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The September 1999 cover story for the late, great Boardwatch Magazine was my interview with Sir Dystic, which took place at the house in the Oakland Hills he shared with a half-dozen other members of the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Note that the link points to my own website, because no other web archive of the magazine from that period exists, afaik. But here's the Caltech Library citation for the article, in case you have any doubts about its provenance ...

AlanBDee confided:

Journalists that I know personally try very hard to have accurate facts and to not let their bias taint their work. While not all journalists are like that I believe most try to be. Editors and publications do have to care more about the bottom line and sadly getting the news out quickly is more important then accuracy.

As a former computer industry trade journalist and columnist, I agree with your assessment of what has come to be called "mainstream media" journalists. Most of them try to get their facts straight.

What complicates their effort is both time pressure considerations (which is to say deadlines and the constant quest for "scoops"), and the standard "three sources" requirement for news stories. The second of those generally means having to include quotes from critics, and there are a lot of those in the auto industry, when it comes to Elon Musk.

(Which only stands to reason, since Tesla is a major disruptive force in that industry, and Detroit has been playing catch-up ever since reality caught up to their pet journalists' confident prediction that Elon's company would fold before he shipped a single car.)

And, speaking again from experience in the trade journal industry (albeit in a totally different sector), those guys - and they're almost all guys in the auto industry version - have the same ethical problems that I found many of my former tech colleagues had. To put it bluntly, a lot of them are basically whores.

There are very different standards in trade journalism than there are in the mainstream version. For one thing, there's bribery, both direct, and via major advertisers (who are the exact same companies about which these people supposedly provide objective coverage) bringing pressure to bear on these rags' publishers to run stories that are favorable to them. For instance, I was fired from my first job at McGraw-Hill's LAN Times when the pubilsher gave the editor who had hired me the boot, and replaced her and her staff with a bunch of ex-PC Week clowns. The first I heard about the new regime was a call from the new Features editor, who opened by telling me, "We want to coordinate content in the back of the book with the News section."

"So, you're telling me you want me to write columns about the latest dot-zero release of Microsoft's crapware, or Intel's me-too networking gear, instead of writing about Internet policy and technology - which is what I was hired to do to begin with?" I replied.

"I wouldn't put it like that," he responded, "but, yes, that's basically what we're looking for."

When I declined to accept the invitation to spread my legs for the magazine's advertisers, I was informed that my services would no longer be required. A year later, McGraw-Hill dispatched the useless, smudgy Xerox of Network World that LAN Times had been transmogrified into to a farm upstate.

So, I went to work for a different mag - which folded after 3 issues - and eventually wound up at Boardwatch, where I spent six glorious years, before the bumbling idiots at Penton Media did the same clueless thing to it that McGraw-Hill had done to LAN TImes. (That happened just months before the first dot-com bubble kerploded, taking most of the computer trade pub industry with it - including the animated corpse of Boardwatch, btw.)

But, a couple of years before that happend, I got so sick of the advertisers dictating content, that, in a column headlined "Crystal Blue Persuasion" (from November, 1999), I closed with a whole section addressed to PR people on how properly to bribe me to write about their clients' products or services.

(What I did not do - what I would never do - is to promise that what I wrote would be flattering. That's something that whatever gadget or service I'm writing about has to convince me it deserves And most of 'em don't.)

You should read it, when and if my ISP gets its Apache fu

The poster has it wrong.

Surprise!

Robert W. Taylor was never the head of DARPA. He was, however, the guy who proposed and ran the ARPAnet for DARPA, under Director Charles Herzfeld, until he left to become head of Xerox PARC. (Although he got the idea while J.C.R. Licklider was head of DARPA, Taylor didn't pitch it as an actual, fundable project until Herzfeld took over.)

Taylor absolutely does NOT credit Robert Metcalfe (developer of Ethernet) for the invention of the Internet. Instead, he reserves the lion's share of the credit for himself. I know this, because he called me in 1994 to lecture me about what he felt were inaccuracies in a column I wrote for LAN Times about the origins of the Internet. (Specifically, he objected to my statement that the earlier RAND thought experiment on a nuclear-war-survivable, peer-based, packet-switched network was the basis for the development of the Internet.)

You can read more about Licklider, Taylor, and others who were responsible for the devleopment of the Internet in my December 2000 Boardwatch cover story "They Might Be Giants", if you're interested in the real story, as opposed to the WSJ's warm, stinky piece of journalistic shit.

Don't sign with a label.

Without a label, how does a recording artist promote his or her music to people who don't listen to Internet radio? A lot of people aren't willing to pay a luxury price for a cellular data plan that would let them replace in-vehicle FM radio with Internet radio. And without a recognized music publisher, how can a songwriter be sure that his song isn't similar enough to someone else's song to attract lawsuits alleging plagiarism?*

* Plagiarism here means infringement of copyright without attribution.

As a recording artist who has no label contract or publishing deal, I can tell you that my personal experience has been that Internet radio is no panacea for getting my own music heard and played. The main problem for recording artists is the same as it was back in the 20th Century: it's very, very difficult to get potential listeners' attention. Historically, the role of record labels primarily was promotion of their artists, along with distribution of their work (and, for new artists, the process of "artist development", as well - a term which mostly meant matching raw talent with the right producer to capture the sound that made the A&R guy sign the artist to begin with, and to mold his/her/their sound into a form that would sell records). For physical CDs and vinyl, the labels' distribution arms are still important (and will continue to be, as long as there exist fans who desire a physical CD or vinyl album to add to their collection), digital distribution notwithstanding. But their real importance lies in promotion.

Realistically speaking, the vast majority of unsigned artists have essentially zero ability to mount and sustain a nationwide or global promotion campaign for their own recordings. Getting people to notice we exist is not increasingly easy in the digital age - it's increasingly difficult, because the amount of competition for the listeners' attention has increased so much, as well. There are a kajillion bands out there, all clamoring for an audience, and getting that audience's attention is still the hardest part of getting anything other than esthetic satisfaction from all the effort that goes into recording.

It's easy for /jerks to prattle about how a recording artist should plan make money from playing out and give away his/her/their recordings as promotional devices. The problem is that you simply don't make very much money playing live unless you're already famous. You certainly don't make enough to afford health insurance, for instance, or that 401K that some sneering codemonkey mentioned as a retirement vehicle in a prior post. Working musicians mostly don't have 401Ks. And, if they do, they're way underfunded, because the money just doesn't stretch that far.

For all their parasitic ways, what record labels still bring to the table is the money and machinery to promote the artists they sign, and the music that they make. Payola is still very much alive in the radio industry here in America, for instance. Nowadays, ClearChannel calls it "research fees", but it's still payola, and your music doesn't get played without it. Not to mention billboards, posters, stand-ups, commercials - all those things cost real money, and it's the record labels that pay for them.

As for copyright, I spent three months recording Whatever Happened To The Revolution. That's an average of four hours a day, working six days a week. And I have yet to make a dime off of it. So, when some know-it-all blathers about how I only deserve to get paid once for that effort (and keep in mind that I put a similar amount of time and effort into every song I record) I want to smack that fool upside the head, because he has no idea what being a recording artist - with or without a label contract - is all about.

Yes, I agree that the copyright system is badly broken. From my perspective, t

At the height of that Kashpureff partially hijacked DNS for a little bit to raise awareness of alternatives.

The issues from then were partially addressed by opening up competition in domain registration and further by regulating the dirtier practices of registrars.

Kashpureff is an asshole. He didn't "partially hijack" DNS "for a little bit" to raise anything other than his bank balance.

I wrote about the transition to what eventually became ICANN in 1997 (see paragraph 6 for Kashpureff's "contribution" to this process). Charging a fee for registrations in the bogus TLDs he "owned" was not the act of a revolutionary - it is the scheme of a buccaneer, pure and simple.

Nor was he the only malefactor. Karl Denninger of MCSNet, who asserted ownership of .BIZ and Christopher Ambler of Image Online Design both attempted to start "alternative" registries, and Ambler tried to flim-flam IANA into legitimizing his attempted namespace land-grab by slipping an envelope containing a $1,000 check into a folder of documents he gave Bill Manning of IANA at the end of a meeting, and subsequently claiming that Manning accepted it as a deposit on his application to start an "experimental registry". (This is Manning's version of the incident - Ambler's, unsurprisingly, differs. I, personally, believe Manning, who had no personal financial stake in the proposal, one way or the other.)

I will also say that, as someone who closely monitored (and occasionally contributed to) the iahc-discuss list, Kashpureff was one of the most combative and least concilliatory members of that list - although there was plenty of flame to go around on all sides of every issue discussed.

As a seventeen-year-old kid, on July 16, 1969, I stood in the front yard of our rental home in Satellite Beach, Florida, and watched Apollo 11 take off for the Moon. It was THE high point of my life to that moment (although the lunar landing and historic first footstep replaced it as such four days later).

Flash forward to January 28, 1986, the day I began working for an audio-visual rental services company in Oakland, California. One of our routine tasks was to test equipment that had been rented out, to ensure that it worked properly before renting it out again. As the brand-new guy, I wanted to impress the boss with my willingness to work, so I started checking a bunch of gear that had been returned at closing time the previous day. Early on in the process, I tested a TV/monitor. I hooked up a VHS player, and that worked fine, and - going the extra mile here - I then hooked up a set of rabbit ears and checked the TV tuner.

The channel that came up was the local ABC affiliate, and I switched on the tuner just as their network announcer broke into Good Morning America to say, "We've just received this raw footage from Cape Canaveral." I watched the two minutes or so of launch footage, and saw for the first time the main fuel tank explode, and the solid fuel boosters' exhaust form the "devil horns" that would become so painfully familiar over the next few days. When the clip began to loop, and the announcer said, "We're not sure what we're seeing here," I muttered under my breath, "Well, I'm sure," and walked up to the front of the warehouse to the manager's office.

"Dan?" I said, "You probably want to see this. The space shuttle just blew up and killed everyone aboard."

Just barely more than 17 years later, on February 1, 2003, I stood in the East pasture of our little five-acre spread in Mariposa County, and watched the Columbia reenter the atmosphere above California. I wondered why I kept seeing pulses of light beneath its wings, but I was so happy to have the opportunity to view an actual shuttle reentry, that I pretty much dismissed it from my mind. Then I went back inside, posted an account of the experience to The Pigdog List, and went to bed (I'd just pulled an all-nighter working on a column for the late, great Boardwatch Magazine). When I woke up that afternoon, I checked my email, to learn ... well, we all know what I learned.

I spent the next ten days writing and recording a song about the experience.

It's the second-saddest song I've every written.

"I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998."

Actually, it's not even as capable as Cool Edit was more than a decade ago. Specifically, Audacity does not support MIDI, whereas, AIR, Cool Edit Pro did. And that's the main reason why Audacity is utterly worthless for music production: because it can't sync to MIDI. So, no drum machine, or outboard sequencer loops.

That's why, when the Linux fanboys point their lofty sneers at lowly Windoze, I just shrug. My old Windows 98SE box allows me to sync my drum droid to Cakewalk 9 to lay down kick, hi-hat, and ride tracks. So I use that, instead of a Linux box, because it actually works. And, in turn, I use Windows 98, because the audio interface hardware I use (the original 16-bit Layla by Echo Audio) doesn't have drivers that work with XP SP3. (Nor, I should point out, does it have Linux drivers.) Since I can't afford new hardware, I use a Windows box that allows me to do stuff like this, which Audacity would not.

And it's sad that that's the case, because I would like to be able to use Audacity on Linux, rather than Cakewalk on Windows.

But I can't.

So I don't.

Here's a question: What about security? And not just for this "ZigBee" system, but for wireless networking and Bluetooth as well. Don't you think that with these PAN networks, security is going to be important?

Since I saw a Bluetooth keyboard the other day, I laughed and realised that keystroke loggers are obsolete. Why should a cracker go to the trouble of futzing around trying to get a user to install a trojan or leave a port open, when they can just point a hi-gain antenna at his desktop and read what the user's typing on the keyboard.

Hasn't anyone noticed all the hassle and screaming and yelling about the crappy security WEP provides? See http://www.starkrealities.com/wireless003.html The reason that happened is that people found out that when wireless networking is used, CRACKERS BREAK IN THROUGH THE CRAPPY SECURITY. Then they mess with your systems, steal your data and zombify your servers!

In the case of 802.11?? the crackers had to be withing a few yards to break in. With a PAN, they have to be within a few feet. Maybe you live in a lead-lined cavern all alone, but most people who use tech are walking around and sitting down next to people all the time. So if you just go and sit in a waiting room while using Bluetooth or some other PAN, the person sitting behind you pretending to play games on his PDA is breaking into your systems and slurping all your passwords and credit card numbers while you sit there none the wiser.

This looks like a security nightmare. Who wants that?