction-indexer, Bidder's Edge, had taken out a full-page New York Times ad slamming eBay's protective attitude. At that time it decided not to list eBay items. In early November, it changed its mind and, says a ZDNet story, put eBay items back on its site. Thus the lawsuit.

If a specialized search engine for auctions is illegal, aren't all search engines illegal? Disobey the robots.txt file and go to jail?

First reported in this story on ABCNews.com, David L. Smith, as expected, pleaded guilty in state court to a charge of computer theft and a federal charge of sending a damaging computer program for creating and distributing the Melissa virus. According to the report, both sides agreed that damges caused by Melissa exceeded $80million.

Lawrence Lessig - the name may be familiar from the Microsoft trial - has written an excellent book, which I've taken my time reviewing because I felt I had to read it twice to grasp the full import. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace covers the real future of your liberties on the internet, and it is not a happy book. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace author Lawrence Lessig pages 297 publisher Basic Books rating 10/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 0-465-03912-X summary A gloomy look at the forces which shape the internet.

Slashdot isn't the first to review this book. Declan McCullagh (Wired), Andy Oram, and Carl Kaplan (NY Times) have all taken a look at it, he's been interviewed, there's an audio debate (mp3 format) between Lessig and McCullagh, and at least a couple of other places have all mentioned it and it is, at this writing, 134 on Amazon.com's best-seller list. I was privileged enough to receive a review copy of the book some time ago, but my review has been delayed because the book is too deep to easily sum up. It's a book about law, and about policy, and about the internet, which doesn't require any grounding in any of the above, but it seems like it would be appropriate for people at almost any level of knowledge - if you know more, you'll get deeper insights, and if you know less, you'll get the basics. A fractal book, in other words. An almost philosophical work, disguised as a law book.

To start with, Lessig's book is a counter to John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow had a good idea, a good goal, but he was totally and completely wrong about how to achieve it, and his declaration and the mindset it embodies has and will do great harm to the future of civil liberties on the internet.

Cyberspace is not and has never been independent of real life, or of government. What it has been is a place where the rules of real life were hard to enforce. That doesn't mean that the rules don't exist - just that it has been hard to make people obey them. The problem for people, like me, who like this state of affairs, this lack of enforcement, is that there's no reason cyberspace has to remain in its current state.

Cyberspace wasn't designed to enforce real-world rules. Such enforcement wasn't built in to the code that runs the internet, was consciously avoided in the early internet designs, and therefore regulators have been working in an environment unfriendly to them. Copying of digital works is easy. Transmitting and receiving content, even forbidden content, is easy. Etc.

But just because it was designed that way once, does not mean that it need be that way in the future. There are tremendous forces (business and government) that would prefer an internet which is friendly and cooperative to regulators. The people building the internet of tomorrow are not professors and geeks, they're CEO's and to a lesser extent, bureaucrats. If the architecture of the internet is "adjusted" to favor regulation instead of disfavor it - and the current internet builders all have reasons to favor regulability - regulating behavior on the internet is not impossible, it's trivial. Lessig has a short chapter on "is-ism", the belief that just because something is, so must it always be. Applied to the internet, this is "We are free, and will always be so." Wrong, wrong! The internet is totally man-made, and what man has made, man can change.

It is hard for me (or Lessig) to emphasize this point too much: the people who claim that we should keep our hands off the internet are completely playing into the hands of government and business. While the net-libertarians have buried their heads in the sand, the net is being changed, constantly, to favor regulation by business and by government.

Lessig takes a look at the infrastructure of the internet and how it is changing for the worse. There's another terrible flaw in thinking about the internet, which runs roughly: "whatever restrictions are placed, someone of technical competence can get around them". This is not true, not if the architecture is designed to support those restrictions rather than oppose them.

The internet, says Lessig, is about to "flip" from "unregulable" to "totally regulable". When that occurs (neither Lessig nor I think there's an "If" involved), who will be regulating the place? Currently corporations, with guidance from government - guidance coming in the form of regulations like CALEA, which make demands not on individuals, but on the code. Once the code is altered to be conducive to regulation, regulation follows naturally.

Lessig makes a great point about open source software. Closed source code which incorporates regulation (censorware is the easiest example, but there are many others) means that the people who are regulated can't even tell exactly what regulation is occuring. When the source code is available, you can at least tell exactly what you can and cannot do, or exactly how your privacy is being infringed. Open source code is inherently less suited to enforcing regulation on users.

I can't do justice to the book without rewriting it. Lessig is deeply skeptical about the ability of the U.S. government to initiate policies which promote, rather than denigrate, the civil liberties we have come to take for granted in cyberspace. Government is busy selling off our freedom to corporations through mechanisms such as ICANN. But no one else is going to do it - and with a government actively hostile to liberties or even one that adopts a hands-off approach, freedom in cyberspace is headed downhill at a tremendous pace.

I recommend this book to almost anyone who cares about the future of the internet. It's well-written - he's a good teacher. It's got some awesome examples - like how Communist Vietnam is more effectively libertarian than the U.S., because it doesn't have the infrastructure of control that we do. It is a scholarly work, but the footnotes are pushed off to the end - they alone are worth the price of the book to a serious student, but someone looking to just read can skip them without problems. It's a deep and thus far unmatched view of what will shape the net of tomorrow, the most inspiring book I've read this year.

Some of Lessig's other papers and articles are available on his home page. The book has a promotional website as well, available at code-is-law.org or what-declan-doesnt-get.com.

Pick this book up at fatbrain.com.

dante773 writes "ABCNews is reporting the Mars Polar Lander has missed it's primary windows of opprotunity to signal Earth. They still have a few options left to establish contact, though. Hopefully this isn't another failed Mars mission." Other sites carrying regular updates on the Mars Polar Lander that you might to check in with now and then: Offical Mars Polar Lander site; Discovery Channel's continuing coverage.

Let's start this off with some Microsoft parodies: Polo pointed us to a version of office2000 that many Slashdotters might prefer to the Microsoft version. Lexie (ask out CowboyNeal!) sent us a Microsoft Monopoly that you probably won't see in stores. G. Crisp sent us a Lego Penguin: proof that someone has both too much spare time, and too many legos. An anonymous reader noted that you can get AccuWeather®5-Day Forecast for AREA 51. Forecast calls for black helecopters and Gillian Anderson. witten sent us a random Jon Katz story generator called (not surprisingly) Katzdot. While we're on the subject of Slashdot, it's worth nothing that ThinkGeek is now carrying new Slashdot T-Shirts. Of course personally I'd prefer the 'Kernel Panic' shot glasses, but then again, I've had a pretty long week. dayeight sent us something that is pretty indescribible. It involves video games, but presumably it also involved some sort of illegal substances too. I think its a metaphor for something. How about a few 'True Stories' to brighten up your day (no I'm not talking about zany Talking Heads movies). First zentropy sent us what seems to be a true story about why sports and Taco Bell just don't mix. An anonymous reader showed us a woman who is trying to get workers comp from her employer since she got carpal tunnel... her job involves phones, but it wasn't dialing them that caused the *ahem* injury.

tuck was the first of many to submit this important milestone in arguably the world's most important scientific endeavor. The Human Genome Project has completed mapping its first entire chromosome, number 22. Second-smallest of our 23 chromosomes, some of 22's genes can cause "heart defects, immune system disorders, cancers, schizophrenia and mental retardation." Portion of its DNA which is "junk" (encodes no protein): 42%. Read it at your favorite source: CNN, MSNBC, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the AP, or Reuters.

NYFreddie writes "ABCNews has an article on NASA's Deep Space 2 program where two basketball sized probes will be dropped from above the Martian atmosphere to crash into the surface at around 400 mph where they are expected to continue operating and transmitting data. "

NYFreddie writes "ABCNews has an article on NASA's Deep Space 2 program where two basketball sized probes will be dropped from above the Martian atmosphere to crash into the surface at around 400 mph where they are expected to continue operating and transmitting data. "

dkh2 writes "Today on ZDNet: A U.S. District Court has denied a request by Disney, InfoSeek and others to stay a preliminary injunction against their familiar green and yellow logo. The injunction orders Disney to remove the logo immediately from all broadcast and internet media and gives them 60 days to remove it from other more solid forms." And Disney/Infoseek has started to comply. You can see the change at Go.com right now.

Anonymous Coward writes "NASA has just released new images of Io taken by Galileo during a flyby several days ago. The images are far better than anything taken of Io before, and an article on the flyby is on ABCnews.com. Apparently NASA wasn't sure if Galileo would survive the radiation it would experience from passing that close to Jupiter, and put off the photo-flyby as long as possible-but it worked, and they're hoping to get one more set of pictures. " The all important question, now, though, is how to make some of these my background image. *grin*

PDA Buzz writes "Looks like we may see a color PalmOS device sooner than later now that Motorola has released the Dragonball VZ which supports 256 color LCD on-chip and runs at 33MHz. " One Word: Yum.

A reader sent us a ABCNews story about the future of genetically engineered children. It's a bit fluffy, but creates some interesting questions, particularly in regards to the ethical questions. The synopsis of some of the people quoted is that most parents will actually do it, because they will want superior children. What do you folks think?

ajs sent us a good investigative piece from the Boston Globe. Many of you recall the article about the Long Island particle accelerator that was going to try to replicate Big Bang conditions. Over the last three months, it's moved around the media, culminating with Fred Moody's scare piece about it, although the British Sunday Times recently picked it up yet again. The Globe article does a great job dissecting the actual facts behind the experiment and pokes fun at the growth of this Chicken Little-type story.

Anonymous Coward sent us a piece of cyberwarefare news. The US Military has said that during the conflict in Yugoslavia "cyber" war was used - although refused to get any more details. In related news, the the United States Space Command has been given the responsibilty to better guard the military computer systems against infiltration.

Akatosh gave us the quick word - MCI/Worldcom has tendered an accepted offer to Sprint to purchase them. Another telco merger, this one is for 100$ billion dollars - beating out BellSouth. This is the largest corporate merger on record - and if it means I can get DSL at home, then more power to it.

A New York Times story reports that Microsoft has unveiled a big shift in its internet strategy. "Software as a service," no "dogmatic commitment" to the Intel platform, and new hardware (a low-cost NC). Plus a revamped MSN, a portal for businesses, and free ham sandwiches for everyone (well, maybe next year). Other news reports are more skeptical, saying "Strategy-less" and "Nothing new."

ozzie writes "George C. Scott, the actor we all know and love from such unbelievably great movies as Dr. Strangelove and Patton died yesterday at the age of 71. Check out ABCNews for more. " Given the current poll, this seems strangely connected - in any case, I remember his role in Dr. Strangelove with fondness. If you haven't seen that classic, rent it tonight.

Pomme de Terre! writes "Patrick Naughton - Java-genius, Starwave CTO, & Infoseek VP - has been arrested for chasing 13 year old girls *and* having kiddie porn on his computer... and is probably going to be put away for a very long time. Very sad. " See also the Yahoo story. As executive vice president of products at Infoseek, was Naughton in charge of GoGuardian?

Daeron Meyer writes " ABCNews is carrying the story of the Boston College prof who took four years but just 78 atoms to create a tiny motor. The current problem is that the wheel get stuck after rotating 120 degrees. So, not much use yet, but it's a step."

mathowie writes "Here's my notes from the 30th Internet anniversary event that took place at UCLA on Thursday. This is a very long, very detailed piece, but worth your time to read if you're interested in learning where the Internet might be heading in the next 5 - 10 years. A Recap of the 30th Anniversary of the Internet Celebration at UCLA September 2, 1999 by Matthew Haughey

Thirty years ago today, the first communication between the Interface Message Processor (IMP) and a host computer took place in a Computer Science Lab at UCLA. The ARPAnet was born, with four nodes by the end of 1969. Today amid the current explosion of Internet growth, the pioneers gathered along with the forerunners of the internet revolution to commemorate that first event and talk about where we are today and where we go from here.

As I walked in, I caught Leonard Kleinrock in the lobby being mobbed by reporters doing interviews in front of the original IMP. As you can see in the photo, several local news and radio outlets covered the event. I had hoped to see some of the footage on the 11 o'clock news, but as I write this, it's just after 11:30, and I only saw a few seconds and quick mention on one of the network news shows.

After 20 minutes of mulling around past the original start time, The Chancellor started off the event with a quick welcome and general speech about how the internet has spread and enriched our lives. The Chair of the Engineering School at UCLA spoke next for about 15 minutes, discussing the impact of Leonard Kleinrock's achievements and Len's great rapport with his former students.

Len Kleinrock took the stage and recounted the 20th Anniversary event, which was a symposium held at UCLA, the 25th Anniversary event, which was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a recent gathering just a few days ago up in Stanford. Those events, he said, focused on the rich history of how the ARPAnet was built and how it eventually lead up what we call The Internet today. Rather than delve into the past, he went on, today's event was going to center around where the Internet will lead us into the future. I was a bit surprised at first, but relieved that I wasn't going to see a rehash of the history, but a refreshing dialogue between the brilliant set of panelists of what they felt was to come.

Dr. Kleinrock then laid down the ground rules for the day. There would be four panels, and he would act as chair of the event, introducing each moderator. He introduced the first panel, titled "Gorillas", which was supposed to represent the proverbial 900 lb. gorillas of the Internet industry. Joining the moderator, Kipling Hagopian of Brentwood Venture Capital were Christine Hemrick of Cisco, Daniel Rosen of Microsoft, George Vradenburg of AOL, and Ronald Whittier of Intel.

Everyone on the panel was in good spirits and took some gentle jabs from the moderator. When the moderator made a joke about the justice department's crackdown on Microsoft, the representatives of Microsoft and AOL both praised the low regulation of the industry thus far and accredited their rapid and extreme growth with the "hands off" policy of the U.S. government. They also stated their support for ICANN and the deregulation of the Internet's domain namespace.

In response to a question about the growth of Cisco, Christine Hemrick praised openness and non-ownership of industry standards like TCP/IP. Since no one owned TCP/IP, she said, anyone could start a company that based their communications on that protocol. The moderator asked several questions about bringing broadband into the home, and whether cable or DSL would be the key technology. Ms. Hemrick stressed that wireless technologies might surpass the capabilities and availability of cable and DSL very soon, which was a good thing to hear.

The panelists were a sharp group of people. Whenever a question about upcoming technology was posed, they acknowledged the fact that the industry moves so fast that no one knows what we will be using in 5 years for any specific technology. They pointed to the audience several times and said that someone among us could start a new company tomorrow with technology that could blow away anything their corporations had done before. When the panel was asked about the longevity of their large corporations, they agreed that scalability was important, to grow with the industry, but trying to stay as close as possible to customers and continuing to address their needs was also important.

All the panelists talked about how hard it was to stay ahead of everyone, to continue as industry leaders with so many competitors on their heels. When asked about the future, one panelist commented that soon the term "e-commerce" would be meaningless, due to a blurring between conventional commerce and commerce done over the Internet. Someday soon, they said, every business would have some aspect of it that would be Internet related. All in all, the four panelists were charismatic, well-spoken, and a hip bunch, making a few jokes about Al Gore inventing the Internet.

The second panel was for the people behind recent industry successes, titled "Netpreneurs." It was moderated by Willem Mesdag of Goldman Sachs and the panelists were David Bohnett, founder of GeoCities, Eric Brewer, co-founder of Inktomi, Sky Dayton, founder of EarthLink, John Payne, CEO of Stamps.com, and Henry Sameueli, co-founder of Broadcom.

It was amazing that no company represented on the panel was created before 1991, with most of them formed in either 1995 or 1996, yet they all had market caps of at least a billion dollars each. Overall, the second panel wasn't as interesting as the first bunch of panelists, some of their answers sounded like a press release. This was especially true for Sky Dayton, who sounded like he was repeating his radio commercials in response to every question he was asked. When asked how they became successful, each panelist talked about how their company filled a void not covered by a larger company, and how they could move faster than a large corporation. Sky Dayton stressed this, the size of your company compared to your competitors was unimportant. What mattered most was the speed at which you could respond to changes in the industry, economy, and customer base. He said that if you were starting a new company, focus on one specific area of the market, and stick to it. Don't try to be monolithic agencies that can do everything like Microsoft tries to be, he said, just do one thing really well and you can emerge as a market leader. He also pitched his new company eCompanies.com for budding entrepreneurs, they are setting up a clearinghouse of new ideas, and intend to fund business plans that catch their eye. When asked about the potential for new companies Dayton said something interesting, he estimated that the development of the Internet as a "thing" was about 20% done at most. That even in 1999, we were just barely scratching the surface of what is possible, he said. Overall the session was enlightening and I came away with a new found enthusiasm to get my ideas out the door.

The third panel was perhaps the most interesting. It was titled "eConsumers" and was moderated by Patt Morrison of the LA Times, who was joined by John Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jeffrey Cole, director of UCLA's Center for Communication Policy, Alan Kay, VP of Imagineering at Disney, and Dan Lynch, founder of Cybercash.

Although the panel was supposed to focus only on consumer issues, the topics discussed ran the gamut, from personal privacy issues to numerous "what if" scenarios of our future ultra-wired world, and the social implications of each. Patt Morrison moderated as a sort of devil's advocate, asking for the panel's reaction to several cynical questions like trusting e-commerce vendors, internet rumors becoming news, and how our lives may be hindered by the burden of technology. Surprisingly, the panel, which had varied opinions on most topics, all found something positive in each question and future scenario. An ebay deal gone bad meant a user could learn to be more careful of sellers, news could not be trusted and should be approached with skepticism, and our lives could be made much better by an increased use of technology by saving us time spent on mundane tasks like paying bills or waiting in lines while shopping.

Intellectual property and copyright issues were discussed, where John Barlow and Alan Kay agreed that intellectual property was dead, and that ideas should be given away freely. Mr. Barlow talked about how every article he's written is freely available online, which allows him to generate revenue from unwritten works. Publishers can see all his writing, he went on, and they pay for new pieces to be written. He said he didn't worry about copyright, because his most valuable ideas were the ones he hasn't had yet. John said it was the philosophy behind the Grateful Dead (whom he wrote songs for); they allowed their shows to be freely taped and exchanged, and they derived revenue from people wanting to see them perform live.

Alan and John also talked about how a lot of intellectual property is meaningless to much of the population, that a technical idea is so complex that few people understand it, regardless of whether or not it is in the public domain. Dr. Kay used Linux as an example of this, the kernel is so complex that one in a million people can understand it all and contribute programming expertise. But with the advent of the Internet, he added, finding that one in a million is easy, and 100 or more people can be brought together to work on it. He praised the development of the ARPAnet because it was open, allowing researchers from all over to contribute to a greater good, and said in today's climate a large corporation would probably try to make much of it proprietary and hinder its development.

When asked how Linux can generate revenue, Alan said that like the Grateful Dead example, giving away Linux meant that large fees could be found in consulting, helping companies use the technology to their advantage. He then mentioned something that dropped just about everyone's jaw: he said that the company with the biggest revenue in the computer industry was not Microsoft, but IBM's consulting business, which he said brings in double the revenue that Microsoft does selling software, just by showing companies how to use technology in their business (which Linux is a part of). Alan Kay stood out as an extremely articulate guy with numerous enlightened answers, and everyone on the panel had great things to say about what the future might be like.

The fourth and final panel, titled "Beyond Today's Internet" was moderated by Stephen Segaller of WNET, the PBS station behind the Triumph of the Nerds series. He was joined by the four pioneers of the original ARAPnet, Vinton Cerf, now with MCI, Robert Kahn, now with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, Leonard Kleinrock, of the UCLA Computer Science Department, and Lawrence Roberts, now of Packetcom

Along with the theme of the day's event, the forefathers of today's Internet focused solely on the future. Since they all have networking backgrounds, the first question was whether or not the network could keep up with client demands. The four panelists unanimously agreed that the capacity of the network would continue to expand at a rate greater than our immediate needs. They acknowledged the limits of the current IP naming system, and that IPv6 would expand the limit of addresses to near 10^38. Len Kleinrock had a problem with these imposed limits and Vint Cerf joked that 10^38 IP addresses would mean enough for "a web page for every molecule on earth." Len clarified his protest and stated that we should instead design variable length solutions to the problem, solutions that offer unlimited means. When asked about limits of physical devices like routers handling packet switching, they agreed that packet switching would probably be replaced by an unknown technology, and that physical capacities of networks would increase with the increased use of fiber. Len said instead of digital packets traveling through copper wire, in the future, it would just be pulses of light traveling along fiber. They all spoke of the proposed growth of the Internet, to surpass one billion people online in the next decade, and they mentioned something that was discussed briefly on an earlier panel; that someday soon, anything you buy over a certain price, say $25, would offer connectivity to the internet for a specific reason. Not a toaster that checks email, but each appliance would use the Internet for communication purposes.

This was another reason Len used to support unlimited IP addressing, due to the fact that billions of devices would need to access the internet. Questions asked by the moderator were mostly big picture, and the panel discussed them at that level. They talked about distant futures, when billions of people would be interacting with billions of devices, we would see drastic changes in Human-Computer interaction. They even alluded to the similarities between an enormous interconnected network of people and machines approaching the complexity of organic beings. The panel agreed with earlier panels that what were are witnessing is bigger than the industrial revolution. The knowledge explosion, as many called it, was going to fundamentally change how we do everything in the future.

Overall, it was an amazing experience. Among all the speakers and panelists, there were several messages that came across. The mood of everyone thinking about the future was one of optimism and opportunity. The interconnecting of everyone person on earth will trigger a knowledge revolution that will have deep, drastic changes on our lives and those around us. But if these future developments are met with some skepticism, and intelligence, it will undoubtedly be a good thing.

Matthew Haughey September 3, 1999

My photos from the event can be seen here

"

jd writes "Canada has just constructed an all-optical network, CA*Net3, capable of 80 gigabits per second (though being expanded to 20 terabits per second). This is over 60 times faster than the Internet 2 project, and according to the description, this will be open to the public, rather than closed as Internet 2 is. Anyone in Canada interested in building the world's most distributed high-performance Beowulf?"

Shawn writes "Interesting article on wearable PCs. Brief mention given to Linux / Beowulf, and 'an undershirt with 64 linked processors.' " God I'm a sucker for this stuff. "Hi, I'm Rob, and I wanna be a borg". This isn't anything really breaking or exciting, but its still neat.

Anonymous Coward writes "A college student who ran a pirate website is the first person in the U.S. to be convicted of felony Internet piracy - max penalty 3 years prison and $250,000 fine. Read all about the conviction. "

lactose_intolerant was one of the several trillion who wrote to us with Fred Moody's last column. It's a little ditty delving into why Solow Paradox's (despite computers, workers' productivity has not increased) exists. Hint: It's got something to do with a crashing operating system. Of course, that doesn't explain why productivity wasn't rising pre-Windows, but c'est la vie.

Yep, it's that time again! Nghia gave us a link to some "Jedi Academy" trailers. Several folks wrote in to say that the guys at Themes.org have a new look. forehead graciously provided an "interesting" bit, based on this "Richard Stallman-as-Marx" posting. "I decided to rework the whole song". Orbitz pointed us at a web-controlled RC car with camera. Next is my favorite, as submitted by Electric Keet, Stick Figure Porn. Thyla pointed us in the general direction of Carbonated Borscht for the Evil Geek's Soul, with a thanks to Illiad. Crazy Man on Fire gave us a link to upcoming distributed.net projects coming out soon. poink threw us a link to The Cereal Page (Ok, someone has waaaay too much time on his hands...) J. Pierpont gave us a link to more info on Episode II and III. Now, from Armin Lenz submitted a link to a CPU Gurus, a new CPU site discussing various current and future processors. Finally, Mike Healy, one of The Bazaar dudes, sent us a status report. Read more for the skinny.

Mike Healy writes "Since Steve Blood, our event chairman, is out of the country - he is actually checking out a solar eclipse in Austria - i've taken it upon myself to give you all an update on the Bazaar. I'd wait for steve to get back, all bleary eyed, by i must squelch the rumors being promulgated by certain sales guys for other events, that we folded. This couldn't be further from the truth. Fact of the matter is we are scheduled, locked and loaded and PUMPED for December 14-16 at the javits NYC.

The Bazaar will be the first large scale conference on opensource software to hit the east coast and will stress program, program and program. Our Theory is that if you build it, they will .com

Not only does EarthWeb, by nature of being an IT content HUB have access to the freshest most imperative material, but we have also brought in an indstry expert, lydia Bennett of Dialogos fame, to aggregate and work closely with conference chairs and advisory board to make sure all tracks and tutorials are epic.

Check out the website for more on the program. The exhibit floor will be refreshingly unlike any you have seen in this space being made up of customed designed, turn key demo stations. This not only makes it a breeze for vendors , but also adds integity to the exhibit floor. No huge booths with revolving marquis, No loud PA systems. No freak shows. This is the wrong event to come to if you want to see Trumps daughter in a g string handing out T shirts... This is the right event if you want to meet some of the biggest brains out there and get no nonsense answers regarding opensource free software... Anyway, thats it for now.. More from Steve when he gets back"

Dodja writes "Just as Kansas decides there's no reason to teach evolution, Aussie scientists are announcing signs of life a billion years older than previous findings."

J. Pierpont writes "According to an ABCNews article, the rumored Apple plan to create an Apple-ified Palm device has been delayed. The article indicates that the project has been delayed in order to focus efforts on the new consumer portable, which will be unveiled at the upcoming MacWorld Expo. "

Derek Pomery writes "ABCnews has done a nice special report on the SETI project, the Drake equation, and the recent successes of Seti@home. Will this mean another spike in Seti@home downloads? "

Derek Pomery writes "ABCnews has done a nice special report on the SETI project, the Drake equation, and the recent successes of Seti@home. Will this mean another spike in Seti@home downloads? "

A reader wrote in with tidbit about the encrypted sculpture at the CIA's headquarters. One of their analysts, on his own time, after nine years has partially cracked it. I like cool art.

Vamphyri writes "An ABC News correspondent says the ``Linux market will, as promised, now be dominated by RedHat's commercial success.'' which he goes on to say is a good thing. The full story is here but way down at bottom of page. " It actually offers one quite interesting comment: Red Hat netted 10 million last year, and devoted 20% of that to R&D. The IPO will raise almost $100M. If they continue that trend, they will put $20M into Linux, GNOME, and more. Interesting.