Sick to death of the whole AOL child-porn spam story? Aren't we all. (For the three people on the planet who didn't get on the end of this one, back in October 1996 someone sent out a message advertising child pornography - "VHS tape, little boys, 'Happy B-day, Timmy' ", that kind of stuff - to 250,000 netheads. Thing was, he put the name and New York address of the supposed pornographer at the bottom of the email.) Cue outrage, cue FBI, cue upset kid in London and "stop this Internet porn" story by BBC South East. And cue a thousand IT journos typing the name of the "pornographer" into an AltaVista Usenet search in a race to find the author of the spam. In a bizarre twist of fate, someone with the same name as the "pornographer" was embroiled in an argument on the rec.pets.dogs.breeds newsgroup. So for a while it looked like the spam had been a broadside volley fired by one of the pet-loving participants. Fortunately that theory was discredited just as quickly as it had been developed (though not before several dog trainers had been deluged with accusatory and investigatory email). The real perpetrator of the spam has still not been discovered, but the story that has gained most credence is that the child-porn spam was a hacker-led retaliation for an earlier series of spams advertising a piece of software called AKIMA, which enables the user to mass-email AOL subscribers. Meaning that somewhere out there is a hacker with a taste for poetic justice.
"Trouble with cybercafes," says Mike Bell of The Portobello Gold hotel and bar, "is that you can't surf in private. People don't like this surfing in public thing." Mike's solution? To put PCs in his hotel rooms and get a 64Kbps link - that is, enough for video conferencing - into the building. Each room now comes tastefully equipped with a high-end Acer and a huge double bed, and not much else. Oh yeah, and a Connectix camera. Now why is it that people don't like to surf in public, again? I can't remember, but I wouldn't expect to find Surfwatch installed on Mike's computers....
Towards the end of 1996, one of the Netherlands' largest crisp manufacturers decided to run a guess-the-ball competition. Into its bags of crisps the company put various "scorecards", each of which had on it two scratchable pictures of a football game, sans ball, and a superimposed grid. The idea was that the expert would guess the ball's location, verify his guess by scratching off the protective layer of that grid square, and claim Dfl10 (about £4) if both were right. And then the inevitable happened: two students set up a Web site that displayed the information gathered so far, and had a request for anybody who'd guessed right - or wrong - to share his or her information. Within two weeks the database had the correct ball position for all 1,445 pictures, and the potato-frier called off the competition, muttering things about unsportsmanlike behaviour. Mark up 1-0 for the Web.
Situationist artist Heath Bunting has graduated from scrawling URL graffiti underneath London's bridges to begging - on the Internet. A glance into the dark doorway of www.irational.org/skint will reveal him squatting in a pile of "vile stinking commercial data trash" with one hand stretched out towards your wallet. How do you donate to an Internet beggar? Just type your credit-card details into the form provided, specify the amount you'd like to donate and press the "There you go mate" button. Easy.
Oo's this geezer standin' 'ere then? An' what's 'ee doin' in that 'uge cathedral?" Well, friends, you might be interested to know that he's not in a cathedral at all (gasp!). He is in fact standing inside a ten-foot cube called the CAVE. But the CAVE is no ordinary cube. First developed by the Electronic Visualisation Laboratory at the University of Illinois and enhanced by the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications, the CAVE is attached to two Silicon Graphics Onyx workstations which control the play of images across walls, floor and ceiling. CAVE software applications have been developed to research such diverse topics as the study of artificial life and visualising the electrostatic field activity of acetylcholinesterase enzymes.
- Cooper James
Instead of following the usual route of pressing knobs and noodling away endlessly in the sonic dimension, the Sensor Band (Edwin van der Heide, Zbigniew Karkowski and Atau Tanaka) strive to feel the physicality of making and controlling electronic sounds. Their instrument is a huge net suspended from a 15m frame. Every strand of the net is connected to the frame via a tension and velocity sensor, and these sensors allow physical motion to control the software composition. The three men, all wearing mountaineering harnesses, spring and bounce across the net, coordinating their movements to trigger and organise the sounds. Well, it's a whole lot more exciting than watching Goldie program Cubase.
- Liz Blinov
For nearly ten years now, Suzanne Treister has been importing the visual language of the video game into her art. She started out in 1988 confusing the divide between digital and traditional art by creating large and very detailed virtual spaces in oils, and last year her electronic costume and CD-ROM "adventure game" was shortlisted for the ICA/Toshiba Art and Innovation Commission. That project followed the progress of Treister's time-travelling alter ego Rosalind Brodsky as she negotiated her way through kitsch, humour, fetishism, sexuality and gothic tendencies in 20th-century Europe. Pictured are some of the sex toys Brodsky comes across on her travels. Ouch.
- James Flint
Peanut Thieves Use Tiny Helicopters To Carry Out Their Evil Crimes Shocker!" Well, not quite, but this is the smallest working helicopter in the world. Built at the Institut für Microtechnik in Mainz, Germany, the helicopter employs two micromotors of the kind used in magnetic disk drives to drive its tiny paper rotor blades at around 40,000 rpm. There is no room on the aircraft's 24mm-x-8mm aluminium fuselage for steering devices or power sources, so an electric cable feeds external power to the motors and the machine flies up and down a wire.
- James Flint