In early May, French habitués of Internet news-groups had time to wonder whether the post office wasn't after all a more reliable medium. Following a raid on two Paris-based Internet service providers (ISPs), the other French ISPs called for a cyberspace solidarity strike on May 9th, collectively turning off 7,000 newsgroups for a week as a way of asking that the legal status of ISPs be "clarified". Thus did the French netizenry sit in unconnectedness, convinced that the battle for control of the Internet in France had been declared. And so it had - an as-yet inconclusive but potentially crucial battle in the European Internet wars.
In France, as in most of the world, the question seems to be an old chestnut: are the ISPs common carriers, broadcasters, or publishers? Answering that determines whether they are responsible for the content they make available - or don't. The peculiar Gallic wrinkle is that French law has already settled this issue, up to a point, for the Minitel system. And to your average fonctionnaire the Internet is a sort of less-developed, foreign cousin of Minitel. So the French want those broadcasting rules that apply to Minitel to apply to the Net, or at least the Web, as well. And they want that written into European law.
May's Internet strike followed a police raid on the premises of well-established ISPs FranceNet and World-Net; the Gendarmerie Research squad unbolted the firms' hard disks and took them away for examination. The next day, the two managing directors were arrested and charged with disseminating pornographic pictures of minors (alt.sex.pedophilia et alia multa horrores), a crime that packs a maximum of three years behind bars.
The files in question were downloaded with many others to the ISPs' hard disks to ease customers' access. Other copies exist at various sites, so the gendarmerie could equally well have raided the servers of, say, the Jussieu campus of the University of Paris, which runs the gateway for most of the newsgroups entering France - or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for that matter, where the files would be available worldwide at the click of a mouse, even if they were wiped off every computer in France.
The strike ended without all that much of the promised clarification. François Fillon, the telecoms minister, did say that the gendarmes had misinterpreted things, which helped ease the tension. But before the French can achieve a clear interpretation, they still have a lot of arguing to do.
The French authorities are so used to seeing the Cartesian coordinates of the Penal Code fix the scope of responsibilities to the nearest pixel that they feel deeply uneasy about a status-free Internet leaving choice to individual responsibility. There is much talk of a "vide juridique" - the insidious idea of an abhorrent vacuum in the French legal machinery - with the corollary that more laws are needed to tame the beast.
On the contrary, France already has more than enough legislation on matters digital: broadcasting laws, anti-cryptography laws, online service supplier laws, anti-software piracy laws and information secrecy laws. As Meryem Marzouki, president of the new but active AUI (Association of Internet Users), says, "What is needed is not more laws, but a broader understanding of the issues."
The most important part of the broadening involves convincing the authorities that the Internet is not Minitel. The 20,000 or so Minitel service providers are governed by a 1986 broadcasting law that defines "audio-visual communication" as "producing signs, signals, writing, images, sounds and messages which are not private correspondence available to the public by telecommunications." This means that any content they publish can be monitored by the Conseil Superieur de l'Audiovisuel (CSA), France's broadcasting authority. The CSA is thought to nurture ambitions to extend its supervisory sway over France's Internet business. Fillon's upcoming bill on the information superhighway asserts, "the measures of the 1986 law give the CSA full competence over all broadcast communication services on any media whatsoever."
Though the CSA has no powers to sanction infractions of broadcasting law, it does seem interested in having the power at least to monitor Web pages (the closest analogy to Minitel services) for content, and not just locally. The French worked hard behind the scenes in Brussels to have the EU's "Television without Frontiers" directive classify Web pages as broadcast.
In theory, this definition could then be used to try to require Web pages available in France (or any other EU member) to contain a set minimum percentage of locally-originated, French content.
Despite the current shadow-play of vested interests and backward-looking bureaucrats, it would be more in the spirit of the Internet - and parts of French history - to turn the whole ISP issue on its head and start thinking about Internet rights and responsibilities from the base up. The AUI's Meryem Marzouki believes that "there is no need to postulate some special legal status for ISPs or to turn the Internet as a whole into a special regime." What is required, she suggests, "is for ISPs to write their contracts with their customers carefully so that they are protected against arbitrary commando actions from irate pressure groups and the police." Aux armes, netoyens!
Despite Hollywood blockbusters, high-paying security consultancies and celebrity status, it seems hackers are not as respectable as we thought. A British hackers' conference called "http://www.access.org.uk/">Access All Areas" was to have been held at London's City University on July 6th and 7th, but university administrators have pulled the plug on the event.Access All Areas kicked off successfully last year in London with about 300 delegates. Organisers had hoped for a similar level of support this time around. Months ago they decided on City University as the venue, paid their money and signed their contracts. Now, though, the university has decided its own areas are not to be accessed. Why ?
The university first said that the conference would break its entertainment licence. Then, on reflection, it decided that the real reason was that "the nature of the event and its management do not meet our usual and reasonable expectations and standards."
When conference organisers cried foul, a final letter from the university explained that the event carried "an (unacceptably high) level of commercial and operational risk." It seems the university's IT people advised Deputy Secretary Robert Smith that its network and computers would be at grave risk from hundreds of marauding adolescents. He then instructed the facilities director to cancel the contract.
In fact, the conference had already organised for an external ISDN line, thus completely bypassing the university's internal network. Conference organiser Simon Gardner described the decision as "unethical, ill-founded, irrational and bloody minded." At the time of writing, Access All Areas is still homeless.
The university is unrepentant. Although legal advice indicates the contract is iron-clad in Gardner's favour, the university appears to have made a "strategic" decision to brave a law suit. Meanwhile, in the name of computer security, it has managed to infuriate a large number of hackers. Way to go.
- Simon Davies
The educational establishment has historically been reluctant to accept that anything other than text can be the carrier of knowledge. So the Knowledge Gallery project, recently announced by Secretary of State for education Gillian Shepherd, is both a pleasant surprise and a sign of the times.The Gallery, a collaboration between higher education and industry, aims to become the world's largest online database of digital images. It will be filled with material taken from substantial academic and corporate holdings, and will provide exclusive, password-protected service to British universities and colleges.
The initiative is a recognition that visuals are set to increase in educational importance. Malcolm Read, the secretary of the Joint Information Systems Committee - which administrates the SuperJANET network over which the images will be delivered - paints a picture of a future where students put together multimedia presentations using the Knowledge Gallery's resources, rather than write essays. All a long way from blackboards and desks with lift-up lids.
- Hari Kunzru
In a country already seemingly saturated with television, the fastest-selling consumer product ever is a box that gives you even more. Decoders for the DirecTV digital service in America are selling at the extraordinary rate of 85,000 a month, despite a $600 price tag and nearly ubiquitous cable. Various companies are salivating over the possibility of something similar happening in Europe, where digital TV is already taking its first steps and looks like breaking into a run with unseemly speed. There could be 3,000 TV channels widely available in Europe within three years - by which time the whole idea of a television channel will have changed almost beyond recognition.Digital television broadcast by satellite offers abundance - DirecTV offers 175 channels - and quality. The systems provide pictures as good as a laser disc's, with the sound quality of a CD. New services are made possible by encryption, which allows easy pay-per-view, and channel number, which allows the same film to air every ten minutes (it's known inelegantly in the trade as "near-video-on-demand").
Europe's first digital service was launched in Italy early this spring by Telepiú, closely followed by French pay-TV company Canal Plus which launched a 20-channel service in April. BSkyB is waiting until the water has been tested, but the UK can expect similar services and technology by the end of 1997 at the latest. And this is only the beginning. Add digital terrestrial services to half a dozen high-capacity satellite schemes and there are thousands of new channels on the way.
Some think that TV will become like FM radio with pictures; some think that it will be dominated by a few well-known brands and that all notions of quality will go out of the window; still others think that the best parallel will be the publishing world, and that watching TV will be like visiting a bookshop. But the most convincing scenario is that watching TV will be like surfing the Web, choosing content with as much eclecticism as the technology allows. If that is so, then the killer app is not a channel, or a brand, or a string of programming, but a browser - a TV version of Netscape.
This is the role of the Electronic Programme Guide, or EPG. The StarSight EPG already available in America tells you what you are watching, what else is on and what will be on. It does not just tell you about channels; it also groups programmes in other ways. You can ask it about news, or sport, or films, and it will offer you the options, working with information encoded in the vertical blanking band of the television signal. With Netscape's ballistic trajectory fresh in their minds, Time Warner, Viacom/Blockbuster and TCI are all busy developing their own EPGs. In Europe, the field is being led by Netherlands-based TV conglomerate NetHold, which has devel- oped a Windows-style EPG that allows the user to zoom in visually in order to retrieve various levels of programming information.
According to Mark Cullen, assistant managing director at the Mirror Group, it is these EPGs that will create the new media culture. "The good guides are going to take away the channels," he says. "Already, people don't watch TV in a linear way. Brand will remain important - in fact will probably grow in importance because of the massive choice - but channel will disappear. Viewers will become far more promiscuous."
People won't be able to put out a TV show quite as easily as they can knock up a Web page, but as the prices of equipment continue to fall we will see more and more independent programming. Cullen thinks it's all up for grabs. "Technology is pushing production costs down all the time. The new digicams are twice the quality of the old ones and half the price. In the future, people will become the major cost. Studios will become less relevant. There's a lot of talented people out there with good ideas who won't let traditional hierarchies stand in their way."
And though it's a fair bet that only a minority will try to become TV producers, the EPGs will make everyone into a programmer - and not necessarily just in his own home. In the two-way world of interactive media, EPGs can do more than just tell viewers what broadcasters are sending out - they could also tell broadcasters what viewers would like to see. Some broadcasters might find it worthwhile to change their schedules on the fly to cater to viewers' desires. It may not be the Net; Jerry Glover, managing director of Granada Sky Broadcasting, argues that "there will always be a core group of channels in the traditional sense, those that are supported by a combination of advertising and subscription." But it won't be television, either.
- James Flint
While some Americans rush to embrace ever more channels, others are turning away from their television sets. Computer screens, it seems, are coming between them and their TVs.Odyssey, a US market-research firm, has been asking Americans what they've been watching. About 11% are now online from home - a third of the 35% of American households with computers. Use, as well as access, is growing quickly; today, computer owners spend a weekly average of over 11 hours at their screens, compared to 8.5 hours in July 1995. And this activity is eating into people's satisfaction with TV as well as into their viewing time.
Only 15% of those online said they could usually find something on TV they were happy to watch, as opposed to 31% of US households overall. Nearly two-thirds of online households took time away from watching TV to use a computer, as opposed to only a third of off-line home computer owners.
But intriguingly, while some would willingly give up their TVs altogether, most don't want to give up either of their screens. Yet....
- John Browning
"The Internet," said the man in the pin-striped suit, "may well be the biggest thing to happen to mankind since the Creation." Nothing new there, except that the speaker was David Shaw MP, the member for Dover. He was speaking at "The Challenge of Cyberspace", a Tory party event launching science and technology minister Ian Taylor's pamphlet on the digital revolution. The times they are indeed a-changin'.At last year's Labour Party conference, the people's party looked like a gang of teenage Finnish cypherpunks compared to the Tories, whose own conference demonstrated the party's bemused incomprehension of the Internet. But 1996 has delivered the CyberTory, in the shape of Shaw, Taylor and a few others.
Taylor's recently published pamphlet, called Net-Working, exhorts true-blue Britons to gird their loins to face "the challenge of the superhighways"; in it, Taylor shows himself to be well-informed about the issues he faces as technology minister. "An imposed regulatory scheme," writes Taylor, "is not likely to solve all our problems. It could also hamper the emergence of new and innovative companies and services."
There is still a long way to go. A lot of the "Challenge of Cyberspace" meeting was spent fending off chinless prospective candidates who were hoping to earn brownie points by denouncing Net porn. And as Shaw points out, in some constituencies the number of people with a Net connection approaches the size of the Conservative majority. But it's just possible that, in the coming election, the Internet will be more than just a focus for moral panic and corporate handouts.
- Hari Kunzru
Vladimir Prosikhin has come a long way in the four years since he imported his first modem. As president of St Petersburg-based Lanck Group - distributor of Acer computers, components and telecoms supplies, and volume exporter of night-vision devices - Prosikhin has seen sales shoot from a few thousand dollars in 1992 to US$27 million (£18 million) in 1995. This year he expects $54 million, despite a slow market in the run-up to the June presidential elections. Eventually he hopes to cover his country with retail computer stores.Currently there are 50 Lanck distributorships in five Russian cities. But as the economy grows, the idea is to put up Lanck retail stores across this vast country, from Scandinavia to the Far East. Prosikhin is confident of the market. "In Russia, people with a higher educational level tend to buy a PC before a car when they start earning money, and we clearly see a growing middle class."
At first Prosikhin planned to expand with a classic franchising strategy like that of Dunkin' Donuts, but in the end he decided that it would be impossible to maintain standards. So he came up with a Russian variation. On the surface, it's like franchising - with the company name, service and products roughly uniform in each store.
But whereas a franchise is locally owned, Lanck will hold substantial ownership of each store and will serve as its main supplier.
Russia has never had a mass retailer of anything, let alone computers. In trying to change that, Prosikhin faces a fair few obstacles, notably corrup-tion, organised crime, brutal taxes, changing legislation and a relatively small PC market, valued at $1.12 billion in a 1995 report by Paris-based BIS Strategic Decisions. The report predicted 20% growth in 1996 - but if the communist candidate wins in the elections, the stripling retail market could be badly hurt.
So far, though, Lanck has managed to thrive despite the obstacles, perhaps because, not having risen through shady real-estate deals or brute force, it is something of an anomaly in Russia. Lanck's beginnings were more in the style of a humble American start-up. In 1992, Prosikhin, a PhD in optical and plasma physics at St Petersburg University, looked around and saw that St Petersburg needed modems.
His wife happened to be in the US, so he asked her to buy 40 modems and send them to Russia. He sold them, sent the money back to her in the US and she sent him 80 more. Two weeks later he sold those, sent the money back to her and she re-supplied him with 150. With the profits from these, he rented a small retail space, called his friends to get some modest computer equipment to sell on a consignment basis, and thus established Lanck. If the business - and the economy - stay healthy, the company should be opening its first pilot "Superstore" in Moscow this September.
Drew Wilson
The barman at the Eagle was abrupt. "They don't look old enough to be at no university to me, and I ain't serving 'em." He had a point. Cambridge undergraduates Adam Twiss and Damian Reeves may be aged 20 and 22 respectively, but in the fine tradition of computer science students worldwide, neither looks a day over 17.The Web server software they've written looks more impressive. According to their own benchmarking, the duo's Zeus software (www.zeus.co.uk) is the fastest on the block, well ahead of the latest versions of Netscape Commerce Server, the Apache HTTP server and Open Market's Web Server. Independent benchmarking conducted by Sun Microsystems backs up their claims. The likes of Pipex, Levi's, Reebok and Berlitz are already using Zeus to run their busiest sites, and Ultraseek (www.ultraseek.com), the next incarnation of the Infoseek search engine (the second busiest site on the Web), will probably be run off a Zeus server.
At the start of 1995, the two friends discovered that their rooms in Churchill College came equipped with 10Mb Ethernet connections. That's serious bandwidth. So the pair set about creating a Web site using their own bedroom PCs as servers. The site was typically adolescent in its content, although Adam insists that "it was all strictly sub-Playboy stuff." Within hours of posting the URL on alt.pictures.binaries.erotica, the site was flooded with requests. The NCSA server software they were using simply couldn't cope with the number of simultaneous requests from the testosterone-raddled throng. "We had a look at the source code for NCSA's server, and it was a mess. So we decided to write our own, and to make sure that ours was properly multi-threaded." Multi-threading allows the server software to deal efficiently with multiple simultaneous requests for data, improving both speed and memory usage in the process.
The vast majority of Web server software - including Netscape's and Apache's - still employs single-threaded architecture. The change to a multi-threaded design is radical and risks alienating existing customers who have invested heavily in customising the original single-threaded design to suit their specific needs. New customers, though, could be very interested in such a system. So at the end of May last year Reeves and Twiss mothballed their smut site and hit the code face with a vengeance. Within two weeks the first iteration of the Zeus server was up and serving. After a summer vacation spent fine-tuning, creating a user-friendly front end and producing an RSA-encrypted secure transaction version, the pair teamed up with Obsolete (www .obsolete.com) to produce the spectacular Levi's site (see page 21). After this initial success, Reeves and Twiss formed a company, Zeus Technologies, and released the server for public download.
The raw speed of the Zeus server has the big players in the Web server game worried. When Sun published results of its benchmarking comparisons, Netscape invoked a draconian clause in its licence agreement to remove the figures for Netscape's Web server from the benchmark site. The results showed Netscape's very latest FastTrack server as up to 25% slower than an out-of-date version of the Zeus server.
For the last few months the pair have been concentrating on their finals. Upon graduating, they plan world domination.
- Tom Loosemore
Infogrames, the French software company, is best known for founder Bruno Bonnell's fixation with the armadillo (in French, le tatou), and for games like Alone in the Dark, Alone in the Dark II, Alone in the Dark III ... well, you get the picture. But last year Infogrames got a bit more serious and set up its own online service, called Infonie - a Francophone island in the online ocean of Anglo-Americanism that is already talking of global expansion.First stop is the world's French-speaking community, with plans for connections in Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec. But that's just the beginning. Director General Christophe Sapet says he wants to avoid the mistake made by Minitel (France's 15-year-old proprietary online system) and expand beyond French-speaking nations. To help beef up the number of subscriptions, the Gallic gamesters have hit on a novel solution: they're targeting people who don't have a computer at all. For your FFr500-per-month subscription (about £65), you get not just access to the service but also a modem, a Pentium 75 and a colour printer - sadly, though, no tatou.
Infonie is already the star of the French Nouveau Marché (a sort of Gallic NASDAQ), which saw its share price rise by 50% within a few days of the March flotation. OK, so that's not such a big deal; for the moment it's also the only company listed on the Nouveau Marché, and with some 2,500 users as opposed to AOL's four million, it's not yet up there with the industry heavyweights. But it's an encouraging start; after all, armadillos are known for their charm, not their beauty.
- Steve Shipside
Go to the Levi's site (www.obsolete.com/levis.html) on a 14,400 modem and you'll notice something different. Lots of action - and not much waiting. Dancing jeans, rotating buttons, chattering teeth. Almost anything you can find on the showcase Java sites you can find here, but without the hanging around and without the software. What's going on ? What's going on is Obsolete. Obsolete is without doubt the Web-design company to watch in the UK. When it sets out to design a new site, it doesn't worry about boring details like what can and can't be done; it decides what needs to be done and sets about dreaming up ways to do it.When Kim Bull, James Stevens and Jon Bains founded Obsolete a little more than a year ago it was just another Web design start-up with lots of big ideas. And then came the Levi's contract. "The difference between us and the other companies pitching for the account was that we actually gave a shit, because for us it was the biggest deal we'd ever seen", says Bains. "That and the fact that we'd created a 3D beta site which basically fucked with everybody's head." Levi's liked Obsolete so much that they gave it almost total control of the site, including its content.
Obsolete works on the basis that imagination can be substituted for hardware, software and data. Bains again: "A lot of people slag off the Net, and rightly so, because it's basically crap. I think people just have to work smarter. There's so much that hasn't been done yet just using the existing technology. People haven't even understood what compression means yet."
Working smarter at Obsolete means using slick software to "server push" small images and files into a browsing machine. It means stacking GIFs and flipping through them quickly to create instant online animation. It means limiting files to 10K and insisting that everything work on a 14,400 modem.
Which doesn't mean scorning the technology du jour. In September, Obsolete will put a two-player Java-based game on its site, previewing Iterated Systems' fractal compression software; they claim it gives you almost real-time streamed video over a 28,800 modem. And they'll release something called the "subvert", an animated advert so cool you want to click on it - they hope it'll change online advertising forever.
- James Flint
Even the technically-minded find maintaining and updating software a tiresome business. For companies it can push the cost of owning PCs far higher than the cost of buying them. But salvation may be in sight - "living" software that updates and repairs itself automatically over the Net.You don't have to wait for a fully appletted world to take advantage of the possibilities. CyberMedia recently announced Oil Change (www.cybermedia.com), a program which will scan your hard disk, compare the contents with its online database of popular programs to identify old or corrupt files, and then request permission to upgrade your software.
You've probably spotted the catch: widespread use of "living" software will allow software companies to monitor the contents of customers' hard disks. CyberMedia, says CEO Unni Warrier, is "painfully aware of the issues of privacy". Part of its business will be to act as a discreet intermediary between software vendors and users. For vendors, "living" software cuts dramatically the costs of providing technical support and updates, and these savings should be passed on to users. "It's a dirty secret in the software industry that software is a service, not a one-shot deal," says Warrier. Imagine, good service from a software company. What will they think of next ?
- Alex Balfour
"Information wants to be free," goes the Hacker's creed. "It also wants to be expensive," pointed out Stewart Brand in a commercial mood. On January 1st, NASK, the Polish equivalent of Britain's SuperJANET Internet backbone, shocked Poland's Internet community by starting to charge customers according to the amount of traffic they generate, rather than bandwidth and connection time.NASK's new prices made life far more expensive for customers. They are now charged for incoming data as well as outgoing, with the result that it is not necessarily possible to economise by using the system less. The popular SunSITE, sponsored by Sun Microsystems and administered from Warsaw University, is terrified that it will have to pay thousands of dollars a day for the gigabytes of free software that people are downloading.
Tomasz Hofmokl, director of NASK, is unrepentant.
"Total expenses for the wide area network in Poland are rising rapidly every year." A new price list was announced on April 1st, but the per-bit structure was unchanged. So NASK's monopoly is being challenged by a new satellite-based service created by ATM and SatNet. Now we'll see if it's costs that are rising, or just profits.
- Cooper James
Parental control is the fashionable alternative to Net censorship; let mum and dad use software to sort out what their kids watch, leaving them in peace. The problem is, even grown-ups have people above them who want to look after them. The software works for them, too.Pipex is spearheading the UK ISP industry's drive towards self-regulation by offering such porn-filtering software to all new dial-up customers (www.microsys.com/cyber/). The Cyber Patrol software allows parents to block access to most of the obvious places where surfers might find naughtiness, with new porn sites automatically added to the list of banned URLs as and when they appear. Corporate clients are being offered a server-based system called CyberSentry (www.expresso.com/sentry.htm) which can do much the same for a whole organisation.
Not letting employees explore all the recreational possibilities of cyberspace, even in their coffee break, may be fair enough. But SurfWatch Software (www.surfwatch.com), the porn-blocking software that's going down a treat in the US, has caught the eye of a truly overwhelming paternalism - that of the the Singapore Broadcasting Authority (www.nussu.nus.sg/nussu/SBA.html).
The SBA recently approached SurfWatch about an industrial-strength version of the software for Singapore's national network. With this, Singaporean Internet users could be denied access to a whole host of "undesirable" sites.
The inquiry (and others from Deutsche Telekom and AT&T) puts the company in a sticky situation. "Sometimes we feel like a gun seller: you're never sure whether the customer is buying the weapon to defend their home or knock off the corner liquor store," says Surfwatch co-founder Jay Friedland. But he says SurfWatch would, reluctantly, sell such a system to the SBA.
- Jim Daly and Tom Loosemore
The Swiss have not lost a war this century, and don't intend to break that record in the next. So they are preparing themselves for the Age of Information Warfare. While most countries are flapping around trying to work out what, if anything, information warfare might be, the Swiss already have a national strategy for dealing with the threat as they see it.A large part of that strategy consists of integrating civilian and military links to make sure that the national communications infrastructure is as secure as can be. You might think this sort of seriousness means that Swiss hackers are in for a very tough time. But it ain't necessarily so. When asked how he treats hackers who get into his system, Colonel Ulrich Fierz of the Swiss general staff is only half joking when he replies, "I say, 'Thank you'."
At InfoWarCon, a meeting that America's National Computer Security Association organised in Brussels this May, Colonel Fierz got his chance. One of the intellectual charms and practical frustrations of information warfare is that no one really knows what it is. So at such a meeting you can get computer professionals, generals, academics, spooks, cops and hackers all rubbing shoulders - and all disagreeing about the causes of the friction that this generates.
The aspect of infowar that gets the headlines is the computer-based stuff. According to a report from America's General Accounting Office, 250,000 attempts are made to get into American military computers every year. When the Pentagon's own experts play at this game, they find that they can get in between 65 and 88% of the time; that about 4% of those intrusions are detected; and that of those detected, only 5% are reported. By way of excuse, bear in mind that the American military networks are huge and unwieldy. There are 2.1 million computers on 10,000 local networks; there are 200 command-and-control centres and 16 "megacentres".
And 95% of the communications is going over commercial leased lines. It is, as they say, a target-rich environment.
One response to figures like this is to get really worried. Another is to say that teenage kids, among other people, get a kick out of going into places they shouldn't. The interesting fact is that the two responses, the worried one and the nonchalant one, are so close to one another. Robert Steele, a former spook who now champions the gathering of intelligence from open sources, was one of InfoWarCon's two chairmen. He can rail against the laxity of a system that provides no security to the military or to civilians while amicably sharing a panel with Rop Gonggrijp, one of the organisers of Amsterdam's Digital City - and the man who told the conference how much fun it was to watch kids get a little drunk and hack the Pentagon.
The thing that lets such people mix so easily is the porosity of boundaries in cyberspace. At one level this is what makes it possible to attack information systems using just information. At another level it is what makes it almost impossible to categorise those attacks. The boundaries between the state and the citizen, the public and the private, are still being defined. And those are the boundaries that separate crime from warfare.
This lack of boundaries invites everyone who talks about information to draw their own. Some draw them tightly, and see information warfare as a matter of precision weapons aimed and radio stations. On this basis, the Gulf War was an information war. Others set them more loosely, letting in the possibility of attacking civilian targets and military targets through hacking. And others - notably, at InfoWarCon, General Jean Pichot-Cuclos, former dean of France's military intelligence school - define it widely enough to include cultural hegemony and business intelligence. You writes your position paper and you takes your choice.
When boundaries are this open to discussion, different countries and different interests will draw them in different ways. The Swiss have a tradition of militias and citizen soldiers, and a strategy that puts almost all its emphasis on defence, not attack. So they're in a good position to set up boundaries - rules about who does what - that the whole country can live with. America or the UK may find that harder. Getting information about what is happening outside the private sector is often difficult. Companies see their problems in terms of the competitive disadvantage of looking insecure, rather than in terms of national security.
Its a fair bet, though, that whatever the boundaries are, they will be broken. The idea is not to keep your information defences - or your concept of what information defence might be - hermetically sealed. This is not a time for Maginot lines. The idea is to adapt to the changes in the boundaries.
In broad terms, that means conversations between hackers, soldiers, spies, businessmen, politicians and pressure groups - like those at InfoWarCon. In operational terms, it means detecting and responding to intrusion. That is where the "thank you" to hackers comes in. If there were no hackers trying to play around with military computers but lacking in military intentions, then there would be no way for people like Colonel Fierz to know whether their security really worked - and there would be no way for the rest of us to keep tabs on what the military was actually capable of.
- Oliver Morton
Once upon a time there was an unhappy accountant. His problem was that he was too good at sums. He couldn't communicate the information he had gained from his sums to anyone else, because no one else was nearly as good at sums as he was. If the company was profitable, they were happy. That was all they wanted to know. Liquidity was what happened to your stomach if you spent too much time in the pub at lunch, Working Capital Position sounded suspiciously left-wing and Financial Leverage was beating your banker at arm-wrestling. But the accountant didn't drink, wasn't interested in politics, and wouldn't have dreamt of arm-wrestling his banker.So this accountant cut a lonely, isolated figure, spending long hours staring out of the window, or doodling faces on his note-pad. It was on one such long, dreary afternoon that he had an idea....
Linking the contours of a schematic cartoon face to a set of data is neither a new idea nor a dodgy magic-realist conceit. The latest paper on the subject rejoices in the title "Improving the Communication of Accounting Information Through Cartoon Graphics," by G. Malcolm Smith of Murdoch University, Perth, and Professor Richard J. Taffler of the City University Business School, London. Finding that no current pictogramic paradigm is flexible enough to deal with multivariate accountancy data, they tentatively suggest changing the picture: "Alternative methods of presentation, notably those involving the use of a facial format, may seem a little strange to existing users, but the test of their usefulness will be in the successful communication of financial messages." Enter the fully formatted smiley, each feature of which communicates something the punter needs to know.
The researchers showed these smileys to 23 accountants, 52 accounting academics and 46 MBA students. According to Professor Taffler, "The professional accountants, who you would have thought would have been wary, have - almost without exception - loved it. The response was, 'What a good way of communicating with our clients.' " Too good, perhaps. In Taffler's consultancy work, one company got fed up with the faces because they showed so clearly the competition's superior financial health.
- Wayne Myers