Filtering A Global Hypermedia Network
Thomas Fruin
> From: Wayne McGuire <Wayne%OZ.AI....@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
> Subject: Filtering A Global Hypermedia Network
What is the rationale for bringing a "global superintelligence" in to solve
the filtering problem for a global hypermedia network? There are _so_ many
disadvantages of having one centralized body: impracticality due to size,
reliability (what if the thing goes down), and the issue of privacy you
already mentioned.
Of course "turning off your personal assistant" if you are worried about
privacy is no solution at all. That's like solving the many car accidents
by refraining from driving.
-- Thomas Fruin
fr...@hlerul5.BITNET
tho...@uvabick.UUCP
2:500/15 on FidoNet
Leiden University, Netherlands
Wa...@oz.ai.mit.edu.uucp
> From: <FRUIN%HLERUL5...@BUACCA.BU.EDU> (Thomas Fruin)
>
> What is the rationale for bringing a "global superintelligence" in to
> solve the filtering problem for a global hypermedia network? There are
> _so_ many disadvantages of having one centralized body: impracticality
> due to size, reliability (what if the thing goes down), and the issue
> of privacy you already mentioned.
Impracticality due to size: with nanotechnology and Crays that will
fit in pocket watches or teeth?
Reliability: why can't a global mind or global hypermedia advisor
replicate itself each day and be distributed by fiber optic or
superconductive links in multiple copies throughout all the cities in
the world? If one goes down, just turn on another.
Privacy: yes, a serious problem, but you should realize that we
already leave behind us a large and detailed digital trail which
profiles our most intimate habits of mind. Many large corporations
and government agencies can access and manipulate that data now. Your
privacy is already long gone.
So why would one want a global hypermedia advisor? For the same
reasons, I suppose, that most of us would rather take advantage of the
resources of the Library of Congress or Harvard's Widener Library than
those of our local public library: knowledge and power. It's a basic
human drive.
Wayne
Wa...@oz.ai.mit.edu.uucp
> From: ma...@bucsf.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
>
> Anyway, the cross-reference ended up being about the size of the
> encyclopaedia but made it possible to find even obscure references in
> only seconds WITHOUT A GLOBAL SEARCH....
The power of the indexing system for the Grolier CD-ROM lies
precisely in the fact that IS based on a global analysis of the total
text. An intelligent agent (no doubt a few people armed with computers
and the appropriate software) scanned the entire text for conceptual
links. Any users of the Grolier CD-ROM are taking advantage of an
indexing scheme built on this global preprocessing. You don't have to
conduct a global search, because someone has already done it for you,
although no doubt your or my personal global analysis would turn up
radically different links than did Grolier's editors.
ISI's citation indexes, which cover the majority of the world
scientific literature, are also based on a global scan, in this case of
millions of documents. It is impossible to predict what journal in
what domain will refer to a given document, and so it is necessary to
analyze (nearly) all the scientific journals in the world to uncover
citation links.
Never underestimate the necessity for or power of global analysis.
Any local structure is only as robust as its knowledge of the entire
world. Presumably a global hypermedia advisor would be very robust
indeed.
Wayne
FR...@hlerul5.bitnet.uucp
> Date: 20 Nov 1987 05:18 EST (Fri)
> From: Wayne McGuire <Wayne%OZ.AI....@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
> Subject: Filtering A Global Hypermedia Network
If communications speeds are going to be so much higher, what's the point in
cramming everything into one big hypermedia adviser? I thought the way of the
future was networking. A more likely prospect is that each person's advisor
queries several databases around the world and copies whatever relevant
information it finds there. Big centralized systems will always stay slow,
impractical, and unreliable because with the advancement of technology the
amount of digitized information is growing at an ever faster rate.
> Privacy: yes, a serious problem, but you should realize that we
> already leave behind us a large and detailed digital trail which
> profiles our most intimate habits of mind. Many large corporations
> and government agencies can access and manipulate that data now. Your
> privacy is already long gone.
You're very cynical here, and maybe you are right. I want to think there is
still hope, though, and in that case a centralized hypermedia advisor is not
the way to go. There is a big difference in leaving behind a _public_ digital
trail (like messages in newsgroups) and a trail that "profiles our most
intimate habits of mind". What do you mean by that?
In Holland a new law will soon take effect regarding databases that store
information about people. It's basic premise is that a database should have
a GOAL, i.e. to send you your electricity bill or to keep track of your car's
registration number. It is FORBIDDEN two match or combine any two databases
that don't have the same goal. You can take anybody to court who does so
anyway. This should make it very hard for corporations and government agencies
to access any information about you.
Barry Shein
From: <FRUIN%HLERUL5...@BUACCA.BU.EDU> (Thomas Fruin)
>If communications speeds are going to be so much higher, what's the point in
>cramming everything into one big hypermedia adviser? I thought the way of the
>future was networking.
I've had some conversations with folks here who are working on large
hypertext projects and some of them in fact do not believe the future
is in networks at all.
One major reason they cite is inevitable frustration of dealing with
the necessary central organization who would be running the network
(and, of course, varying scepticism on the available bandwidth.)
The system of the future they envision would be something more like a
desktop, high-speed multi-processor with CD-ROM readers and a nice
stack of CD-ROMs (not unlike your current CD player.) People would buy
sets of CDs to start collections (not unlike investing in a good
encyclopaedia) and beyond that would either buy them in typical ways
or subscribe to "CD of the month" clubs which might send you all of
the previous months journals w/in some field (or popular mags,
whatever.)
To be more up to date you might use a network to peruse very current
stuff, it's not either or, but the network may not be a critical
component.
Another very important point that was stated was: How do you make
money on networks? Connect charges? Access charges, etc? Nuisance
service organizations and open-ended costs, blech. Notice all the
hostility towards the phone company? People will leap at alternatives
like private collections.
You get what you want, when you want and you (the service org) doesn't
have to figure out how to get everything on-line at all times (that
is, analogous to the reason that VCRs sell better than attempts at
Pay-per-view cable services.)
There's far more money (they claim) to be made in selling everyone
their own copies of the stuff and that's where the "smart" money is
going.
Remember, this is not so much an issue of what is possible (eg.
discussing suitably high-speed network technology) but where the MONEY
is going to go for R&D. And there is some indication that it prefers
the idea of publishing and sales to building service organizations.
There's a very heavy socio-economic aspect here that cannot be
overlooked.
-Barry Shein, Boston University
Wayne McGuire
system in the sense of storing the full text of all the documents in
the world, but it should be a supreme index of indexes--a clearinghouse
of pointers to pointers to pointers ad infinitum to all the information
chunks and information chunk types (including the full text of
documents and document elements) on all the networks in the world. An
analogy might be the Harvard Union Catalog, which stores easily
accessible pointers to all the works in the many libraries in the
Harvard library network. But a GHA would be much more powerful than,
say, the HUC, since it would embody the best knowledge of the best
experts in the world about the conceptual structures of their
domains.
I am not being cynical about privacy, merely realistic. Regarding
"intimate habits of mind": certainly one's banking and telephone
records, which chronicle in exquisite detail what one buys and with
whom one communicates, provide an in-depth psychological profile to
the eye of an acute analyst. Holland and other nations may be passing
laws to restrict access to these records in the usual case, but the
security and intelligence establishments of most of these countries can
find loopholes and exceptions in these laws through which to drive
fleets of Mack trucks.
As a general rule, whatever flows through a telecommunications
channel should not be considered private. James Bamford in _The Puzzle
Palace_ outlines the methods of the NSA for intercepting and analyzing
global telecommunications. England's Government Communications
Headquarters and the Soviet Union's KGB (or the Soviet equivalent to
the NSA) are engaged in the same activities. They don't capture
everything, but they get enough. They probably have as much regard for
the spirit and letter of the public privacy laws as do drivers on the
Massachusetts Turnpike for the 55 mph speed limit.
As far as protecting your privacy from the general public, I assume
that with a global hypermedia advisor one could choose how much of
one's profile to make public, or one could choose not to interact with
the system at all.
Current online database vendors like Dialog and Mead Data Central are
already foreshadowings (albeit extremely primitive) of a GHA. It is
interesting to recall that under the reign of John Poindexter, of
Irangate fame, the NSC was seeking to gain legal access to the records
of these companies, which store sensitive information about the search
targets and patterns of their users. As I recall, the NSC was denied
legal access by Congress, but then there is always the problem of
illegal access, which is relatively trivial to accomplish wholesale by
intercepting telecommunications.
Wayne
John Gilmore
> It is
> interesting to recall that under the reign of John Poindexter, of
> Irangate fame, the NSC was seeking to gain legal access to the records
> of these companies, which store sensitive information about the search
> targets and patterns of their users. As I recall, the NSC was denied
> legal access by Congress, but then there is always the problem of
I'd appreciate a pointer to "NSC was denied legal access by Congress".
I didn't follow the Irangate hearings, but the old boogaboo Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, which Congress definitely passed, provides
ways for medium level bureaucrats in government (federal & local) to
force a computer service bureau to turn over everything they have on an
individual customer (including all that customer's private files)
without telling the customer for many months. They can also force the
service bureau to make a special backup of that user's files in case
the user gets wind of the investigation and erases them. I would
hope that any service bureau that wants to keep MY business would refuse
the order and force a court to decide its constitutionality, but it's
hard to tell how many times this power has been used, with which service
bureaus, and against whom.
On the contrary, I think Congress handed NSC what they want on a silver
platter.