Computer underground Digest Wed July 15, 1998 Volume 10 : Issue 38 ISSN 1004-042X Editor: Jim Thomas (cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu) News Editor: Gordon Meyer (gmeyer@sun.soci.niu.edu) Archivist: Brendan Kehoe Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala Ian Dickinson Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest CONTENTS, #10.38 (Wed, July 15, 1998) File 1--Internet "Losing Virginity" Event a Scam File 2--Free Kevin Mitnick -- Action Alert #1 File 3--Internet Privacy Ruling in Canada (excerpt) File 4-- "EFF DES CRACKER" MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. Prof. Communicators. July 4, 1998 File 6--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 25 Apr, 1998) CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION ApPEARS IN THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 19 Jul 98 14:17 CDT From: anonymous (deleted@by.request) Subject: File 1--Internet "Losing Virginity" Event a Scam ((MODERATORS' NOTE: Probably not many people outside of the media were deceived by the story that two "18 year old virgins" intended to lose their virginity on the net. The intro to the site's homepage, http://www.ourfirsttime.com, said: On August 4th, 1998..... Come and meet Diane and Mike, two 18 year old "Honor" students who have recently graduated from high school, and are looking forward to starting college in the fall. They are as close to being "typical All-American" kids as you can get. Active in school and church. Well liked by family, friends, and their community - but sexually, they are both virgins.Their lives are going to change in a unique and dramatic way. They are about to leave the safety of youth, accept the challenges of adulthood, and take that frightening ... but wonderful, step into adult sexuality. There's one big difference...they are going to let the world come along and witness their lives over an 18 day period as this adventure unfolds, when they lose their virginity together .... All, of course, for a small cost. The Chicago Tribune reported the hoax in a short inside story on July 18. The following are extracts from Reuters. ============== By Mark Egan LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A company that was to provide the computer equipment to show two 18-year-olds losing their virginity on the Internet said Friday the event was a hoax designed to make a fortune and fool millions of people. Seattle-based Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), which had signed a contract to supply the computer hardware, told Reuters the organizers planned to charge Internet users $5 each and then not deliver on their promise that the couple would have sex "for the first time." IEG's President Seth Warshavsky said the couple was going to have AIDS tests and pick out condoms leading up to their Aug. 4 event and charge viewers $5 for "age-verification" purposes. Then on the actual day, the couple would decide they were not ready for sex, he said. Warshavsky said he was informed by Ken Tipton, the organizer of the event, in a phone call on Friday that it was aimed at fooling more people than Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" 60 years ago. That realistic radio drama duped millions of Americans into thinking that Martians had invaded New Jersey. According to IEG's Web site (www.clublove.com) Tipton told the company, "Nobody has any intention of having sex. You won't even see them naked. Christ, I wouldn't be surprised to find out Diane had lost her virginity years ago in the back seat of a Chevy." Attorney Vega said Thursday that the site had attracted "hundreds of millions" of "hits" and could become one the biggest ever online events. He insisted the Web site would have been free and that the event "was not about making money." The caper was a field day for hackers who were able to trace "www.ourfirsttime.com" Web site to Tipton and then connect Tipton and Vega to the same movie production company. Vega is known in Los Angeles legal circles for his work on freedom of speech cases. He insisted in interviews earlier this week that the project was not a hoax but an effort to expand free speech on the Net. IEG, which markets the sex video of actress Pamela Anderson and rocker Tommy Lee on its Web sites, became involved with the project Thursday. But 24 hours after signing the contract, the company pulled out because it said it suspected the organizers' motives. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 08:50:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Free Kevin Subject: File 2--Free Kevin Mitnick -- Action Alert #1 FREE KEVIN MITNICK -- ACTION ALERT #1 5 July 1998 ----------------------------------------- PLEASE REDISTRIBUTE THIS DOCUMENT TO APPROPRIATE FORUMS ----------------------------------------- 1) Happy 4th of July 2) Let's Screw Kevin Again: The Movie 3) Where Are the Activists? 4) What You Can Do ------------------------------------------------------------ 1) Happy 4th of July Did you have an enjoyable 4th of July weekend? Did you hang out by the barbecue, beer in hand, and eat too many burgers and/or tofu dogs? Well, whatever you did, it was probably more enjoyable then Kevin Mitnick's 4th of July. Kevin spent his in the same place that he had the last few -- the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Los Angeles. Kevin has been held without bail for three years and four months pending his trial on a 25 count federal indictment, and it will likely be more than four years without bail by the time his trial actually takes place. MDC is a pre-trial facility and is intended for much shorter periods of detention, so Kevin is only allowed visits from his attorney and immediate family. Amazingly, Kevin has never had the opportunity to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses in an adversarial detention hearing, as is required by the Bail Reform Act. Kevin did waive his right to a speedy trial, as most defendants do, but this isn't quite what he had in mind. What makes all of this worse is that Kevin is not likely to get the facilities that he needs to defend himself properly while he is in MDC. The government is entering loads of evidence against Kevin that exists in electronic form, and he will need a computer and a lot of time to properly sort through it all. So far it appears that he will be given neither the time nor the equipment to properly prepare a defense against the government's case. How long will this go on? Kevin has never committed a violent crime, and there's no evidence that there was any profit motive behind his hacking. Violent and truly dangerous criminals get lighter treatment than Kevin every day and no one blinks. What would the Founding Fathers have thought of such an obvious attempt to prevent someone from obtaining a fair trial? Let's hope that Kevin doesn't have to spend another 4th of July in custody next year... ------------------------------------------------------------ 2) Let's Screw Kevin Again: The Movie From the Exploitative Journalism Makes Good Movies department: Miramax pictures recently announced that they will begin shooting in July on "Takedown," a movie based on the book by Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff. The book, which chronicles Shimomura's version of the events leading up to Kevin's capture, was criticized by some as a self-serving attempt by the authors to cash in on the hype surrounding Mitnick's arrest. People who have seen the script for the movie say it's even worse. Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of "2600" magazine, was one of the first Mitnick supporters to obtain a copy of the "Takedown" script. Goldstein writes that the script is "far worse than I had even imagined." "If this film is made the way the script reads," he adds, "Kevin will be forever demonized in the eyes of the public. And mostly for things that everyone agrees *never even happened* in the first place!" Inaccuracies in the script range from the merely comical (Kevin makes free phone calls by whistling touch tones into the handset) to the outright false and defamatory (Kevin assaults Shimomura in an alley with a garbage-can lid, and Shimomura visits Kevin in prison and tells him "good work" for cracking his systems). Goldstein's notes on the script is online at: http://www.kevinmitnick.com/review.html In an article for ZDTV, columnist Kevin Poulsen writes, "nobody predicted that the script, supposedly based on the dry, but inoffensive book of the same name, would be filled with so much blatant fabrication. No one expected that Kevin Mitnick might become the most feared and hated screen villain since Hannibal Lecter." Poulsen, himself a convicted hacker who was held for years without bail, scored a revealing interview with one of the "Takedown" screenwriters, John Danza. Danza told Poulsen that he had wanted to present a different view of Mitnick's case, one that "wasn't so black and white; good and bad-- I think Tsutomu was basically self-serving, and I thought it would be an interesting idea if he realized that." The studio allegedly didn't buy off on Danza's ideas, or even on his draft that stuck more closely to the book. "Then they gave it to a high-priced polish writer who gets paid an enormous amount of money to spice up the dialog," Danza told Poulsen, "and I think he did that and also changed quite a bit. I've read that draft and I'm even less satisfied." Poulsen's article is at: http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cda/index/0,2073,2115491-2103615,00.html He's written several other articles about Mitnick's case: http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cda/index/0,2073,2110084-2103615.00.html http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cda/index/0,2073,2000162-2103615.00.html http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cda/index/0,2073,2000163-2103615.00.html ----------------------------------------------------------- 3) Where Are the Activists? One of the most disturbing aspects of Kevin Mitnick's case is the lack of support for his plight from Net activists. The same people who could probably quote moving passages from their dog-eared copies of "The Hacker Crackdown" seem to become very quiet when it comes to Kevin's case. Not only have groups like EFF not lent direct legal support to Kevin, but they have done little else to show any support for him. It's time for Internet activists to take a stand. It's time for people to realize that for phrases like "Cyber Rights Now" to have any meaning, they must apply to Kevin Mitnick as well as every other netizen. Even if we assume that the worst accusations about Kevin's hacking are true, it still becomes quickly clear that his case has been blown way out of proportion. Kevin is the victim of a campaign to hype his story, a campaign which has made millions of dollars for those responsible. Obviously, Net activist organizations have a limited amount of time and must focus their resources. They cannot respond to every potential crisis, and no reasonable person would expect them to. They have other, more practical concerns as well, like the possibility of alienating potential donors and sponsors. That's reality. What's also reality is that Kevin's case is sure to be a landmark in the field of computer crime, and that activists should be getting involved to make sure that bad precedents aren't set which could impact us all. Kevin is obviously being singled out to act as an example for other hackers, and the message is pretty clear so far: that the government can do as it pleases when it comes to hackers, civil rights be damned. If that's the case, then how safe is anyone? Why should a "computer criminal" be treated more severely than violent criminals are? Is a hacker more dangerous to the fabric of society than a rapist or murderer? Should someone be penalized more severely for their crimes because they involve computers? Is a computer a weapon, something to be feared? Will the real activists please stand up? Ironically, it's the movie of "Takedown," which some people feel may do irreversible damage to Kevin's reputation, that may put him in the same boat with some prominent netizens. EFF co-founder John Gilmore reportedly is portrayed in a negative light in the script, as is the management of The Well. And believe it or not, Goldstein writes that the script portrays "'Electronic Freedom Foundation' types" who actually aid in Mitnick's capture. Things aren't quite that bad in real life, but they could be a lot better. ------------------------------------------------------------ 4) What You Can Do There are a lot of things you can do to help Kevin's situation: A) Donate to Kevin's defense fund. This is one of the most helpful things you can do. Over $3,000 has been raised so far, but that's just a drop in the bucket. Kevin needs expert witnesses, research, and other things that the court is unlikely to provide much financial help for. Information about donating is at: http://www.kevinmitnick.com/df.html If you can't afford to donate, though, there are still other things you can do. B) Bumper stickers. The tres chic "Free Kevin" bumper stickers are available for $1 apiece through www.kevinmitnick.com, and the money goes towards Kevin's defense fund. You can also place a virtual bumper sticker on your web page and link it to www.kevinmitnick.com. C) Join the mailing list. "2600" has set up a Majordomo list for discussion of Kevin's case, and it's a great place to stay tuned for information about the case and other related events. Email majordomo@2600.com with the words "subscribe mitnick" (without the quotes) as the body of your message. You can also get info on Kevin's case (and many other topics) from "Off The Hook," Emmanuel Goldstein's radio program that airs on WBAI in New York, and via RealAudio. More info is at: http://www.2600.com/offthehook/ D) Protest the movie, "Takedown." Plans are being put in place now for pickets of the Miramax offices in New York and Los Angeles, and there will likely be some sort of demonstrations in North Carolina when shooting there begins. Join the mailing list using the directions above to stay up to date on these events. Also, write letters to those involved with the movie expressing your feelings about the project. Individuals involved with the production might not even be aware of the finer points of the case, and they deserve to know what they're getting themselves into. A list of contacts is at the end of this message. E) Write legislators, members of the media, and anyone else you can think of who might be able to have a positive impact on Kevin's situation. F) Join the RC5 team. We're participating in the distributed.net effort to crack RC5-64, and if someone on our team hits the key we will donate our winnings to Kevin's defense fund. It's also an opportunity to get some positive publicity for Kevin, and, after all, they're just spare CPU cycles. You might as well use them for a good cause. More information is at: http://www.paranoid.org/mitnick/ G) Contact Net activists and ask them to get involved. The trial is getting nearer, and Kevin needs help now, not in a couple of years on appeal. H) Read, read, read. Read the books about Kevin's case, and the information at www.kevinmitnick.com. The more information you have, the better able you'll be to discuss the case. I) Spread the word. Tell people about Kevin's case, hand out fliers, do whatever you can to try to help balance out the negative hype. J) Repost this message to appropriate forums. K) Think of more ideas like these and post them to the mailing list. ------------------------------------------------------- CONTACTS: For feedback about this document, contact mitnick@paranoid.org. Emmanuel Goldstein of "2600" can be reached at emmanuel@2600.com. Feedback on the www.kevinmitnick.com website should go to fill@2600.com. We can all be reached through the mitnick@2600.com Majordomo list. ASCII art by rOTTEN. ----------------------------------------------------- People to contact about the movie "Takedown," as posted to the mitnick@2600.com list: Miramax Films 7966 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90048 (213) 951-4200 (213) 951-4315 (fax) Miramax Films 375 Greenwich St., 3rd floor New York, NY 10013 (212) 941-3800 (212) 941-3949 (fax) ANDREW STENGEL Publicist for Miramax (212) 625-2222 DAILY VARIETY 5700 Wilshire Boulevard #120 Los Angeles, CA 90036 (213) 857-6600 MONICA ROMAN Variety writer who wrote internet announcement about "Takedown" movie (212) 337-7001 (Variety New York office) HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 5055 Wilshire Bouevard #600 Los Angeles, CA 90036 (213) 525-2000 SKEET ULRICH (actor who will play Kevin Mitnick) ICM 8942 Wilshire Boulevard Beverly Hills, CA 90211 (310) 550-4000 (310) 550-4100 (fax) (this is the agency representing Skeet) Aleen Keshishian (212) 556-5698 (Skeet's agent) JOE CHAPPELLE (director of Takedown) Bohrman Agency 8489 W. Third Street Los Angeles, CA 90048 (213) 653-6701 (agency representing Chappelle) DAVID NEWMAN HOWARD RODMAN JOHN DANZA (writers of Takedown script) There were too many Newmans to trace. Danza is not listed with the Writers Guild. Howard Rodman is represented by: Creative Artists 9830 Wilshire Boulevard Beverly Hills, CA 90212 (310) 288-4545 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 09:00:37 -0400 From: "Simon.Van-Norden" The ruling is expected to have broad implications for investors who talk on the Internet. If the court order remains unchallenged, their anonymity will disappear. The decision is believed to mark the first time a Canadian court has waded into privacy issues in cyberspace. The developing technology of cyberspace means e-mail containing hate messages may not even stem from the Internet provider in question, Remborg said. By Friday afternoon, several Internet providers had complied with the court order. "We haven't decided what we want to do with the information," said Philips spokeswoman Lynda Kuhn. "The goal was to stop the defamation." ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 17 Jul 1998 11:27:12 -0700 (PDT) From: Mike Godwin Subject: File 4-- "EFF DES CRACKER" MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 17, 1998 CONTACTS: Alexander Fowler, +1 202 462 5826, afowler@eff.org Barry Steinhardt, +1 415 436 9333 ext. 102, barrys@eff.org John Gilmore, +1 415 221 6524, gnu@toad.com "EFF DES CRACKER" MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION PROVES THAT DES IS NOT SECURE SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today raised the level of honesty in crypto politics by revealing that the Data Encryption Standard (DES) is insecure. The U.S. government has long pressed industry to limit encryption to DES (and even weaker forms), without revealing how easy it is to crack. Continued adherence to this policy would put critical infrastructures at risk; society should choose a different course. To prove the insecurity of DES, EFF built the first unclassified hardware for cracking messages encoded with it. On Wednesday of this week the EFF DES Cracker, which was built for less than $250,000, easily won RSA Laboratory's "DES Challenge II" contest and a $10,000 cash prize. It took the machine less than 3 days to complete the challenge, shattering the previous record of 39 days set by a massive network of tens of thousands of computers. The research results are fully documented in a book published this week by EFF and O'Reilly and Associates, entitled "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design." "Producing a workable policy for encryption has proven a very hard political challenge. We believe that it will only be possible to craft good policies if all the players are honest with one another and the public," said John Gilmore, EFF co-founder and project leader. "When the government won't reveal relevant facts, the private sector must independently conduct the research and publish the results so that we can all see the social trade-offs involved in policy choices." The nonprofit foundation designed and built the EFF DES Cracker to counter the claim made by U.S. government officials that governments cannot decrypt information when protected by DES, or that it would take multimillion-dollar networks of computers months to decrypt one message. "The government has used that claim to justify policies of weak encryption and 'key recovery,' which erode privacy and security in the digital age," said EFF Executive Director Barry Steinhardt. It is now time for an honest and fully informed debate, which we believe will lead to a reversal of these policies." "EFF has proved what has been argued by scientists for twenty years, that DES can be cracked quickly and inexpensively," said Gilmore. "Now that the public knows, it will not be fooled into buying products that promise real privacy but only deliver DES. This will prevent manufacturers from buckling under government pressure to 'dumb down' their products, since such products will no longer sell." Steinhardt added, "If a small nonprofit can crack DES, your competitors can too. Five years from now some teenager may well build a DES Cracker as her high school science fair project." The Data Encryption Standard, adopted as a federal standard in 1977 to protect unclassified communications and data, was designed by IBM and modified by the National Security Agency. It uses 56-bit keys, meaning a user must employ precisely the right combination of 56 1s and 0s to decode information correctly. DES accounted for more than $125 million annually in software and hardware sales, according to a 1993 article in "Federal Computer Week." Trusted Information Systems reported last December that DES can be found in 281 foreign and 466 domestic encryption products, which accounts for between a third and half of the market. A DES cracker is a machine that can read information encrypted with DES by finding the key that was used to encrypt that data. DES crackers have been researched by scientists and speculated about in the popular literature on cryptography since the 1970s. The design of the EFF DES Cracker consists of an ordinary personal computer connected to a large array of custom chips. It took EFF less than one year to build and cost less than $250,000. This week marks the first public test of the EFF DES Cracker, which won the latest DES-cracking speed competition sponsored by RSA Laboratories (http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/). Two previous RSA challenges proved that massive collections of computers coordinated over the Internet could successfully crack DES. Beginning Monday morning, the EFF DES Cracker began searching for the correct answer to this latest challenge, the RSA DES Challenge II-2. In less than 3 days of searching, the EFF DES Cracker found the correct key. "We searched more than 88 billion keys every second, for 56 hours, before we found the right 56-bit key to decrypt the answer to the RSA challenge, which was 'It's time for those 128-, 192-, and 256-bit keys,'" said Gilmore. Many of the world's top cryptographers agree that the EFF DES Cracker represents a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate computer security and the public policies that control its use. "With the advent of the EFF DES Cracker machine, the game changes forever," said Whitfield Diffie, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and famed co-inventor of public key cryptography. "Vast Internet collaborations cannot be concealed and so they cannot be used to attack real, secret messages. The EFF DES Cracker shows that it is easy to build search engines that can." "The news is not that a DES cracker can be built; we've known that for years," said Bruce Schneier, the President of Counterpane Systems. "The news is that it can be built cheaply using off-the-shelf technology and minimal engineering, even though the department of Justice and the FBI have been denying that this was possible." Matt Blaze, a cryptographer at AT&T Labs, agreed: "Today's announcement is significant because it unambiguously demonstrates that DES is vulnerable, even to attackers with relatively modest resources. The existence of the EFF DES Cracker proves that the threat of "brute force" DES key search is a reality. Although the cryptographic community has understood for years that DES keys are much too small, DES-based systems are still being designed and used today. Today's announcement should dissuade anyone from using DES." EFF and O'Reilly and Associates have published a book about the EFF DES Cracker, "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design." The book contains the complete design details for the EFF DES Cracker chips, boards, and software. This provides other researchers with the necessary data to fully reproduce, validate, and/or improve on EFF's research, an important step in the scientific method. The book is only available on paper because U.S. export controls on encryption potentially make it a crime to publish such information on the Internet. EFF has prepared a background document on the EFF DES Cracker, which includes the foreword by Whitfield Diffie to "Cracking DES." See http://www.eff.org/descracker/. The book can be ordered for worldwide delivery from O'Reilly & Associates at http://www.ora.com/catalog/crackdes, +1 800 998 9938, or +1 707 829 0515. ********** The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the leading civil liberties organizations devoted to ensuring that the Internet remains the world's first truly global vehicle for free speech, and that the privacy and security of all on-line communication is preserved. Founded in 1990 as a nonprofit, public interest organization, EFF is based in San Francisco, California. EFF maintains an extensive archive of information on encryption policy, privacy, and free speech at http://www.eff.org. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 08 Jul 1998 19:23:37 -0500 From: Richard Thieme Subject: File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. Prof. Communicators. July 4, 1998 Islands in the Clickstream: Professional Communicators From one point of view, all we humans do is communicate. We broadcast information about ourselves all the time, just as our planet broadcasts information into space. (Isn't there a better name than "space?" "Space" sounds like Greeks calling all the non-Greeks "barbarians." The Universe is teeming with life, and all we can call it is "space?") But I digress. All humans communicate, yes, but there are also men and women who call themselves "professional speakers." I am just back from a convention of two thousand of them. The National Speakers Association has been a tent for twenty-five years under which every conceivable kind of "professional speaker" comes to work and play. Nick Carter, one of the great veterans of the speaking business, calls himself a professional communicator, not a professional speaker. By making that distinction, he captures the essence of life in the digital world. The digital world is interactive, modular, and very much in flux, and because it is back-engineering the way we imagine everything, we see our selves as modular and transitory too. We imagine life as a kind of plug-and-play digital game. We build symbolic modules in our minds and live in those morphing modules even as our intuition tells us that there is a larger matrix of possibility from which they all emerge. In a world of simulations, we achieve our goals by maintaining some consistency of artifact and design. We sustain a professional identity the way a business engages in branding. In a way that prior generations could not imagine, our intentions really do generate the landscapes of our lives. The primacy of intentionality extends far beyond tasks or projects to our selves and personas, the identities we present to the world. We become who we intend to become, and when we alter the matrix of our lives, when we move through any kind of dramatic passage or transition, we must build a symbolic bridge even as we cross the chasm to become the self we are imagining, adding modules to the modules of which we are already built. Back to that great circus of "professional speakers." Enter the tent, the first thing you notice is that every single one of us is hopelessly neurotic. What a bunch we are, honestly. We traffic in symbols, nothing but symbols, and because we know that we're always dancing in the middle of the air, we pretend all the more that there's firm ground under our feet. We look around at all the beautiful people and compare our fluttering, anxious insides with the polished veneer of these practiced actors. We come together because we need one another deeply, but the minute we're together, we pretend we don't. We present images of accomplishment and success that would make even a Bill Gates doubt his vocation. But then, that's all of us, isn't it? Isn't that life in a knowledge economy? What happens at that convention is what happens in the digital world. We can choose to believe the symbols or we can see through them to both the childlike fears and the real contribution of the people who invent them. We come back to both the digital world and that convention because every year we find more real connection, more modular structures to channel the flow of energy and information, and suddenly we discover that we have real friends in a world in which no one can know enough to make it alone. Maintaining integrity in a world of simulations is, at best, pretty tricky. Integrity once meant "walking the talk," the congruence of action and speech. Now integrity means alignment of our selves and ALL of the digital images we create. The worst mistake we can make is to confuse our presentations for the imperfect foundation on which they stand. The story is told of a violinist whose notes were diced and spliced by an expert mixer until the concerto he had played a dozen times had been turned into one perfect performance. He was listening to the sound track with obvious delight and turned to a colleague. "Isn't that magnificent?" "Yes," said his friend. "Don't you wish you could play that well?" Our egos always airbrush our self-portraits. Our minds are like PhotoShop, making everything look better. The war between memory and pride, noted Nietzsche, is always won by pride. Session musicians are replaced by synthesizers, actors by their own more perfect digital scans. How can we believe those images represent who we really are? And yet they do because our images of ourselves are generated by interacting in and through the matrix of those digital symbols. Mental artifacts couple with digital ones. The simulation becomes the real landscape, perception becomes reality. The symbolic universe we inhabit defines our larger life in a way we can never escape. "Professional speakers" had better become "professional communicators" and so had everybody else. The symbolic modules we construct are bridges between the thought of taking a step and the step itself, a Big Toy we can climb to the next level of self-representation and self-understanding. We need that bridge because we are headed for a cliff. The cliff is our extinction, the moment of our translation as a species into something else, something that we half-create and half-discover as we take control of our evolution, spread throughout the solar system and to the nearest stars, and become utterly other. Yes, we do need a better name than "space" for the gregarious universe. And a better name than "human" for what we are becoming. And a better name than "aliens" for the others we encounter. And a better name than "writer" or "speaker" for people who give names to emergent realities. Both the names and the realities have already been invented somewhere in the deeper matrix under us all. We ride a river of archetypal energy streaming from an underground canyon, rafting a whitewater river that is a dream, not ours, under a sky of multiple moons. ********************************************************************** Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions of computer technology. Comments are welcome. Feel free to pass along columns for personal use, retaining this signature file. If interested in (1) publishing columns online or in print, (2) giving a free subscription as a gift, or (3) distributing Islands to employees or over a network, email for details. To subscribe to Islands in the Clickstream, send email to rthieme@thiemeworks.com with the words "subscribe islands" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, email with "unsubscribe islands" in the body of the message. Richard Thieme is a professional speaker, consultant, and writer focused on the impact of computer technology on individuals and organizations. Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 1998. All rights reserved. ThiemeWorks on the Web: http://www.thiemeworks.com ThiemeWorks P. O. Box 17737 Milwaukee WI 53217-0737 414.351.2321 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1998 22:51:01 CST From: CuD Moderators Subject: File 6--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 25 Apr, 1998) Cu-Digest is a weekly electronic journal/newsletter. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically. CuD is available as a Usenet newsgroup: comp.society.cu-digest Or, to subscribe, send post with this in the "Subject:: line: SUBSCRIBE CU-DIGEST Send the message to: cu-digest-request@weber.ucsd.edu DO NOT SEND SUBSCRIPTIONS TO THE MODERATORS. 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