The sane response to all proposals of this ilk is not "hey, maybe global warming isn't such a big problem after all." The sane response is sheer terror.
Say you start putting particulates into the atmosphere so their cooling effect will counteract the warming effect of the CO2 we put into the atmosphere. Well particulates don't stay up in the atmosphere as long or spread globally in the same patterns that CO2 does. So we would be getting into a continuous process of deciding how much to insert into the atmosphere where and when so that not only the global weather is OK, but so that no huge weather distrubances are caused regionally. Gotta make sure the monsoons arrive on time in India, without setting off too many hurricanes in the Gulf. In other words, what is being proposed is that mankind take over active management of the world's climate.
Yes, our understanding of global climate has advanced by leaps and bounds, and weather models are really fairly good these days, but not anywhere near THAT good. If you planted a four-year-old kid who had seen "There Goes An Airplane" in the pilot's seat of a Boeing 747 and turned off the autopilot, you'd be in approximately the same delightful situation.
I suppose sooner or later we are going to be forced to actively manage the planet's weather, but we need to do everything we can to make it as much later as possible. The fact that there are lots of maniacs waiting in the wings, ready and willing to take over the management of the earth's climate if we screw up its natural balance enough should only be taken as more encouragement to cut CO2 emissions for all we are worth, as fast as we can. We need to invest in learning all we can about climate, in hopes that the maniacs will know a bit more about what they are doing when their turn comes, and we generally need to build international cooperation, because the geopolitical problems of managing global weather are at least as scary as the scientific ones.
(Note: I'm a member of the board of Cyberspace Communications, and testified at the original hearing of this case.)
I'm not sure how significant the whole thing is. The Supreme Court set the most important precedent when it overthrew the CDA and it's successors at the Federal level. There have already been a couple similar state laws thrown out. The legal tide is already flowing so strongly our way on this that there seemed from the beginning little chance that this Michigan law wouldn't be defeated. The Michigan legislature was stupid enough to pass it (in spite of their own legal staff advising them that it was probably unconstitutional), so we have to fight it. They fact that we are winning easily isn't really cause for excitement. If we somehow manage to lose it, however, that would make a splash.
The first hearing was just to temporarily keep the law from being enforced until it's constitutionality was determined. Judge Tarnow not only gave us the preliminary injunction, but also a rather strongly worded opinion that the law probably is unconstitutional. I think he was hoping to speed up it's death.
The state appealed the preliminary injunction. The circuit court distanced itself a little from Tarnow's condemnation of the law, but agreed that it was likely enough to be shown unconstitutional to justify the preliminary injunction. So my reading (I'm not a lawyer and haven't heard a lawyer's opinon of this) is that though this ruling is favorable, it isn't as wildly favorable as the lower court ruling was.
Though it sounds like there is still a long way to go, since we haven't actually challenged the law yet, just gotten a preliminary injunction, there are good odds that it really is closer to being done that it looks. With all this build-up and with favorable rulings at the district and appeals court level, we may be able to get a summary judgement against the law soon, without another full-blown hearing. So this ruling may be a bigger step toward finishing off the law than it appears to be.
More than one judge. So far four judges have ruled in our favor on this case alone, and it's not the first of it's kind. The legal system as a whole seems pretty unanimous on the subject.
I'm not sure what "corporate and liberal group" you are talking about. Cyberspace Communications is the lead plaintiff. We're a corporate group, albeit a tax-exempt non-profit charitable corporation. The suit is being mounted by the ACLU, certainly a liberal group. But nobody found against us. They found for us, against the State of Michigan. So the judges haven't been standing up to corporate and liberal pressure. Quite the contrary. It's Michigan's conservative legislature and governor who was pushing this censorship, and they're the ones the judges have been "standing up to".
I'm completely in agreement with your opinion that it is the parent's job to control what their children see. In fact, in the original opinion by Judge Tarnow on this case, he added a third reason why this law was suspect (beside the free speech and commerce clause issues), one that the ACLU lawyers hadn't even claimed. He felt that since there are tools to allow parents to censor their children's access to the web, for the state to take that role from the parents was an unwarrented intrusion into the parent's right to raise their own children their own way.
(Note: I'm a member of the board of directors at Cyberspace Communications, and testified at the original hearing in this case.)
The ACLU attorneys prosecuting this case have been trying not to emphasis the Commerce Clause aspects of it, not because they don't think they could win on that basis, but because they are much more interested in setting precedent on the Free Speech issues. The Commerce Clause issue is raised to leave no stone unturned, but we'd all be rather worried if the courts said we won the case solely on the basis of the Commerce Clause.
My understanding is that the system was sufficiently compromised that they felt they needeed to rebuild the software from scratch. As long as you're going to do that, you might as well do it with newer versions of things, in this case, a new computer and a new operating system. Recovery would have been faster if they had just rebuilt the old system, but then all their time would have put them right back where they were when they started. Instead they invested more time and ended up with a better system.
Obviously, if the AG attempts to claim that the hacker forced them to buy a new computer, they will be ripped apart in court. I expect the AG will be a bit more careful in making their case then they are in writing their press releases.
It was more than a month, nearer two. But the
downtime cannot be entirely blamed on the hacker.
The admins weren't by any means taking the shortest route getting the system back up fast. Not only did they get new hardware (actually, I think they had already bought the new hardware before the crash), but they changed operating systems (from BSDI to FreeBSD, I think) which took a lot of time because they use a lot of custom software that didn't all port easily.
So you can't blame this guy for a month of down time.
However, I've been doing admin work on public access systems like M-Net for over 15 years, and I can't say I'm very sorry to see this person charged. How much damage this person actually did is debatable. But the cummulative damage done by people like him is substantial. More than half of the admin work we do is either cleaning up after or hardening our system against people like this. If we didn't have to play juvenile games with them, we could expend a lot more effort on improving our services. We are volunteers, offering a free, non-profit service. Why are we spending most of our time beating off literally thousands of people who are trying to damage or abuse our system sheerly for entertainment?
We've got a large class of people on the net who think breaking random things is a fun game. Individually they do inconsequential damage. Collectively, they are a real problem. I'm not sure what I think of these cases, but I do understand the social need to send signals discouraging this kind of stuff.
Beside full unix shell access, M-Net had both a fully functional bbs and a live-chat area from the beginning. But the most interesting piece of custom software was the 'newuser' program.
At the unix login prompt, you'd type 'newuser'. Instead of asking for a password, it would ask you for various information, and then instantly create a new unix account for you. So to get on M-Net you didn't need to know the right person to ask for an account, you just needed to know the phone number. You weren't required to tell the truth when asked for your name, so it was easy to be essentially anonymous. There exist all sorts of shades and degrees to "public access," but M-Net always pushed it almost as far as you can go, from the very beginning (surely someone, somewhere has tried setting up a system that gives away free root accounts (on purpose, I mean) - that'd go further).
One of the consequences of an unrestricted newuser program is that you can't really boot people off the system. They just create new accounts and come back. This means that you have to deal with "problem users" by social means rather than technical means. You have to either convince them to stop being a problem, or you have to learn to deal with them as they are. This is difficult, but ultimately healthy.
By 1991, M-Net had made difficult transition from being a privately-owned system run by a benevolent dictator, to a communally-owned, non-profit corporation, where the users write the rules for how the system is run. Management is elected by the users who care enough about the system to donate money to its upkeep.
I think M-Net (and even more so its splinter sister system, Grex) represent something close to the best that can be done in terms of offering cost-free, advertisement-free, censorship-free, public access shell and conferencing systems on the net. And it isn't something they just started doing recently. They've been doing it for the full 17 years of there history.
I believe Chinet is a bit older, but it has never during all its history been as open as M-Net, and has often been pretty nearly closed. Firstness is not the cool thing about M-Net. Openness is.
Note that the people who started it pretty much represented the "old guard" at M-Net. If you want to know about the early history of M-Net, you pretty much have to go to Grex to ask, because that's where all the M-Net old-timers are.
Grex and M-Net are still pretty similar, but differ in a few obvious ways. Grex culture is not particularly flame prone. Grex has more users. Grex actually manages to bring in enough donations to support its operations and is financially stable. Grex has weirder hardware.
Jan Wolter M-Net Staff, 1984 to 1988 Grex Staff, 1995 to present
The machine was an Altos 6800 - Altos's only foray into Motorola chips, never well supported by the manufacturer. It was a big rectagular box about the size of a modern full tower, but on its side. It had no keyboard or monitor, so it certainly isn't being used as a dumb terminal anywhere. You needed a separate dumb terminal to use as a console.
The top of the box hinged up. The circuit board was in the hinged top - it was a single-board computer, not designed for add-on cards of any kind, though by the end we had all sorts of third-party daughterboards piggy backed on it. The bottom part of the box held drives (8 inch hard drives and floppy drives) and power supplies and such. It ran for many years with the top up, because RF interference from the drives would crash the computer if you hinged the board down. Its main nice feature was that it had 16 serial ports. Perfect. Its main obnoxious feature was that the C compiler defaulted the 'int' type to 16 bits. This made porting software to it intensely painful.
Mike had about five or six of these things at peak. He'd gather them from various sources, pass them along to people who wanted to start systems like M-Net. Parts and machines got swapped in and out. I'm not sure that even Mike could have identified 'the original' by the end. But there was so much switching around and so few of these machines were ever made in the first place, I figure any Altos 6800 that you find has a decent chance of having been M-Net at some point.:)
I remember things a bit differently. Firstness is a fuzzy concept, and not a very meaningful one, since the people setting up M-Net knew nothing about Chinet and the people who set up a thousand later systems knew nothing about M-Net. But for what it is worth, I think Chinet/CBBS have uncommonly good bragging rights for many forms of firstness. Randy Suess does claim to have run a public Unix a bit before M-Net came up.
When Byte was considering creating their own conferencing system (later BIX), a flock of editors and writers visited M-Net and hung around in the 'byte' conference several months. I remember Jerry Pournelle being just ahead of that wave, definately already a columnist there. I remember finding it odd that this well-know computer columnist had so much more trouble with Picospan than the average 13-year-old. It wasn't that hard to use.
I was on M-Net near the begining. Yes, Usenet predates it, but Usenet never gave out free unix shell accounts.
I think it very possible that there was an earlier system - Chinet or one of its predecessors may have been first, but not by much. I don't think there are other serious contenders.
It's kind of dumb arguing over who is first. Things weren't as connected back then. Lots of people worked on things like this independently in different parts of the country, with very little communication between them. They were all doing things that hadn't much been done before so far as they knew.
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The sane response to all proposals of this ilk is not "hey, maybe global warming isn't such a big problem after all." The sane response is sheer terror.
Say you start putting particulates into the atmosphere so their cooling effect will counteract the warming effect of the CO2 we put into the atmosphere. Well particulates don't stay up in the atmosphere as long or spread globally in the same patterns that CO2 does. So we would be getting into a continuous process of deciding how much to insert into the atmosphere where and when so that not only the global weather is OK, but so that no huge weather distrubances are caused regionally. Gotta make sure the monsoons arrive on time in India, without setting off too many hurricanes in the Gulf. In other words, what is being proposed is that mankind take over active management of the world's climate.
Yes, our understanding of global climate has advanced by leaps and bounds, and weather models are really fairly good these days, but not anywhere near THAT good. If you planted a four-year-old kid who had seen "There Goes An Airplane" in the pilot's seat of a Boeing 747 and turned off the autopilot, you'd be in approximately the same delightful situation.
I suppose sooner or later we are going to be forced to actively manage the planet's weather, but we need to do everything we can to make it as much later as possible. The fact that there are lots of maniacs waiting in the wings, ready and willing to take over the management of the earth's climate if we screw up its natural balance enough should only be taken as more encouragement to cut CO2 emissions for all we are worth, as fast as we can. We need to invest in learning all we can about climate, in hopes that the maniacs will know a bit more about what they are doing when their turn comes, and we generally need to build international cooperation, because the geopolitical problems of managing global weather are at least as scary as the scientific ones.
I'm not sure how significant the whole thing is. The Supreme Court set the most important precedent when it overthrew the CDA and it's successors at the Federal level. There have already been a couple similar state laws thrown out. The legal tide is already flowing so strongly our way on this that there seemed from the beginning little chance that this Michigan law wouldn't be defeated. The Michigan legislature was stupid enough to pass it (in spite of their own legal staff advising them that it was probably unconstitutional), so we have to fight it. They fact that we are winning easily isn't really cause for excitement. If we somehow manage to lose it, however, that would make a splash.
The first hearing was just to temporarily keep the law from being enforced until it's constitutionality was determined. Judge Tarnow not only gave us the preliminary injunction, but also a rather strongly worded opinion that the law probably is unconstitutional. I think he was hoping to speed up it's death.
The state appealed the preliminary injunction. The circuit court distanced itself a little from Tarnow's condemnation of the law, but agreed that it was likely enough to be shown unconstitutional to justify the preliminary injunction. So my reading (I'm not a lawyer and haven't heard a lawyer's opinon of this) is that though this ruling is favorable, it isn't as wildly favorable as the lower court ruling was.
Though it sounds like there is still a long way to go, since we haven't actually challenged the law yet, just gotten a preliminary injunction, there are good odds that it really is closer to being done that it looks. With all this build-up and with favorable rulings at the district and appeals court level, we may be able to get a summary judgement against the law soon, without another full-blown hearing. So this ruling may be a bigger step toward finishing off the law than it appears to be.
I'm not sure what "corporate and liberal group" you are talking about. Cyberspace Communications is the lead plaintiff. We're a corporate group, albeit a tax-exempt non-profit charitable corporation. The suit is being mounted by the ACLU, certainly a liberal group. But nobody found against us. They found for us, against the State of Michigan. So the judges haven't been standing up to corporate and liberal pressure. Quite the contrary. It's Michigan's conservative legislature and governor who was pushing this censorship, and they're the ones the judges have been "standing up to".
I'm completely in agreement with your opinion that it is the parent's job to control what their children see. In fact, in the original opinion by Judge Tarnow on this case, he added a third reason why this law was suspect (beside the free speech and commerce clause issues), one that the ACLU lawyers hadn't even claimed. He felt that since there are tools to allow parents to censor their children's access to the web, for the state to take that role from the parents was an unwarrented intrusion into the parent's right to raise their own children their own way.
The ACLU attorneys prosecuting this case have been trying not to emphasis the Commerce Clause aspects of it, not because they don't think they could win on that basis, but because they are much more interested in setting precedent on the Free Speech issues. The Commerce Clause issue is raised to leave no stone unturned, but we'd all be rather worried if the courts said we won the case solely on the basis of the Commerce Clause.
Obviously, if the AG attempts to claim that the hacker forced them to buy a new computer, they will be ripped apart in court. I expect the AG will be a bit more careful in making their case then they are in writing their press releases.
So you can't blame this guy for a month of down time.
However, I've been doing admin work on public access systems like M-Net for over 15 years, and I can't say I'm very sorry to see this person charged. How much damage this person actually did is debatable. But the cummulative damage done by people like him is substantial. More than half of the admin work we do is either cleaning up after or hardening our system against people like this. If we didn't have to play juvenile games with them, we could expend a lot more effort on improving our services. We are volunteers, offering a free, non-profit service. Why are we spending most of our time beating off literally thousands of people who are trying to damage or abuse our system sheerly for entertainment?
We've got a large class of people on the net who think breaking random things is a fun game. Individually they do inconsequential damage. Collectively, they are a real problem. I'm not sure what I think of these cases, but I do understand the social need to send signals discouraging this kind of stuff.
At the unix login prompt, you'd type 'newuser'. Instead of asking for a password, it would ask you for various information, and then instantly create a new unix account for you. So to get on M-Net you didn't need to know the right person to ask for an account, you just needed to know the phone number. You weren't required to tell the truth when asked for your name, so it was easy to be essentially anonymous. There exist all sorts of shades and degrees to "public access," but M-Net always pushed it almost as far as you can go, from the very beginning (surely someone, somewhere has tried setting up a system that gives away free root accounts (on purpose, I mean) - that'd go further).
One of the consequences of an unrestricted newuser program is that you can't really boot people off the system. They just create new accounts and come back. This means that you have to deal with "problem users" by social means rather than technical means. You have to either convince them to stop being a problem, or you have to learn to deal with them as they are. This is difficult, but ultimately healthy.
By 1991, M-Net had made difficult transition from being a privately-owned system run by a benevolent dictator, to a communally-owned, non-profit corporation, where the users write the rules for how the system is run. Management is elected by the users who care enough about the system to donate money to its upkeep.
I think M-Net (and even more so its splinter sister system, Grex) represent something close to the best that can be done in terms of offering cost-free, advertisement-free, censorship-free, public access shell and conferencing systems on the net. And it isn't something they just started doing recently. They've been doing it for the full 17 years of there history.
I believe Chinet is a bit older, but it has never during all its history been as open as M-Net, and has often been pretty nearly closed. Firstness is not the cool thing about M-Net. Openness is.
Grex wasn't down because it was slashdotted. It was down because I was formatting and testing a new disk.
Note that the people who started it pretty much represented the "old guard" at M-Net. If you want to know about the early history of M-Net, you pretty much have to go to Grex to ask, because that's where all the M-Net old-timers are.
Grex and M-Net are still pretty similar, but differ in a few obvious ways. Grex culture is not particularly flame prone. Grex has more users. Grex actually manages to bring in enough donations to support its operations and is financially stable. Grex has weirder hardware.
Jan Wolter
M-Net Staff, 1984 to 1988
Grex Staff, 1995 to present
The top of the box hinged up. The circuit board was in the hinged top - it was a single-board computer, not designed for add-on cards of any kind, though by the end we had all sorts of third-party daughterboards piggy backed on it. The bottom part of the box held drives (8 inch hard drives and floppy drives) and power supplies and such. It ran for many years with the top up, because RF interference from the drives would crash the computer if you hinged the board down. Its main nice feature was that it had 16 serial ports. Perfect. Its main obnoxious feature was that the C compiler defaulted the 'int' type to 16 bits. This made porting software to it intensely painful.
Mike had about five or six of these things at peak. He'd gather them from various sources, pass them along to people who wanted to start systems like M-Net. Parts and machines got swapped in and out. I'm not sure that even Mike could have identified 'the original' by the end. But there was so much switching around and so few of these machines were ever made in the first place, I figure any Altos 6800 that you find has a decent chance of having been M-Net at some point. :)
When Byte was considering creating their own conferencing system (later BIX), a flock of editors and writers visited M-Net and hung around in the 'byte' conference several months. I remember Jerry Pournelle being just ahead of that wave, definately already a columnist there. I remember finding it odd that this well-know computer columnist had so much more trouble with Picospan than the average 13-year-old. It wasn't that hard to use.
Not sure what you are talking about. In 1983, M-Net was running Bell System III Unix. Much later it changed to BSDI.
I think it very possible that there was an earlier system - Chinet or one of its predecessors may have been first, but not by much. I don't think there are other serious contenders.
It's kind of dumb arguing over who is first. Things weren't as connected back then. Lots of people worked on things like this independently in different parts of the country, with very little communication between them. They were all doing things that hadn't much been done before so far as they knew.
More history of M-Net and spinoffs is here
The Well can reasonably be considered an M-Net spinoff.