Electronic Lounge

  Anorak Free TV

Since Britain stopped leading the world in science fiction, we have maintained a dim view of the genre. SF, maintain the British, is only for people who think smart-casual dress means an anorak and Spock ears. So spare a thought for the Sci-Fi Channel Europe: its mission is to boldly go and make SF sexy. Marketing Director John Ainsworth and visuals whizz Dean Wheeler have the uphill struggle of overturning deeply-held prejudices.

Does SF have an image problem just because the British stuff is crap? After all, this is the country which perpetrated Blake's Seven. Says John, "Good British sci-fi is not an impossibility. If the BBC put as much into it as they put into Middlemarch they could come up with a really worthwhile product". In the meantime, the Sci-Fi Channel is hoping to change minds with reruns of Battlestar Galactica and The Twilight Zone. Will they succeed? Or will their dream burn up with the heat of a thousand suns? Only time will tell.

- Jamie Cason

  Urban Web Warriors

"Another poxy fanzine with a dumb-ass name. So what have they got to offer?" Brixton-based Webzine Urban75 opens with a question, but offers an answer: "Long before he sold his ass down the line, Johnny Lydon sang, 'Anger is an energy', and right now our tank is full. We're fuelled up." Urban75 burns with urgency and passion. Monochrome shots of burnt-out cars from the Brixton riots give way to the stark nocturnal cityscape of the capital. Rough-cut rants rip into Goa trancers trashing India's ecosystem, celebrate the motorway-occupying radicals of Reclaim The Streets, and fire off instant newsbytes from the activist front line. A cheeky Java app encourages you to "punch a politician."

DIY Culture, the rebel fringe of British politics where direct action and techno meet, has spawned a new underground press to document its activities. But while SchNews and Squall maintain token Web presences, Urban75 was born of electronic media. "The fact that a page can be written up and published in minutes gives us an immediacy otherwise unavailable on such a small budget," says its editor, Mike Slocombe. "We can report back on actions and events much more quickly than a conventional paper fanzine - we had reports of the M41 Reclaim The Streets online within three hours. We don't have to grovel around for advertising, and this ensures that the editorial content is honest. And why hand out a thousand grubby flyers when you've got a potential readership of millions?" As Urban75's manifesto concludes, "The time is NOW. Let's have some fun. Are you ready?"

- Matthew Collin

Tired	Wired
Geek girls	Cybertotty
Megahertz processors	Gigahertz processors
Class struggle	Sibling rivalry
Space-age bachelor-pad music	Suburban wife-swapping music
Love at first sight	0.7 waist-to-hip ratio
ActiveX v. Java	ActiveX written in Java
Charging subscribers	Charging providers
Citibank	Russian hackers
Silicon	Holographic storage
Dilbert	Doonesbury

Thanks to Oliver Curry

  King Ludd

Our token technophobe
Bruce Lehman's Luddism may be the most damaging of any we have yet featured on these pages. As United States Patent and Trademark Commissioner, he proposed changes to US copyright law in the winter of last year that would effectively have made the Internet an impossibility.

Inspired by Hollywood movie moguls desperate to keep conventional media at the top of the food chain, the National Information Infrastructure Copyright Protection Act would have severely limited browsing rights. It threatened Net privacy by requiring ISPs to identify all communications - so copyright violators could more easily be traced. Luckily the US Congress turned the bill down.

Undaunted, Lehman took his proposals to an international conference held to amend the Berne convention, the treaty that governs international copyright. There he got accepted at least part of what his Congress had already turned down. Now US politicians have either to reject the whole treaty, or simply accept restrictions on the free flow of ideas. Lehman is unrepentant, arguing that without the "rights" created by his proposals, no new Net content would be created. So, for ignoring the fact that the Net is the fastest-growing medium in the history of communication, not to mention basic democratic principles about the free flow of ideas, we name Bruce Lehman, warrior against the future, this month's King Ludd.

- John Browning

  Astral Art

Forget NASA. The smartest piece of contemporary space equipment began life last November in a workshop in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Brooklyn-born artist Gregory Green is building a replica of the first satellite, Sputnik 1, and a rocket to carry it. Oh, and then he's going to put it into orbit - as Gregnik.

As you may have gathered, Green is not your everyday artist. Past work includes a fully functional nuclear bomb (minus plutonium), all manner of pipe bombs, suitcase bombs and letter bombs, and a exhibit of a collection of glass phials filled with an amber-coloured liquid purporting to be 10,000 doses of LSD - which led the Chicago Police Department to charge both him and the gallery owner with possession of a controlled substance. There's also his long-term project to create a new nation state on the uninhabited island of Caroline in the Line Islands of the South Pacific.

Green is on a one-man mission to "break through the myth of the magic and inaccessibility of technology." Discussing Gregnik, he says, "It took the entire Soviet state to do Sputnik in 1957; for some yahoo from Brooklyn to do the same thing off his own bat 40 years later is to redefine our understanding of the position of the individual in the world." So it's entirely appropriate that when Gregnik launches, it won't broadcast military beeping noises, but will send a track of canned laughter out across the planet.

- James Flint

  Jargon Watch

CHA

Short for "Click Here, Asshole." Refers to oversimplified instructions and navigation hints created for computer users who are assumed to be stupid. "We need some CHA to explain how the pull-down menus work."

Chaord

A self-organising, adaptive, non-linear, complex system that simultaneously exhibits characteristics of order and chaos.

ELIZA effect

The tendency to believe that a computer has personality or intelligence when it obviously doesn't. Refers to an early computer program called ELIZA that simulated discussion with a psychologist.

Geeksploitation

Taking advantage of twentysomething digital workers who are flushed with pioneer enthusiasm and willing to work very long hours if bolstered by junk food, flexible work schedules and no dress code.

Out-of-control Freak

Someone who believes that the Net works as a universal and perfect panacea for all ills.

Thankee kindly to all Haddocks and US jargonwatchers, and to Gareth Branwyn.

  Another Scramble for Africa

You thought the colonial "scramble for Africa" was part of history? Think again. But where the 19th-century version was acted out to the sound of rifle fire, today's battles are fought to the tune of tone-dialling. In a world of free trade, the key to opening new markets is language. For years you could go to any major African city and find both the British Council and an Institut Français offering rival language lessons.

The Internet represents a new weapon in this fight. Under the banner "The battle of French on the Internet", a recent Francophone summit debated how best to combat the "disturbing phenomenon of English domination on the Internet." Warned President Chirac in a speech in Cotonou, Benin, "Today, 90% of information travelling by Internet is in the English language. The stakes are clear; if our language and our creations are not strongly present in the new media, our future generations will be both economically and culturally marginalised."

At the head of that struggle is Orstom, the French institute for scientific research and cooperative development. Orstom has equipped ten Francophone countries in Africa with Internet servers, linked to mirror sites in its head office at Montpellier.

For its part, the British Council seems more laissez-faire. As David Mason of the Council's English 2000 project puts it, "We're trying to provide access to the public in every office in Africa where there is an ISP. If there's no existing infrastructure, it's not in our remit to dig up the roads." Consequently most of Anglophone Africa isn't scheduled to come online until March '97.

- Steve Shipside

  Ye Guilde of Geekes

Tell a Silicon Valley coder that in Britain there's a guild for nerds, complete with robes and a coat of arms, and once they've picked themselves off the floor they'll be reaching for a camera. But then we are supposed to be living in the new Middle Ages, so perhaps the concept of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (WCIT) makes sense. IT is as central to the current Middle Ages as bodkin manufacture and faggot rolling were to the original one. The WCIT is the 100th Livery Company of the City of London. Drawing on an ancient tradition of networking and on-the-job training, it believes in looking backward to go forward.

Gillian Davies, the learned clerk of the company, says, "I feel very strongly that we should respect things that happened hundreds of years ago." Maybe an unusual attitude for a cutting-edge technologist, but livery companies are all about nostalgia. "An apprentice would be sent by their father to learn a trade - and the same thing happens today."

Young Jody Best recently completed her four-year apprenticeship. "It was a really good experience. I gained a qualification, worked in many areas of a major IT company at home and abroad, and learnt many important social skills." Social skills seem important to the information technologists of the future. Gillian Davies again: "Young people today miss out on a lot of social interaction. People no longer sit around a dinner table, but in front of the TV. Simple social occasions no longer happen naturally." So was Jody torn away from her Playstation to snack on devilled swan with the Lord Mayor? "No. We did have shark-fin soup and oysters. But I'm not a great fan of seafood." Once more, Britain strides bravely into the future.

- Jamie Cason

  Government v. Privacy World Tour

Legislatures around the world are suddenly scrambling to create national policies on encryption. It's the crucial issue of the digital age. Users want it for privacy, businesses want it for commercial transactions and communications, but governments desperately want to be able to decipher it for surveillance purposes. Around the world, state crackdowns on encryption are in the offing. Net users' rights to private communication are far from safe. Here's where the key nations stand in the crypto debate.
- Kenneth Neil Cukier

Britain

Position on Encryption: Tight crypto export controls. Recommendations tabled for trusted third party (TTP) systems for law-enforcement access.
Likely future policy: Key management; all commercial crypto products must be breakable or the keys escrowed, and mandatory key escrow for individual use.
In the news: Labour Party against enforced key escrow, but wants power to demand decryption under court order.
Quote: "The UK government's key escrow initiative is bound to fail in the marketplace. But perhaps all the intelligence services really want ... is to create enough fear, uncertainty and doubt that the commercial deployment of non-trivial crypto is delayed for a few years."
- Ross Anderson, Cambridge University

European Union

Position: European crypto resolution on the way.
Likely future policy: A TTP key escrow system, favourable to business rather than law enforcement, is likely to be approved in 1997.
In the news: Commission split down the middle between those favouring business and those supporting key escrow.
Quote: "The politics of this are that the nation states [in the Council] are perhaps more likely to resonate to law enforcement and national security concerns than the Commission staff. It would be a bit of a surprise if a Commission proposal were moved in the direction of industry and privacy by the Council."
- Stewart A. Baker, former official at the US National Security Agency and currently a lawyer in private practice dealing with crypto issues

France

Position: Users need authorisation for crypto, apparently "impossible" to get, and must escrow keys with government.
Likely future policy: No change, though low-grade crypto may be OK with a back door for law-enforcement access.
In the news: A telecoms bill passed in June set up key escrow agents with major government-linked defence companies.
Quote: "We have no idea what are in the new decrees [to set up TTPs and shorten the government's review time to approve crypto sales], or when the decrees will be known. Last time it took two years [for the law to be official] - this time they say they want to go fast."
- Yves Le Roux, Digital Equipment Corp, France

Germany

Position: Export controls on crypto. Use of personal encryption software, such as Pretty Good Privacy, allowed.
Likely future policy: More liberal than Britain, France and US. Germany eyeing the commercial crypto market.
In the news: Task force set up in October to recommend policy by the beginning of 1997. Opposition parties favour free use of crypto.
Quote: "The secret service's panic-like fear of cellular phones they cannot wiretap is just as silly as the old-fashioned wish to clean the 'anarchist' Internet from pornography or questionable political propaganda. The mafia will adapt to any regulation - usually faster than the police."
- Peter Glotz, Social Democrat Party (SPD) politician

Italy

Position: The only crypto law is one requiring the accessibility of stored data for the Ministry of the Treasury. Likely future policy A big question-mark. Key escrow with the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, or perhaps TTPs.
In the news: Little public debate.
Quote: "In Italy, there may be a regulation, but the question is how much enforced will the regulation be. In that sense, even if [cryptography] is generally regulated, this would not prohibit it from private use. What we see there is more a regulation connected with criminal charges, and less a regulation on an administrative scale."
- Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Vienna University Law School

Japan

Position: Encryption completely legal, actively promoted commercially.
Likely future policy: Trade ministry, MITI, is considering a voluntary key escrow system mainly for business. Japan interested in crypto exports.
In the news: Constitution forbids wiretapping - proposals to allow it under strict court order.
Quote: "Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed. No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated."
- Article 21, Constitution of Japan

The Netherlands

Position: Crypto for personal communications use is freely allowed. File encryption requires a licence. Likely future policy Status quo
In the news: Attempts by the Ministry of Justice to prohibit crypto have met with stiff resistance.
Quote: "Some statements by an official at the Ministry of Justice indicate that they don't understand fully the technical intricacies of potential regulation. My fear is that if there will be regulation, it will be drafted by people who don't have a full knowledge of the technology."
- Bert-Jaap Koops, researcher at Tilburg University, The Netherlands

OECD

Position: No formal position.
Likely future policy: OECD guidelines will allow countries to develop their own national policies.
In the news: A report is due in February. The US position was resisted in September '97.
Quote: "Some of the countries send people who work for law-enforcement agencies, and these people sit in an ivory tower, and they see only one view - the criminal who will use encryption. I think there will be a document that is sufficiently vague to satisfy all the parties. I don't know if that document has a lot of use, because then you don't have any real guidelines."
- A European OECD delegate, speaking on the condition of anonymity

Russia

Position: Strict import/export laws. Crypto development, production or implementation without state authorisation is forbidden.
Likely future policy: Continuation of strict policy for individuals, slight liberalisation for business, if they escrow keys. Crypto control likely to remain under FAPSI, the former KGB.
In the news: Free use of crypto unlikely. Central government even fears other government branches using it.
Quote: "In the interests of the information security of the Russian Federation and intensification of the fight against organised crime, [this decree is] prohibiting legal and physical persons from designing, manufacturing, selling and using information media, and also securing means of storing, treating and transmitting information and rendering services in the area of information encoding, without a licence."
- Decreed by Boris Yeltsin, April 3rd, 1995

United States

Position: Export of high-grade encryption banned without a licence and key recovery systems; domestic use is freely allowed.
Likely future policy: Further liberalised export licensing for products with key recovery; domestic, mass-market, crypto-embedded products to require key recovery systems for law-enforcement access.
In the news: In December a judge ruled that encryption source code constitutes a form of speech, hence is protected by the First Amendment. This would make the Government's export restrictions unconstitutional. USpolicy in chaos.
Quote: "The Clinton administration's proposal will discourage the use of encryption and leaves our national infrastructure vulnerable to information terrorists. It is part and parcel of the administration's campaign to expand the government's ability to snoop. That campaign now has an international angle."
- Barry Steinhardt, American Civil Liberties Union

Sources Bert-Jaap Koops; Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications; le bulletin lambda; European Cryptography Resources; Ulf Moeller

  Web: 1, Milosevic: 0

In December, Serbia was in crisis after Slobodan Milosevic's refusal to accept the results of the country's elections. As protest against his regime grew, the increasingly embattled premier resorted to silencing voices of criticism. Almost all media in the former Yugoslav republic is directly or indirectly connected to the state. One of the exceptions is B92, a Belgrade radio station which also organises film, video, theatre and Internet productions. During the war, B92 was one few voices countering the frenzied jingoism emanating from official media. After Milosevic's refusal to cede power, B92 was forthright in its criticism.

Milosevic responded by shutting down the station's transmitter, claiming that its licence was invalid. B92 launched a Net campaign for assistance, via a Web site (www.xs4all.nl /~opennet) hosted by the crusading Dutch ISP XS4all (Access For All). Using RealAudio, B92 transmitted news bulletins on the escalating troubles in Serbia, bypassing the regime's attempts to censor its point of view. After an international outcry, and aware that B92 was still being heard around the world, Milosevic's government backed down, and B92 went back on the air, a week after its closure. As Wired went to press, three other censored stations in the region - the Serbian Radio Index, B92's sister station in the rural area of Pozarevac; Boom 93; and Zagreb's Radio 101 - were still unable to transmit.

- Hari Kunzru

Free Speech Round-Up

Oil giant Total, stung by criticism of its activities in Myanmar (Burma), has responded robustly on the Web. In particular, asserts the megacorp, "Total reaffirms its commitment to respecting human rights everywhere in the world." A reassuring edict, but one that will sadly go unread in Myanmar itself, where the government, itself unencumbered by commitments to human rights, has made it illegal to possess - let alone use - a modem, or even a fax, without the express permission of the authorities. Find Total's justification at www.webnet .fr/total.
- Steve Shipside

Felipe Rodriguez, CEO of Dutch ISP XS4all, is still a free man, despite the hot air spouted by German State Prosecutors (Wired 2.11). Meanwhile, Germany has backed down on its initial assertion that its ISPs must screen all their customers' content. The Germans still insist that ISPs have a duty to monitor for any pornography or Nazi propaganda that they have the technical means to block.
- Hari Kunzru

When Bill Clinton wanted to sell the world on an unpopular US encryption policy, he turned to a spy novelist. David Aaron's latest book, Crossing by Night, tells the story of the cracking of the Enigma code during World War II. Last November, Aaron was appointed field marshal in a more modern war over encryption policy that pits law-enforcement agencies against netizens. As the new US crypto-ambassador, Aaron lobbies foreign governments to change their laws to comply with this US policy. Aaron formerly served as deputy national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, and since 1993 has been the US representative to the OECD in Paris.
- Declan McCullagh