From sex to Nazis, Germany's state prosecutors are finding that there's all sorts of fun to be had with the Internet. In January prosecutors in Munich scared Compuserve into blocking access to sex-related Usenet sites; in February their colleagues in Mannheim told Compuserve and T-Online, Deutsche Telekom's online subsidiary, to do something about Nazi nastiness. Predictably, it hasn't worked. The sorry business offers a telling demonstration of the right way and the wrong way to handle extremism on the Internet.
At the middle of all the fuss is German-Canadian "human rights activist" Ernst Zündel. Zündel's unusual brand of human rights activism consists of denying that the Nazi holocaust ever took place - a denial explained in great depth on his Web site. Zündel is the most vocal of a network of Holocaust "revisionists" who, funnily enough, are for the most part explicitly anti-Semitic and linked to neo-Nazis.
In Germany, denying the Holocaust is a criminal offence; hence the prosecutors' interest in the "Zündelsite". As a result of their action, T-Online's one million subscribers found themselves unable to access any of the 1,400 sites on Webcom, the Californian Internet service provider which houses the Zündelsite. Compuserve has been pressured to follow suit, but at the time this article went to press it had not done so.
The Mannheim action was supported by Nazi-watchers at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre on the basis that Germany's legal limitations on "hate speech" should be en- forced on the Net. The Wiesenthal Centre has also lobbied US federal authorities to gain support for censorship of "racism and terrorism" online. On its Web site, the Wiesenthal centre is asking visitors for examples of hate speech and conducting a survey into the most effective Net strategies.
Whatever the effective means may be, those used by the Mannheim prosecutors weren't among them. Within a couple of days of their action, mirrors of the Zündelsite had sprung up on a number of major American academic servers, usually identified by the string "Not_By_Me_Not_My_Views". This was, on the whole, not the work of Nazis, but of free-speech activists. Richard Graves, who put up one of the Web sites, speaks for many when he says, "If Zündel and his like cannot be heard, they cannot be debunked, and they can more easily spread false conspiracy theories."
As a result, Zündel has received enormous media exposure in Canada and Germany. Other "revisionist" sites are reporting increased traffic. And Zündel can now portray himself as a victim of illiberal repression - a tactic the revisionists have often used in the past. These are hardly the results that his opponents would have wished for.
Asked whether the Mannheim action was counterproductive, the Wiesenthal Centre's rabbi, Abraham Cooper, is unabashed. "Absolutely not. The effect was to expose the fact that people are using this technology to promote bigotry. I'd rather risk giving Zündel short-term celebrity than letting him be and taking the attitude 'let the buyer beware'."
Not all those struggling against Net Nazis agree. A group called Nizkor has been waging a Net war against Zündel for years, issuing point-by-point rebuttals of his statements. Rather than trying to shut Zündel off from the world, Nizkor has linked its pages to his - and so, to maintain his stance as a champion of free speech, Zündel has had to post a Nizkor statement on his page and link his site to Nizkor's rebuttals.
Nizkor director Ken McVay says the organisation is "dedicated to providing the truth with regard to history. We are convinced that the public is quite capable of considering the convergence of evidence with regard to historical events, and making up their minds, without help from some well-meaning Big Brother." McVay is worried by the Mannheim action and "vigorously opposed" to the Wiesenthal Centre's lobbying for governmental censorship.
Cooper is unconvinced, saying that Nizkor's tactics only work when a real-time debate is taking place. He remains adamant that the Internet should be subject to the same laws as terrestrial publishing - thus avoiding the question of whether such censorship is productive, practical, or even possible, and ignoring the possibility that evil should be washed away in a free flow of information, rather than left to fester in shut-off pools.
"'Once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."Although not every rocket engineer has the ethical insouciance Tom Lehrer mocked in "von Braun", most tend to have the same sort of attitude towards what comes down. You see it every time you watch a rocket on television, jettisoning one huge stage after another to put a relatively tiny payload into orbit. Such primitive attempts at space travel generate a lot of waste. But by and large, it's not the waste that comes down that's the problem - it's the waste that stays up.
Until recently, no one gave a damn about the bits and pieces of old rocket and satellite cluttering up orbital space. Space is pretty empty, after all, and the problem, such as it was, would be a long time getting serious. Now researchers are not so sure. They have realised that the situation could get a lot worse quite quickly, all on its own.
The more junk there is, the more likely one piece is to hit another, creating yet more junk. And each time that happens, it makes further junk-junk collisions more likely. Hence the risk of a runaway chain reaction - one which could produce an asteroid belt of rubbish around the world and make space missions and satellite launches an increasingly risky business. There are 7,500 man-made objects currently being tracked in earth orbit. They range from an entire Saturn IVB upper stage (which narrowly missed the space shuttle Discovery in 1992) to wing nuts and at least one lens cap. Only 5% of them are operational spacecraft; the rest are dead satellites and bits of rocket in various stages of disintegration. And they are most certainly not biodegradable; as Joel Primack of the University of California, Santa Cruz, points out, "Space is the most fragile environment that exists, because it has the least ability to repair itself." Anything above the atmosphere is going to stay there for a very long time.
With bureaucratic delicacy, the European Space Agency speaks of the "non-negligible operational risk" of a "collision between a catalogue object [read: piece of junk] and an operational space craft in a representative target orbit." How non-negligible? The ESA puts it at something on the order of 1:100,000, an "acceptable figure". That's certainly acceptable compared to the chances of launch failure, which are somewhere between one in twelve and one in fifty. But catalogue figures may not give a fair account of the real situation now, let alone after some putative chain reaction. There are millions of pieces of orbital junk less than one centimetre in size. Items as small as a "submillimetre fleck", something like a paint chip, can cause signifi- cant damage - witness the 13 space-shuttle windscreens that have had to be replaced.
Given that most of us aren't intending to make non-essential space journeys in the near future, why should we care? The satellites that provide television and phone services are in high orbits, far above most of the junk. But various companies are looking at low orbits as an alternative, especially for mobile phone services.
Motorola's Iridium project requires 66 satellites in low orbit. A bunch of similar systems are under development, and some are much more spectacular. Teledesic - in which Bill Gates and Craig McCaw, the American cellphone pioneer, have invested - talks of 840 satellites, something Richard Tremayne-Smith, director of the British National Space Centre, calls "sheer lunacy".
A lot more activity in low orbit could mean a lot more junk. There are ways to minimise the junk produced, and the spacefaring nations (as countries with big rockets like to be called) mostly say they are keen to apply them. But the Chinese, currently the worst offenders, have yet to join the international working committee on the debris problem. And since satellites do eventually fail, some increase in junk is unavoidable - if only because taking up into space enough fuel to bring a dead satellite back to a fiery funeral in the atmosphere would be extremely expensive.
If legislation is not enough, then there are two other alternatives: clean things up, or live with the dirt. At the moment, a thorough clean-up operation would be technically difficult and politically all but impossible. Any way of getting rid of junk - whether it be fancy lasers or giant soggy sponges - is also a way of getting rid of satellites, and satellites are a vital, hard-to-protect part of a country's military wherewithal. If space-junk clearance means a proliferation of anti-satellite weapons, it's not about to happen. Which leaves living with the junk as the only solution: keep space flight as neat and tidy as possible, and hope the catastrophic chain reaction doesn't happen. The one advantage is that satellites in low earth orbit will be cheap - and thus replaceable - should nasty things start to happen. But the same cannot be said of the planned international space station, which will cost tens of billions of dollars and contain eight fragile human lives.
- Hari Kunzru
What should writers do on the Web? Channel, an online arts forum, has sent four to find out. Brookside and EastEnders script-writer Alan McDonald has written pious paeans to Washandgo, goddess of hair products, Mammaria, goddess of the tabloids and others of their ilk, which he invites you to help complete via email.Poet Mike Blackburn's work The Last of Harry is a sort of combo poem, prose piece, biography and bulletin board. It makes good use of hypertext - keywords in poems about Harry link to events in his life. Aaron Williamson brings real passion to the Internet. Being profoundly deaf, his work has always centred on the issue of communication. His online piece, What Breathing Looks Like, is a partially randomised hypertext which is "survey, graffiti board, space-junk virtual cargo, E.T. bait, or literary work", depending on how you look at it.
Meanwhile, Caribbean novelist Earl Lovelace's response to the challenge is as valid as that of any of the others: he proclaims a horror of technology and hasn't written a word. "It's not that I'm a Luddite," he insists. "I just haven't had time. I've been finishing my latest book."
- Robert Nurden
It is odd how apparently disparate ideas can have the same shape. Take Plato's theory of ideal objects and Viewpoint DataLabs' business strategy. Plato thought that each particular example of an object was an imperfect copy of an ideal object created by God, realised on earth by a mystical demiurge. Viewpoint DataLabs thinks that each particular example of a 3D object will be a perfect copy of one made by them, realised by a computer. Based in Orem, Utah, the company has both the largest and the fastest growing catalogue of 3D datasets in the world: currently there are over 5,000 objects, and an average of 400 new ones are created each month.Now with branches in London, Tokyo and Paris, Viewpoint is clearly set on becoming something big on the basis of dominance in a fast-growing market. What it sells is imagery; 3D models of more or less whatever you want. Its models and datasets have appeared on the BBC's Panorama, in the film Batman Forever and as part of the Pet Shop Boys' Liberation video. Since no one else is doing anything remotely similar on the same scale, the company is free simply to follow what's hot in terms of which objects to digitise next. As Wright says, "When it's the World Cup we sell footballs; when it's Jurassic Park we sell dinosaurs."
Obsessed with maps and model-making since childhood, Wright's early years were spent digitising classified military visualisations, digitised world maps, detailed anatomical studies for medical purposes and a bewildering array of random objects such as pickles or pizzas. By the time CD-ROM was invented, the Viewpoint Catalogue was the largest archive of 3D data in the world.
And staying the biggest is what matters. The company has abandoned a plausibly attractive diversification into motion capture on the basis that such a move would have made it much more service-oriented, and taken it away from its roots as a raw data broker. The company plans to expand in this sphere, offering new types of data such as details of movement or, perhaps, texture. Tailoring the data to specific markets is also potentially lucrative. Most Viewpoint datasets are far more detailed than is necessary for PCs, so a simplified set of "objects created to meet the specific requirements of the desktop and design markets" has already been launched in the US; formal announcements of product launches in the UK are expected soon.
All Viewpoint has to do is sit and wait for new platforms to emerge that are capable of supporting their data, and then get it there in a suitable form. As long as formatting is not too hard, Viewpoint can remain aloof from the vagaries of the volatile world of new platforms, content in the knowledge that, when the dust clears, Viewpoint will have pickles and pizzas ready for the winners. Demiurges come and go; the ideal realm remains. That, at least, is the Platonic plan.
- Wayne Myers
Bored with the everyday grind of solving problems too com-plex for the human mind to com-prehend, neural nets are kicking off their shoes and turning up the volume. The Computer Music Research Group at Cardiff University is developing neural netswith the beginnings of an understanding of music.
Among their programs, the "neural foot-tapper" is the most appreciative listener. When fed with a sequence of notes, it determines the strong beats from the notes' onsets and emits a pulse on each, successfully predicting expressive human responses - tappings, nods and the like - to a variety of rhythmic patterns. The aim, says developer Simon Roberts, is a machine which could listen with enough intelligence to "automatically transcribe live musical performances and synchronise instruments and editing devices."
Another net has cracked the interpretation of pitch; harder than it sounds, given the fact that different musical instruments can produce very different spectral patterns. And Danny Alexander and Neil Forrester - whose first 15 minutes of fame came among the Notting Hill flatmates filmed for MTV's The Real World - have trained another neural net, Autobach, to produce string quartets. Autobach is connected to the Waterfowl homepage. If you ask nicely it will email you a personalised fugue.
- James Flint
February 8th was a dark day for the etherworld - so dark, in fact, that the Netizens dubbed it Black Thursday. After months of ominous and demagogic debate, Bill Clinton had signed into law a sweeping telecommunications-reform bill that included draconian measures for cleansing the Net of "indecent" speech. Civil libertarians, First Amendment junkies and most of the digerati were incensed. Web sites across America joined together in a virtual protest: for part of Black Thursday, they went black, too.In the world of presidential politics, however, February 8th wasn't dark at all. It was a brilliant, sunny day in Iowa and the nine Republicans then chasing their party's nomination were heading into the final weekend before the state's crucial caucuses. As Bob Dole, Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes and the rest rambled round the frozen cornfields, they jabbered about almost every topic imaginable, from the budget to abortion to hog confinement; every topic, that is, except censorship of the Net.
If the protest on the Net had managed to come to light in Iowa, the response would have made the online community angrier still. Dole and Buchanan are ardent supporters of the Communications Decency Act (CDA); indeed, Dole was a pivotal figure in shaping the telecoms bill. The former governor of Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, said that he was against the Act, but not because he considered it absurd, censorious, or inimical to freedom. Instead, he argued that the Act's problem was that it tried to impose a Washington solution - "the ideas of a bunch of Senators about what's appropriate." Alexander thinks restrictions are fine as long as they are imposed by the states rather than the federal government.
What the candidates would have said, though, is not as important as the fact that they didn't have to say it. Cyber rights are a dead issue in the Republican primaries. If that seems odd for the party of Newt "laptops-for-the-homeless" Gingrich, bear in mind that the futurist wing of the party - the wing he represents - is still tiny and weak. The cultural conservatives and Christian-right activists who think the Net is synonymous with porno- graphy, on the other hand, are strong: too strong for Newt. After taking an apparently principled stand against the proposed CDA last summer, Gingrich folded in the face of pressure from the Christian Coalition, refusing to fight for his position when the final draft of the telecoms bill was being assembled.
The Democrats are no better. The seeds of the CDA were sown by Democratic Senator James Exon. Vice President Al Gore, Newt's rival for the top Cyberpol slot, acquiesced in a policy that seems screamingly unconstitutional. The courts may yet defend freedom of speech. But it doesn't look like any politicians will; not for a medium so marginal in their eyes that what passes for a massive protest on it can be safely ignored - or not even noticed.
- John Heilemann
If Tony Blair gets elected, will he put a privatising Anthea Turner in charge of telecommunications? Well, probably not. But his counterparts in theDanish Socialist party did. Frank Jensen is a baby-faced, blond 34-year-old who made his name as the host of a television bingo program. And now he's in charge of Denmark's ambitions to lead the European Union into the digital era.
Denmark is already pretty wired: 86% of its office workers and 33% of its households have computers. Under Jensen's Info Society 2000 plan, almost everything the government does will be in the next five years.
He's already overseen the privatisation of a large chunk of the state-owned telecoms provider, Tele-Danmark, and is pushing for deregulation throughout the EU.
"Information sharing will be more important than welfare payments in promoting equality in the 21st century," he says - and he's helping to make sure that the market provides it.
- Bill Echikson
It's a particularly bizarre feature of hallucinations that while on the one hand they are supposed to give access to your innermost thoughts and desires, on the other they always seem to be fairly generic; hippie culture depends for its very existence upon people being able to bond over the "shared" experience of getting high. The idea of shared transcendence is deep in the culture. Ever since Freud and Jung, would-be interpreters have recycled the idea that hallucinations either express your subconscious or some profound philosophical truth, such as the idea that we're all really descended from Venusian Mushroom Men. But do they?Dr Mario Markus of the Max Planck Institute in Dortmund says no. He sees the geometric patterns of which so many hallucinations are made as being due not to any shared cultural or personal experience, but rather to the way the human brain is wired up.
He claims that when the neurons in the brain act in concert - when lines of them flash on and off in sync, for example - they can give rise to stereotyped patterns of sensation. They can make people "see" spirals, tunnels and concentric circles: the building blocks of hallucination. He argues that the popularity of these patterns in the art and imagery of many times and culture reflects the fact that they are produced by spontaneous and meaningless activity in the brain's visual cortex.
How can stripes in the cortex produce all these different patterns? Where do the stripes come from? The answers lie in the nature of the connection between eye and brain, and in the way the brain works. Dr Markus thinks that, up to a point, the brain works like a "neural net" computer (not so odd, considering that such computers were inspired by studies of the brain). The novelty of his work is that he has applied to the neural nets a theory that Alan Turing - renowned code breaker, computer genius and persecuted homosexual - originally scribbled down on the back of an envelope. Turing's idea was that some chemical reactions could spontaneously create regular patterns - like the stripes of a zebra.
For Turing's mechanism to work you need a chemical reaction that produces something firey to fuel itself up and something smothery to damp itself down; and the fuel and the dampener have to percolate through the reaction at different speeds. The fuel spreads slowly; the dampener spreads quickly. So wherever a reaction starts, it will be driven on in a positive feedback loop, like a microphone picking up output from its own speaker in the hands of Jimi Hendrix. At the same time, the dampener stops any other reactions from starting nearby. The balance between self-encouragement and self-inhibition can give you regular dots, or stripes, or other patterns of reaction; you have spaces between your fingers because, at some stage of development, the formation of fingers in those spaces was inhibited.
Dr Markus reasons that these pattern-forming mechanisms need not exist only in chemical systems. Neural nets are formed through the distribution of inhibiting and activating potentials; it makes sense that Turing patterns should flourish within them. And if the patterns can exist in grossly simplified models of the brain, why not in the brain itself?
To test such an idea, you need a way to see into the brain - and the visual system provides you with one. If the pattern were to exist in the visual cortex, then it could be experienced as a vision. But because of the subtleties of the relationship between eye and brain (a translation from polar to Cartesian coordinates, among other things), the vision would not be of lines flashing on and off. The brain, interpreting the cortex's odd behaviour as coming from the outside world, would instead experience the sight of a pattern that would make the cortex light up in stripes.
In the case of a simple, striped Turing pattern, the final image depends on the orientation of the stripes. Horizontal cortical stripes would produce a visual pattern of concentric circles. Vertical stripes in the cortex would appear as lines converging to the centre. Diagonal stripes, on the other hand, would give rise to images of spirals. A more complex but still common type of Turing pattern, known as "labyrinthine" because of its maze-like appearance, would look very much like a tunnel receding into the distance. All of these are fairly common hallucinations.
To test his hypothesis, Dr Markus fed sketches that artist Gerald Oster drew while tripping on LSD into his computer. Then he transformed them to see what patterns in the cortex they corresponded to. Pleasingly, the spirals and circles were found to correspond exactly to the striped Turing patterns that Dr Markus had predicted. Dr Markus suggests that the tunnels to the underworld experienced by shamans during drumming rituals and the ascents into light often described after near-death experiences are both examples of these physio- logical "hallucinatory form constants". He thinks the appropriate patterns of neural activity are set up in the brain by the resonances from the drums in the first instance and by a lack of oxygen in the second. "The dramatic visionary episodes involving spiralling tunnels leading to the 'beyond' can be reduced to a dry numerical calculation of a physicochemical process," he maintains. Visions do not reveal the nature of the mind, as Freud thought, nor of the soul, as religions teach. If Dr Markus is right, they simply reveal the nature of the brain.
- James Flint
The Dayton peace talks briefly broke down over a minor point of topography. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic balked over the width of a strip of land that would run through Bosnian-Serb territory, insisting that the corridor could be no more than two miles across. US negotiators were convinced that such a narrow opening through the mountainous terrain was strategically indefensible. One of the negotiators sat the Serb leader down in front of a computer screen and, with the help of a mapping program called PowerScene, flew him off on a virtual reality tour of the area."As you can see," said the negotiator, as the computer swooped in over the area, "God didn't put the mountains two miles apart." Milosevic swallowed a large gulp of whisky and agreed to a strip five miles wide.
The first virtual reality program ever used in peace negotiations, PowerScene - developed by Cambridge Research Associates, McLean, Virginia - generates an amazing level ofdetail. One participant spotted his grandparents' house, while another flew past a stream where he used to fish as a boy.
The virtual geography was not perfect, though. "Stop the flight," Milosevic told Vic Kuchar of the Defence Mapping Agency at one point. "See that bridge there? It is gone. You bombed it away." Indeed, NATO pilots had bombed the bridge since the data had first been fed in And they had trained for those missions using PowerScene. The US government's love affair with this new technology will continue long after the peace takes effect. The two US$400,000 systems used during the negotiations have been shipped to Germany to train the US Army's First Armoured Division and to Tuzla to train other troops.
"We knew PowerScene was a remarkable tool to make war," says Jerry Moore, Cambridge Research Associates' director of new business. "It was gratify- ing to discover that it could help make peace as well."
- Ethan Watters
Is the British film industry about to place its chips on the new media roulette table? In January 1996, VTR, Portman Entertainment Group and Advanced Media Group plc (AMG) announced a multimillion pound corporate buyout which established a new UK-based multimedia player on the entertainment industry scene. AMG has acquired Portman New Media in a merger that could see the British film establishment finally try its hand at developing British digital products for both CD-ROM and online delivery.The new deal puts AMG's corporate value at £6 million - pretty good for a company that so far has produced only a CD-ROM of medical references and software to make maps from coastal surveys. The company's brief now is to de- velop interactive dramas for CD-ROM, based on a portfolio of film and TV properties. AMG's director, George Macaulay, argues, "The first generation of CD-ROMs were games and reference titles. The second generation will be about dramas and story-telling." It has several titles already in development - including an interactive version of a planned BBC treatment of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast to be directed by Cracker's Andy Wilson, and a collaboration with J. G. Ballard.
VTR, a leading film and TV post-production company based in Soho, acquired the Portman Entertainment Group in August 1995. One of the oldest and largest of the remaining UK studios, Portman produced An Awfully Big Adventure, starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant, and it's just completed development on a $35-million SF feature, The Virtual Hero.
Scots-born, with 20 year's experience in computing, AMG's Macaulay is quick to point out that developing and exploiting new media products is a perilous undertaking at best. Nonetheless, he aims to "establish a British corporate group, a global player in the new media marketplace." AMG plans to launch five new titles next year.
What the British film industry lacks in seven-figure budgets it might make up for by providing the kind of content-led, high-value productions the US has come to expect from across the pond. If so, Britain may be poised to build on its reputation for software talent with an arts agenda that could break new ground in interactive entertainment. But the digital entertainment industry is still in its infancy, with no clearly defin- ed market sector. The future of digital entertainment seems tenuous, but this doesn't faze Macaulay. "My clan's motto has always been dulce periculum: 'Danger is sweet'." A fitting slogan for a risky business.
- Igor Goldkind
Today clockwork brings to mind the watches of people more interested in expensive craftsmanship than accuracy and the lurching progress of wind-up toys. It's quite a comedown for the technology upon which the trade of great sea-faring empires was once founded. But the clockwork counter-revolution is on its way.British inventor Trevor Baylis has adapted the traditional clockwork mechanism to get it to generate electricity. The result, the Baylis Generator, can be used to produce a bit of electricity anywhere you need it: in a radio, for example. Baylis's BayGen Freeplay clockwork radio, his best known invention, plays for 40 minutes on 20 seconds' winding, providing 50 milliamps at 3 volts. "You're carrying your battery around with you - it's in your arm," he says.
The Freeplay is aimed at markets where the cost of batteries is prohibitive for a lot of people. In principle, a Freeplay could replace the equivalent of US$150 to $250 per year in (unaffordable) battery costs for someone in a country like Tanzania. This has led to enthusiasm all over Africa. Nelson Mandela described the Free-play as "a fantastic achievement". Uganda has expressed interest in 50,000 radios for use in an AIDS-awareness project.
This is not the first time that clockwork ingenuity has spread across the world. In 1714 the British Government's Board of Longitude announced that it would award a series of prizes of up to £20,000 - an astronomical sum at the time - to any- one who could make an instrument to determine longitude at sea to within half a degree after a voyage of six weeks. It was noted at the time that the prize instantly became " the immediate and accessible target of every crank, swindler, fanatic, enthusiast and lunatic in or out of Bedlam." It also inspired John Harrison of Hull to build an accurate sea-going clock.
An accurate chronometer can be used to determine the longitude of a ship at sea. You tell the local time from the sun; you tell Greenwich time from the clock; you compare the two. If, that is, your clock keeps Greenwich time well. Harrison had already invented a clock with a bimetallic pendulum that kept good time despite changes in temperature. But stabilising a pendulum at sea proved impossible, so he turned his attention to small clockwork devices instead. Various innovations - most notably the ability to keep ticking while being wound - made the clocks superbly accurate. On two voyages to the West Indies, the Harrison Mark IV chronometer was found to be accurate to within five seconds upon its return - equivalent to a positional error of a 60th of a degree, or one nautical mile.
In 1763 Harrison was awarded a bit of the prize - £5,000 - on the basis that his design worked, but cost about £5,000 each to manufacture. It was 50 years before two rival and litigious London clockmakers - John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw - devised a simpler, cheaper design. The resulting mechanism was essentially identical to that found in chronometers up until the advent of quartz. The resultant revolution in navigation laid the found ation for the first great expansion of world trade.
Baylis's innovation is the addition to normal clockwork of a tensator - the kind of spring commonly found in self-retracting household tape measures. When traditional clockwork devices wind down they deliver the energy stored in their spring at a gradually diminishing rate. Clocks and watches have governing devices to dissipate excess energy and smooth out the output. By adding a tensator, though, Baylis created a system that maintains a steady output while not wasting energy. His radio combines a, tensator-based clockwork mechanism with modern radio electronics. "We've taken old technology and improved it, and new technology - and married them together," he says.
Baylis can see scores of other applications, including a torch and a clockwork power source for portable computers. He's reluctant to go into much detail about this idea, other than to explain that it would involve an on-screen thermometer-bar to show the user the amount of operating time remaining. And he's designing a combined shortwave receiver, emergency radio beacon and Global Positioning System locator, all powered by clockwork, for incorporation into lifeboats. In future, those in peril on the sea could once again find themselves reliant on clockwork to tell them where they are.
- Tom Standage
"John Pike should be lynched," the Usenet post began. Most of his critics are not quite so intemperate, but there is no doubt that Pike, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists , has been putting a lot of noses out of joint. Having spent more than a decade trying to keep tabs on spookery in orbit, Pike has now turned to cyberspace - with too much success for some.To help America's citizens understand its spooks, Pike and his colleagues at the FAS's Intelligence Reform Project have created "model homepages" for some of America's 13 intelligence agencies with outlines of their remits, their activities, their budgets and their often unacknowledged locations.
The locations come not from some monster hack or Deep Throat, but by putting together things that lots of people already know. Things like: the look and feel of secure installations; the existence of security establishments for which no one knows an address; and the knowledge people have of their local areas. Pike started posting addresses of buildings with no obvious owner and heavy duty government style security (retinal scanners and the like) on various news-groups under the heading "Check It Out!!"; in response, people offered opinions, informed or not, and came up with other such sites. To no one's great surprise, there are a lot of them scattered around the suburbs of Washington, DC; and people who live near one tend to know of its existence.
Local knowledge and a pool of intrigued spook watchers have revealed quite a lot of places that, while demonstrably not all that secret, are still not openly acknowledged. Among them are the temporary home of the National Reconnaissance Office (the spy satellite people) and some chunks of the National Security Agency (the code-breaking people) and the CIA.
The spooks' party line is that this is "not helpful"; just because Pike can do this doesn't strike the insiders as a good reason why he should do it. There are mutterings about abetting the enemy and "useful idiots". Pike is having none of it. He says any foreign intelligence agency worth its salt would be able to do the same, and that keeping up covers, classifications and compartmentalisation at levels unchanged since the Cold War is counterproductive by the security establishment's own terms, let alone in terms of public accountability.
- Oliver Morton
You know how it is. You've got a few thousand friends coming round on Saturday night, and you've no idea where to put them all. That's where Keith Still comes in. His award-winning Legion software uses a new fractal algorithm called Orchid to map the behaviour of up to a quarter of a million people in any space from a station to a stadium. "Our breakthrough came after months studying crowd patterns at Wembley," recalls Keith. "No matter what the crowd, we would see similar flow patterns." As well as crowd safety, Still sees applications for ecosystem modelling and data compression - problems to do with making things fit. Email Keith Still at 100414.3265@compuserve.com.- James Flint
A man, Neil Young assured his listeners, needs a MAID. Dan Wagner certainly did eleven years ago. A 21-year-old junior account executive at an advertising agency, he spent so many hours in the library searching for market research reports that he felt there must be a better way. The result was Market Analysis and Information Database, or MAID, a service which delivers business information to subscribers electronically, over telephone lines. It was a hit; the service it provides has made Wagner a multimillionaire. Now, to make life for its customers yet more convenient, MAID is making its information available over the Internet. Like Wagner's last attempt to make life simpler and easier, this little convenience will spawn a huge business upheaval. MAID's customers have been willing to pay through the nose for the privilege of searching for data electronically, instead of searching through reams of paper.Companies pay up to £6,000 a year for the right to dial into MAID's databases, containing over 100 million pages of information on companies and markets. Customers pay further charges for time spent searching. The company's value on the stock market has swelled to about £200 million, and Wagner, with 17 million shares, is currently worth about £35 million.
Wagner is now turning that business model upside down as he moves on to the Internet. Access to MAID's newly launched Web site costs about £150 a year. Called Profound, the new service contains information on about four million companies, quotes from major financial exchanges, economic data, markets studies, industry analyses and clippings from over 4,000 newspapers and magazines. Although some of the more esoteric market-research studies available on the site still cost as much as £3,000 to buy, MAID's Internet strategy will transform the basic economics of the company, and, with it, the online information industry. It won't be pretty, but Wagner believes the growth of the Web will divide the online club into two: those quick to embrace the new way of doing things, and the dead.
"If the traditional online hosts don't get onto the Internet within two years they won't be around for much longer," Wagner says. His decision to move MAID on to the Web will speed up the pace of change. "Even a year ago," Wagner says, "I'd have said 'Oh no, not the Internet!'. Proprietary services like ours have been around for years and have built up private networks - we justified them by saying they are much faster and safer."
Many of Wagner's rivals still resist the wave of change - or at least try to. American online-information providers like Lexus (for legal data) and Nexus (for press clippings) are only slowly moving Webwards. FT PROFILE, a business-information provider which belongs to the Financial Times, is not convinced that the Web is secure. "We want to strike the balance between providing what the users want and looking after the interests of our data providers," says Geoff Barnes, UK sales and marketing director. "We have to make sure the safety nets are in place to protect their copyright." He says FT PROFILE might one day migrate to the Net, but only when the balance of power has shifted from the desktop to the network. Given that the Internet exists to give power to the desktop, there could be a long wait.
Wagner, by contrast, reckons most of his customers are ready now. He says that the deciding moment came in early 1995 when his company was testing the market for new products. "Our salesmen came back and said, 'People are asking if we have Internet access.' The point is that people's perception of online is the Internet now, and there is no way companies like us can overcome the market's view."
Netscape, whose browsers MAID uses to provide access to its data, has done much to create this change of attitude. Nearly all Web users have Netscape, so it offers MAID an interface to its data which new customers can use immediately - without having to learn any of the proprietary commands of a dial-up service. And most business users now perceive Netscape's encryption to be secure.
MAID will maintain its dial-up services to cater to traditionalists and the deeply paranoid. And in the few areas where dial-up can still offer advantages over the Internet, MAID will try to tap them. It is, for example, offering Adobe Acrobat documents over its dial-up Profound service, so newsletters can be reproduced exactly as they appear in print, and a business news digest, updated hourly from agency reports, can look like a newspaper. On the Web, by contrast, formatting of documents is handled by the browser - which gives the user more control over how a document looks, and the designer correspondingly less. Eventually, however, there seems no reason why Acrobat files could not be made available on the Net.
The 40 million or so people on the Net are used to shopping around for data, and much good information is already available for free. Unlike dial-up information providers, which hold customers captive so long as they are online, those on the Internet have to learn to package their wares to make their value immediately apparent. And because the Web's bargain hunters are unlikely to pay a hefty subscription fee just to access an online database, online-information service providers will have to develop business models that allow them to profit from selling bits of data individually. On MAID's Web site, data costs any-thing from a few pence for a stock quote to several thousand pounds for an in-depth market study.
By moving fast, Wagner hopes to be the first to come to grips with the new rules of doing business as an information supermarket. If he learns well, he could gain a grip on his customers far more powerful than that enjoyed by his subscription-charging, dial-up rivals. Instead of locking them in economically and technically, he will have created a habit of mind. MAID could become the brand info-hunters most trust; it could also define the way the business-information business works on the Internet. It won't be easy, but Wagner seems to have realised what most of his rivals are trying hard to deny. Accepting the Internet isn't enough; only by taking the lead in redefining it do MAID and its ilk have a hope of long-term prosperity.
As David Worlock, a consultant who runs London-based Electronic Publishing Services, points out, MAID has few advantages in the new world of the Internet beyond its reputation for convenience. "MAID is a warehouse operation," he says. "It doesn't own any of the information." If the companies that currently provide MAID with its material decide to make them available directly on the Net, "we will be able to send agents out on the Web to look for it. There will no longer be any need for an integrator." Ultimately, Worlock reckons that the owners of information will take over from businesses like MAID. "If I were him, I would have a plan to sell the company very expensively to one of the media groups in three years time," he says. "He will be 35 by then - and he could have £50 million in the bank."
- David Bowen