Rebuilding the Internet

I've been playing Shadowrun too much lately... because my first thought, even though I was being humorous, was "Wait, it's not 2029 yet!"

i really hope they rebuild html at the same time. web design is like trying to build houses on a beach in an earthquake.

Well, of course. It's all VRML these days.

~J

Am I the only one that's reading that entire article as "governments and corporations are pressuring anyone and everyone they can think of in an effort to make the internet easier to control, tax, and censor"?

Vint Cerf is generally ok, as far as I've been able to tell. The remainder of your concerns are wholly valid.

~J

Surprised? Not really. Surprised it took this long? Yes. Happy about any of it? Probably not.

scared?

Not really. Disgusted, more like.

Congress keep funding a program for 15 years that doesn't buy them votes in the next election? Not likely.

So you're saying that law enforcement agencies will be able to see what we are typing on these forums and then bust us all be cause they think we are in some sort of terrorist group called "shadowrun" and are plotting against corporations and governments.

Nah, we're obviously far too materialistic to be considered a threat, they're going to hire us all as anti-terrorist advisors.

odinson is, if I'm not mistaken, referring to the Steve Jackson Games incident.

Well the short version of the story is that the FBI decided to raid SJG because GURPS Cyberpunk had 'Hacking Rules' and therefore must be teaching people criminal activities.

Suposedly they had to completely rewrite large sections of the book because SJG didn't have safe backups and the FBI never returned the computers they took.

***

However, I've always thought that the story sounded somewhat 'fishy' to me, after all, I'm suppose to believe that SJG keeps all of their eggs in one basket and ignore that the story could be used as the perfect excuse to hide a deadline slip?

Meh, maybe I've been playing in the Cyberpunk genre for too long...

The US Secret Service, believing that the RPG was a conspiratorial document about actual computer crime, seized all copies of the GURPS Cyberpunk manuscript and computers that were used in the creation of the book. This forced Steve Jackson Games to start over from scratch and cost them a great deal of money.

http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

The raid was conducted because one of SJ Games employees, Loyd Blankenship, hosted a copy of the hacker newsletter /Phrak, which had published a text document containing administrative information about the E911 system, on his personal BBS. Information contained in this document was available to the public for free and Bell South sold hardcopies for 20 dollars. However, a teenage cracker broke into a Bell South system and made a copy of this document and Bell South spun the incident with the untrue assertion that the document contained secret information that could be used to destroy the entire 911 system, killing untold millions and causing general chaos and the Secret Service went after anyone with even periphery involvement in the incident.


Remember, this was at a time when the vast majority of people, including law enforcement, wouldn't be able to identify a computer if one fell on their heads. The general lack of knowledge about how these things worked left the Secret Service a the mercy of Bell South's spin doctors and made it rather impossible for them to tell the difference between a harmless game and document furthering a terrorist conspiracy to destroy 911 service across the nation.

That... that is sad but I am so not surprised. Not in the slightest. (and I can't tell which is the sadder part--their actions, or that they didn't surprise me)