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1. S.Boxx

More options Dec 3 1993, 2:52 pm

Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet, alt.culture.internet, alt.life.internet, comp.org.eff.talk

From: an12...@anon.penet.fi (S.Boxx)

Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1993 18:58:15 UTC

Local: Fri, Dec 3 1993 1:58 pm

Subject: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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TECHNOLOGY
FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

Twenty million strong and adding a million new users a month, the Internet
is suddenly the place to be

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT

Back in the mid-1960s, at the height of the cold war, the Department of
Defense faced a tough question: How could orders be issued to the armed
forces if the U.S. were ravaged by a nuclear assault? The communication
hubs in place at the time -- the telephone switching offices and the radio
and TV broadcast stations -- were not only vulnerable to attack, they
would also probably be the first to go. The Pentagon needed a military
command-and-control system that would continue to operate even if most of
the phone lines were in tatters and the switches had melted down.

In 1964 a researcher at the Rand Corp. named Paul Baran came up with a
bizarre solution to this Strangelovian puzzle. He designed a
computer-communications network that had no hub, no central switching
station, no governing authority, and that assumed that the links
connecting any city to any other were totally unreliable. Baran's system
was the antithesis of the orderly, efficient phone network; it was more
like an electronic post office designed by a madman. In Baran's scheme,
each message was cut into tiny strips and stuffed into electronic
envelopes, called packets, each marked with the address of the sender and
the intended receiver. The packets were then released like so much
confetti into the web of interconnected computers, where they were tossed
back and forth over high-speed wires in the general direction of their
destination and reassembled when they finally got there. If any packets
were missing or mangled (and it was assumed that some would be), it was no
big deal; they were simply re-sent.

Baran's packet-switching network, as it came to be called, might have
been a minor footnote in cold war history were it not for one contingency:
it took root in the computers that began showing up in universities and
government research laboratories in the late 1960s and early 1970s and
became, by a path as circuitous as one taken by those wayward packets, the
technological underpinning of the Internet.

The Internet, for those who haven't been hanging out in cyberspace,
reading the business pages or following Doonesbury, is the mother of all
computer networks -- an anarchistic electronic freeway that has spread
uncontrollably and now circles the globe. It is at once the shining
archetype and the nightmare vision of the information highway that the
Clinton Administration has been touting and that the telephone and
cable-TV companies are racing to build. Much of what Bell Atlantic and
Time Warner are planning to sell -- interactivity, two-way communications,
multimedia info on demand -- the Internet already provides for free. And
because of its cold war roots, the Internet has one quality that makes it
a formidable competitor: you couldn't destroy it if you tried.

Nobody owns the Internet, and no single organization controls its use. In
the mid-1980s the National Science Foundation built the high-speed,
long-distance data lines that form Internet's U.S. backbone. But the major
costs of running the network are shared in a cooperative arrangement by
its primary users: universities, national labs, high-tech corporations and
foreign governments. Two years ago, the NSF lifted restrictions against
commercial use of the Internet, and in September the White House announced
a plan to make it the starting point for an even grander concept called
the National Information Infrastructure.

Suddenly the Internet is the place to be. College students are queuing up
outside computing centers to get online. Executives are ordering new
business cards that show off their Internet addresses. Millions of people
around the world are logging on to tap into libraries, call up satellite
weather photos, download free computer programs and participate in
discussion groups with everyone from lawyers to physicists to
sadomasochists. Even the President and Vice President have their own
Internet accounts (although they aren't very good at answering their
mail). ``It's the Internet boom,'' says network activist Mitch Kapor, who
thinks the true sign that popular interest has reached critical mass came
this summer when the New Yorker printed a cartoon showing two
computer-savvy canines with the caption, ``On the Internet, nobody knows
you're a dog.''

But the Internet is not ready for prime time. There are no TV Guides to
sort through the 5,000 discussion groups or the 2,500 electronic
newsletters or the tens of thousands of computers with files to share.
Instead of feeling surrounded by information, first-timers (``newbies'' in
the jargon of the Net) are likely to find themselves adrift in a
borderless sea. Old-timers say the first wave of dizziness doesn't last
long. ``It's like driving a car with a clutch,'' says Thomas Lunzer, a
network designer at SRI International, a California consulting firm.
``Once you figure it out, you can drive all over the place.''

But you must learn new languages (like UNIX), new forms of address (like
presid...@whitehouse.gov) and new ways of expressing feeling (like those
ubiquitous sideways smiley faces), and you must master a whole set of
rules for how to behave, called netiquette. Rule No. 1: Don't ask dumb
questions. In fact, don't ask any questions at all before you've read the
FAQ (frequently asked questions) files. Otherwise you risk annoying a few
hundred thousand people who may either yell at you (IN ALL CAPS!) or,
worse still, ignore you.

All that is starting to change, however, as successive waves of netters
demand, and eventually get, more user-friendly tools for navigating the
Internet. In fact, anyone with a desktop computer and a modem connecting
it to a phone line can now find ways into and around the network. ``The
Internet isn't just computer scientists talking to one another anymore,''
says Glee Willis, the engineering librarian at the University of Nevada at
Reno and one of nearly 20,000 (mostly female) academic librarians who have
joined the Internet in the past five years. ``It's a family place. It's a
place for perverts. It's everything rolled into one.''

As traffic swells, the Internet is beginning to suffer the problems of
any heavily traveled highway, including vandalism, break-ins and traffic
jams. ``It's like an amusement park that's so successful that there are
long waits for the most popular rides,'' says David Farber, a professor of
information science at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the
network's original architects. And while most users wait patiently for the
access and information they need, rogue hackers use stolen passwords to
roam the network, exploring forbidden computers and reading other people's
mail.

How big is the Internet? Part of its mystique is that nobody knows for
sure. The only fact that can be measured precisely is the number of
computers directly connected to it by high-speed links -- a figure that is
updated periodically by sending a computer program crawling around like a
Roto-Rooter, tallying the number of connections (last count: roughly 2
million). But that figure does not include military computers that for
security reasons are invisible to other users, or the hundreds of people
who may share a single Internet host. Nor does it include millions more
who dial into the Internet through the growing number of commercial
gateways, such as Panix and Netcom, which offer indirect telephone access
for $10 to $20 a month. When all these users are taken into account, the
total number of people around the world who can get into the Internet one
way or another may be 20 million. ``It's a large country,'' says Farber of
the Internet population. ``We ought to apply to the U.N. as the first
nation in cyberspace.''

That nation is about to get even bigger as the major commercial computer
networks -- Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, GEnie and Delphi Internet
Service -- begin to dismantle the walls that have separated their private
operations from the public Internet. The success of the Internet is a
matter of frustration to the owners of the commercial networks, who have
tried all sorts of marketing tricks and still count fewer than 5 million
subscribers among them. Most commercial networks now allow electronic mail
to pass between their services and the Internet. Delphi, which was
purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in September, began providing its
customers full Internet access last summer. America Online (which
publishes an electronic version of Time) is scheduled to begin offering
limited Internet services later this month.

People who use these new entry points into the Net may be in for a shock.
Unlike the family-oriented commercial services, which censor messages they
find offensive, the Internet imposes no restrictions. Anybody can start a
discussion on any topic and say anything. There have been sporadic
attempts by local network managers to crack down on the raunchier
discussion groups, but as Internet pioneer John Gilmore puts it, ``The Net
interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.''

The casual visitor to the newsgroups on the Usenet (a bulletin-board
system that began as a competitor to the Internet but has been largely
subsumed by it) will discover discussion groups labeled, according to the
Net's idiosyncratic cataloging system, alt.sex.masturbation,
alt.sex.bondage and alt.sex.fetish.feet. On Internet Relay Chat, a global
24-hour-a-day message board, one can stumble upon imaginary orgies played
out with one-line typed commands (``Now I'm taking off your shirt . .
.''). In alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, a user can peek at snapshots that
would make a sailor blush.

But those who focus on the Internet's sexual content risk missing the
point. For every sexually oriented discussion group there are hundreds on
tamer and often more substantial topics ranging from ...

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2. Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Dec 3 1993, 4:05 pm

Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet, alt.culture.internet, alt.life.internet, comp.org.eff.talk

From: p...@panix.com (Philip Elmer-DeWitt)

Date: 3 Dec 1993 15:33:42 -0500

Local: Fri, Dec 3 1993 3:33 pm

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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3. Graham Toal

Dec 3 1993, 8:29 pm

Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet, alt.culture.internet, alt.life.internet, comp.org.eff.talk

From: gt...@an-teallach.com (Graham Toal)

Date: Sat, 4 Dec 1993 00:06:28 +0000

Local: Fri, Dec 3 1993 7:06 pm

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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4. tim werner

Dec 4 1993, 3:10 am

Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet, alt.culture.internet, alt.life.internet, comp.org.eff.talk

From: thx1...@knuth.cba.csuohio.edu (tim werner)

Date: Sat, 4 Dec 1993 05:22:00 GMT

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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5. Eric Hollander

Dec 4 1993, 7:46 am

Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet, alt.culture.internet, comp.org.eff.talk

From: h...@soda.berkeley.edu (Eric Hollander)

Date: 4 Dec 1993 11:12:52 GMT

Local: Sat, Dec 4 1993 6:12 am

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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6. Scott Russell

Dec 4 1993, 6:26 pm

Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet, alt.culture.internet, comp.org.eff.talk

From: qu...@interaccess.com (Scott Russell)

Date: 4 Dec 1993 17:11:22 -0600

Local: Sat, Dec 4 1993 6:11 pm

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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7. Mats Bergstrom

Dec 4 1993, 9:04 pm

Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk

From: ma...@sos.sll.se (Mats Bergstrom)

Date: 4 Dec 1993 21:03:38 -0500

Local: Sat, Dec 4 1993 9:03 pm

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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8. Andrew Steele

Dec 8 1993, 1:40 pm

Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk

From: fo...@cerberus.bhpese.oz.au (Andrew Steele)

Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1993 01:37:33 GMT

Local: Tues, Dec 7 1993 8:37 pm

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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Discussion subject changed to "TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE (LONG POST)" by Eric Hollander

9. Eric Hollander

Dec 4 1993, 9:13 pm

Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet, alt.culture.internet, comp.org.eff.talk

From: h...@soda.berkeley.edu (Eric Hollander)

Date: 5 Dec 1993 02:11:20 GMT

Local: Sat, Dec 4 1993 9:11 pm

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE (LONG POST)

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In article <queue.755046...@interaccess.com>,

Scott Russell <qu...@interaccess.com> wrote:
> Information not only should be free, on the 'net it IS free. (with the
>exception of the $23.00 that I send to Interaccess Co 9400 W.Foster Ave,
>Suite 111 Chicago Il 60656) Everyone has to understand that copyright
>laws don't mean much anymore, and work on rebuilding the information
>infrastructure from that.

Yup. Free information is almost unstoppable, I believe. But just to make
extra sure that it really is unstoppable, there are these remailer things
which you can use to post anonymously. Everyone should know about and use
these thigns. Simply follow the instructions below, and send anon mail to
alt-best-of-inter...@cs.utexad.edu, for example, and it'll post here. If
you think you have some cool software that would help a lot of people, or
some interesting information we should all know about, go ahead and post
it. (NOTE: please don't abuse these things, though. Post stuff only in
appropriate newsgroups.) I've attached a copy of the remailer
instructions. This and other information is available by anon ftp from
soda.berkeley.edu:/pub/cypherpunks. While you're in there, you might also
want to check out the pgp stuff. If you don't have pgp running on your
machine yet, you might want to give it a try.

Enjoy!

How to use the Cypherpunks Remailers
------------------------------------
by Hal Finney, <74076.1...@compuserve.com>
First written: January 10, 1993
Last revised: May 29, 1993

Several sites are running simple remailers based on Perl scripts
originally created by Eric Hughes and using the mh utility program
"slocal". I wrote a simple slocal replacement in Perl, and added
PGP decryption. The code for these remailers is available by
anonymous ftp from soda.berkeley.edu, in the cypherpunks/remailer
directory. The latest version of this document may be found there as
well, as long as other scripts useful in operating the remailers.
At the bottom of this document is a list of currently available Cypherpunks
remailers.

These basic remailers have one main function: they will automatically
forward a message to any requested destination, removing all incoming
header fields except "Subject:". Although this is less power than
some other remailers provide, the Cypherpunks remailers do not require
the operator to have root privileges on the machine which runs the
remailer. It basically has to be a Unix machine which runs Perl and
which supports the feature of looking for a ".forward" file in the
user's home directory to find the name of a program for processing
incoming mail. Many Unix systems provide these capabilities.

Basic Remailing Functions
-------------------------

There are two general ways of specifying the remailing instructions.
The simplest is to add an extra field to the header of the message.
All of the Cypherpunks remailers will accept the field name
"Request-Remailing-To:". (Several of the remailers also accept shorter
versions of this name, but there is no standard for the short versions
accepted.) Simply put the address that you want the mail to be forwarded
to after "Request-Remailing-To:" in the message header, and the forwarding
will be done. (Case is important in this header field, so be sure to put
in the capital letters as shown.)

The remailers do not create aliases or allow replies to such anonymously
forwarded mail. (But see below for how anonymous replies can be
done using the encryption enhancements.)

Here is an example:

================================================================
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 92 22:13:57 -0800
Message-Id: <9301100613.AA05...@soda.berkeley.edu>
From: "Sue Jones" <s...@mec.com>
To: hfin...@shell.portal.com
Subject: Anonymous mail
Request-Remailing-To: j...@tap.com

Joe - This is some anonymous mail from me.
================================================================

This is a message from s...@mec.com to be anonymously forwarded to
j...@tap.com. It is directed to the Cypherpunks remailer at address
hfin...@shell.portal.com. When Joe receives the message it will look
something like:

================================================================
Sender: hfin...@shell.portal.com
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 92 01:03:31 -0800
Message-Id: <9301110702.AA15...@shell.portal.com>
To: j...@tap.com
From: nob...@shell.portal.com
Subject: Anonymous mail
Remailed-By: Hal Finney <hfin...@shell.portal.com>

Joe - This is some anonymous mail from me.
================================================================

All the identifying information from Sue's message header has been
replaced, except for the subject line.

Many people have mailers which will not allow them to add fields to the
headers of the messages they send. Instead, they can only put material
into the bodies of the mail. In order to accomodate such systems, the
Cypherpunks remailers provide a mechanism for "pasting" the first few
lines of the message body into the header. These lines can then contain
"Request-Remailing-To:" commands.

This is done by having the first non-blank line of your message be the
special token "::" (two colons). If the Cypherpunks remailers see this
as the first non-blank line, all following lines up to a blank one
will be pasted into your mail header. Then the message will be processed
as usual. Here is how the message above would be prepared if Sue were
not able to add lines to her outgoing message header.

::
Request-Remailing-To: j...@tap.com

Joe - This is some anonymous mail from me.
================================================================

There are three common mistakes which I have seen in messages using
these remailers. The first is to leave the "::" off. Sometimes people
are not sure whether the text they write goes into the header or the
message body. They may think they are putting it into the header, but
it is actually in the body. The "::" is needed if it will be in the
body. The second mistake is leaving off the blank line after the
material to be added to the header. In that case the whole message gets
added to the header (up to the first blank in the message), causing
considerable confusion for the remailer and generally not allowing
the mail to be forwarded. The third mistake is to misspell
"Request-Remailing-To:".

Anonymous Posting
-----------------

Although the only remailer function is to forward messages to someone,
they can also be used (indirectly) for anonymous posting. This can
be done by mailing to one of the mail-to-news gateways offered at a
few sites. These gateway computers will automatically post any message
they receive with a special address format. A commonly used format is to
take the newsgroup name and replace "." with "-", then add the address
of the gateway after an "@" sign.

These gateways tend not to have a very long lifetime, but at least at
this writing one operates at cs.utexas.edu. Another operates at
ucbvax.berkeley.edu, but that one is only available for mail from
Berkeley sites. Fortunately, there are cypherpunks remailers operating

>from Berkeley sites (see the list below). By using one of those remailers

to direct the mail to ucbvax.berkeley.edu, it should be possible to post
to news.

As an example, to post to sci.crypt, send mail to "sci-cr...@cs.utexas.edu",
or use one of the Berkeley cypherpunks remailers to send mail to
"sci-cr...@ucbvax.berkeley.edu". By using remailers in conjunction with
mail-to-news gateways, anonymous posting is possible. Realize, though,
that people will not be able to respond to you directly (but see below
for the anonymous address implementation).

(Sometimes people ask how to post to groups with "-" in their names,
since these gateways turn "-" characters into "."'s. I don't know the answer
but if anyone finds out please tell me and I will incorporate it into a
future version of this document.)

Chaining Remailers
------------------

Remailers can be chained for somewhat more security. The simplest way
to do this is to put multiple blocks starting with :: and ending with
a blank line at the beginning of the message. Here is the example above,
re-done to pass through two remailers, first h...@soda.berkeley.edu, then
hfin...@shell.portal.com.

::
Request-Remailing-To: hfin...@shell.portal.com

::
Request-Remailing-To: j...@tap.com

Joe - This is some anonymous mail from me.
================================================================

This mail is sent to the remailer at h...@soda.berkeley.edu. It will strip
off the first "::" and the "Request-Remailing-To: hfin...@shell.portal.com"
lines, and send it to the "shell.portal.com" remailer. That remailer will
then send the message to Joe. Chains can be made as long as desired by
extending this scheme.

Chaining does increase the complexity of the path a message takes,
but the gain in security is limited because the whole path is visible
in the message when you send it. Adding encryption to the remailer
allows more security, especially when combined with chaining.

Encrypting Enhancements
-----------------------

Encryption/decryption for the Cypherpunks remailers is done using
Phillip Zimmermann's "underground" public-key encryption program,
PGP. Although PGP's legality for use in the U.S. is debatable (and
often debated), it is widely available at overseas ftp sites and at
some domestic sites. Use "archie" or a similar service to find the
latest version.

The encryption enhancement to the remailers is done in a fairly simple
way. Each
...

read more »

Discussion subject changed to "TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE" by Plastic Man

10. Plastic Man

Dec 7 1993, 8:35 pm

Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet, alt.culture.internet, comp.org.eff.talk

From: p...@flipper.demon.co.uk (Plastic Man)

Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1993 01:03:21 +0000

Local: Mon, Dec 6 1993 8:03 pm

Subject: Re: TIME: FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE

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