Computer underground Digest Wed Apr 22, 1998 Volume 10 : Issue 25 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, #10.25 (Wed, Apr 22, 1998) File 1--Call for Papers - Special Issue of SP&E File 2--Congress May Soon Vote on Spawn of CDA Censorship Bills File 3--"Spam King" abdicates File 4--REVIEW: "Digital Fortress", Dan Brown File 5--Internet porn restriction moving ahead in Congress File 6--Re: "tagging color printers" (CuD 10.22) File 7--Re: File 1--proposal of technical solutions to spam problem File 8--for CuD File 9--Islands in the Clickstream. Densities. April 11, 1998 File 10--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 7 May, 1997) CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION ApPEARS IN THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 07:58:57 -0700 (PDT) From: Gene Spafford Subject: File 1--Call for Papers - Special Issue of SP&E Call for Papers Special issue of "Software Practice & Experience" Experiences with Computer and Network Security July 1, 1998 Later this year or early next year, there will be a special issue of the journal "Software Practice & Experience," with Gene Spafford as the guest editor; if there are enough articles, a second issue may also be published. This special issue will be devoted to experiences with computer and network security. The purpose of Software- Practice & Experience is to convey the results of practical experience (whether successful or not) that might benefit the computing community. The key criterion for a paper is that it make a contribution from which other persons engaged in software design and implementation might benefit. Originality, although important, is secondary, especially in cases where apparently well known techniques do not appear in the readily available literature. Papers describing both `systems' and `applications' software in any computing environment are acceptable. Typical topics include software design and implementation, case studies, studies describing the evolution of software systems, critical appraisals of systems, and the practical aspects of software engineering. Theoretical discussions can be included, but should illuminate the practical aspects of the work, or indicate directions that might lead to better practical systems. This special issue is specifically devoted to issues of computer and network security software. We are seeking high-quality articles relating to the above-mentioned themes. This includes papers on at least the following topics: * access control systems * auditing systems and analysis * misuse and instrusion detection systems * applications of cryptography * secure messaging systems * information protection systems * security of mobile code * security of browsers and related technology * security testing and assurance * firewall construction and testing * experiences with new security programming paradigms * development and experience with "hacking tools" * experiences with patching security flaws Papers may be of any length, ranging from a short note (perhaps a page) to a full treatment of a substantial software system (say 40 pages). To submit a paper to this special issue of the journal, please submit 3 paper copies of your paper, double-spaced, to: SP&E Special Issue Submissions c/o Prof. Eugene Spafford Department of Computer Sciences Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907-1398 Articles should be submitted when ready, and preferably by July 1, 1998 so as to allow sufficient time for peer review and any required edits and resubmission. Expected publication of the issue will be December 1998. If you are interested in being added to the list of potential reviewers for this issue, or if you have questions concerning submissions, contact Spaf at ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 17:44:12 -0500 (EST) From: owner-cyber-liberties@aclu.org Subject: File 2--Congress May Soon Vote on Spawn of CDA Censorship Bills CYBER-LIBERTIES UPDATE April 7, 1998 7Congress May Soon Vote on Spawn of CDA Censorship Bills ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Congress May Soon Vote on Spawn of CDA Censorship Bills The Senate Commerce Committee recently approved two bills that may soon go to a floor vote that reconstruct the unconstitutional provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act and remove power from parents and local communities to decide how to help children use the Internet safely. The ACLU dubbed the bills "spawn of CDA," saying in a letter to the committee that the proposals fly in the face of the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in ACLU v. Reno and will restrict protected speech on the Internet. Ignoring these warnings, the Commerce Committee passed Senate Bill 1619, the Internet School Filtering Act, by a unanimous voice vote. The bill, sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, requires all public libraries and schools that receive federal funds for Internet access to use blocking software. The second bill, S. 1482, was sponsored by Senator Dan Coats, R-IN. Dubbed "Son of CDA," its thrust is identical to the ill-fated Communications Decency Act, which was unanimously overturned last year by the United States Supreme Court in Reno v ACLU. The lone dissenter in that voice vote was Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, who criticized the "one-size-fits-all Washington approach" to regulating the Internet. Congress is obviously enjoying the free political ride these bills provide, with little thought for the taxpayers who will ultimately pay the price when the courts strike them down, said Ann Beeson, ACLU Staff Attorney. In an ACLU letter to the Senate Committee about the Internet Filtering Act, the group said, "blocking software restricts access to valuable, protected online speech about topics including safe sex, AIDS and even web sites posted by religious groups such as the Society of Friends and the Glide United Methodist Church." The ACLU is also working with 37 organizations that are members of the Internet Free Expression Alliance (IFEA) on efforts to dissuade Congress from passing the laws. The ACLU and IFEA members continue to emphasize that parents and teachers, not the government, should provide minors with guidance about accessing the Internet. The Coats bill, which attempts to narrow the CDA's restrictions to speech that is "harmful to minors," is also unconstitutional, the groups said, because such speech is "unquestionably protected by the Constitution when communicated among adults." The bill would impose criminal penalties on any sites with a commercial component that provide access to inappropriate material without requiring age verification. The definition of commercial distributor could include any site from amazon.com to individual home pages that have banner advertisements. The bill also "fails to make any distinction between material that may be harmful to a six-year-old but valuable for a 16-year-old, such as safer-sex information," the ACLU letter said. Some Congressional staff members believe the bills may go to a floor vote shortly after Congress spring recess. Take action against these bills by sending a message to Congress that you oppose these bills. You may send a fax in just a few moments by visiting the In Congress section of the ACLU Freedom Network web page, online at: More information can also be found online at the Internet Free Expression Alliance home page, online at ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Update is a bi-weekly e-zine on cyber-liberties cases and controversies at the state and federal level. Questions or comments can be sent to Cassidy Sehgal at csehgal@aclu.org. Past issues are archived at: To subscribe to the ACLU Cyber-Liberties Update, send a message to majordomo@aclu.org with "subscribe Cyber-Liberties" in the body of your message. To terminate your subscription, send a message to majordomo@aclu.org with "unsubscribe Cyber-Liberties" in the body. FOR GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE ACLU, WRITE TO info@aclu.org. SEE US ON THE WEB AT AND AMERICA ONLINE KEYWORD: ACLU ------------------------------ From: "Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro" Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 22:36:30 +0000 Subject: File 3--"Spam King" abdicates Thursday April 16 11:17 AM EDT "Spam King" abdicates PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - "The Spam King," one of the most notorious junk e-mailers on the Internet, says he has abdicated his throne and promises never to sin again. But not everyone believes him. Sanford Wallace, 29-year-old president of Cyber Promotions Inc., abruptly announced his decision to a legion of long-time adversaries who frequent a newsgroup dedicated to fighting bulk e-mail promotions. The term "spamming" was derived from a "Monty Python" sketch in which a waitress offers diners a choice of "spam, spam, spam, spam and spam." As the Internet's so-called Spam King, Wallace once boasted that his Philadelphia-based firm was sending out 25 million promotional e-mails daily on behalf of himself and his clients. But in his parting message, posted last weekend, he said he had not only abandoned the practice but would support anti-spam legislation. "I will never go back to spamming," he wrote. "I apologize for my past actions." He added that although there was money in spamming, profits were outweighed by risks. Some anti-spam activists welcomed the news as a sign that the battle had turned in their favor. But others remained suspicious, recalling that Wallace had once previously promised to desist and form a direct mailing standards organization. His latest change of heart followed a futile six-month attempt to get his operation back online after an angry service provider cut him off. He also had been saddled with expensive legal settlements, ending with a judgment against him last week over unsolicited faxes. Wallace could not be reached for comment. ^REUTERS@ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 08:38:02 -0800 From: "Rob Slade" Subject: File 4--REVIEW: "Digital Fortress", Dan Brown BKDGTLFT.RVW 980222 "Digital Fortress", Dan Brown, 1998, 0-312-18087-X, U$24.95/C$33.95 %A Dan Brown danbrown@digitalfortress.com %C 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010 %D 1998 %G 0-312-18087-X %I St. Martin's Press %O U$24.95/C$33.95 212-674-5151 fax 800-288-2131 www.stmartins.com %P 384 p. %T "Digital Fortress" Dear Dan, Thanks for getting St. Martin's to send along the book. I enjoyed it a lot. Your characters are great, and the device of having the physical "street" action run in parallel with the cerebrations going on in Crypto was quite effective. It lost a little when the action in Crypto got physical, and at times the street activity skated a bit close to farce, but that's a fine line with thrillers anyway. You have a fine touch with dialogue, and the misunderstandings caused by specific messages was particularly realistic. (Although, if I may say, the people who staff your command center are a bit thick: I got it sixteen pages before they did.) However, I suspect that whoever suggested the review project to you didn't tell you the whole story. The books reviewed here are critiqued on the basis of technology, including the fiction. And on that score, well, there are a few things you might want to reconsider on your next effort. I will say that you have included a good presentation of ciphering, although you sometimes seem to get codes and ciphers confused. ("Without wax" is a code, and therefore not subject to decryption.) You have also stressed the importance of key lengths, which, along with the algorithm used, is critical to determining the strength of encryption. Cryptographic key length is usually expressed in bits, but you often refer to keys with different lengths of characters. A character is usually measured as a byte, or eight bits. (Incidentally, ASCII characters were original defined as seven bits, so there are only 128, not 256.) Let me point out, though, that *adding* a single bit (not character) to a key length is generally considered to double the key space, essentially doubling the time necessary to crack a given key. Let's start with arithmetic. If your TRANSLTR superdecrypter is able to crack a 64 *character* key in ten minutes, a 65 character key will take about a day. A 66 character key will need about four months. However, in the book, a 10,000 bit key, which is equivalent to 1,250 bytes and roughly twenty *times* as long as your 64 byte key, only takes an hour. A key length a hundred times as long as the 10,000 bits takes only three hours. Sticking with calculations, I note that your command center, dominated by a 30' by 40' video wall, required the excavation of 250 metric tons of earth. If so, the room is less than eight feet from front to back, even if it was earth that was excavated and not rock, as one might expect at 214 feet down. In the same vein, TRANSLTR is housed in something no more than twenty three feet across and eight stories deep. But if we assume that the three million processors in it are no more advanced than, say, Pentiums, then the processors themselves are going to occupy a solid block of space ten feet thick and five stories high, even if the "spray-seal" doesn't add too much bulk. (I assume that by "VSLI" you mean VLSI, very large scale integration?) This disregards the space needed for memory, support chips, the boards themselves, cabling, interfaces, catwalks, and the oft-mentioned generators and cooling system, never mind enough air to support a fire. (While we are on the subject, we might as well mention chemistry: fire consumes oxygen, it doesn't usually release it.) A short detour via linguistics. Japanese ideographs are, as you say, based on Chinese ideographs. The similarity is not confined to the form of the symbols, though: enough of the meaning should come through in either language. (Of course, if you have the actual symbols, it should be clear which language is being used. The biggest problem would be in determining representation for the symbols. Unicode, anyone?) And, finally, to computers. Just to get these points out of the way, Grace Murray Hopper's moth was found in the Mark II, not the Mark I, and was not the first use of the term "bug" (although it may have been the origin of the use of "debugging"). PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is not an algorithm, although it is one of the most widely used implementations. First of all, you can't weld ceramic, and secondly, if you do weld the computer shut, you have rendered it instantly obsolete. Even Deep Blue got rebuilt between matches. Next, it makes no sense to say that the computer uses quantum states "rather than" binary for storage. Binary is, in a basic sense, a quantum state, and quantum physics could be used to build devices that store binary information. (All information can be stored in a binary system.) Also, I know about silicon, CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor), and gallium- arsenide but ... titanium-strontium? And, OK, I know titanium burns, but you have to get it pretty darn hot in order to do so. Yes, some languages are similar enough that it makes it easy for someone who has learned one to learn the other. However, it doesn't mean that you automatically know how to use a third. When programs are created, though, they are generally compiled into machine language. (Certainly programs in Pascal and C are.) That means it doesn't matter what languages you know: typing source commands into the keyboard isn't going to affect the running program. Some scripting languages use the source files, but Pascal and C don't qualify. But the difference between source and object code raises another point: the net would not automatically adopt an encryption standard without having the source code and a description of the algorithm to examine. The source code for PGP is available, and many people compile their program directly from the source, not trusting an already compiled version. Therefore, a "trap-doored" Digital Fortress would be detected almost immediately. (The publication of the Skipjack algorithm did result in the detection of a bug: ironically the bug would have let the public use non-escrowed keys with it, rendering the government's attempt to read messages much more difficult.) Your email tracer doesn't make any sense: if you can't find the guy, how can you find his site? Also, even if you could link back to him somehow, as I get everlastingly tired of repeating, you can't send programs in text messages (at least, not without it being blindingly obvious). More importantly, it doesn't matter how powerful your computer is, you can't decrypt a message with a key if you don't know the algorithm. Key length is important, but so is the algorithm used. A 56 bit (that's seven bytes, by the way) key can be very strong in one algorithm, and relatively weak in another. Also, the importance of public-key encryption does not lie simply in the strength of the algorithm. It is the "public" aspect that is so important. Correspondents who have not met can be completely sure of the authentication of the other without ever knowing identities. A fraudulent "North Dakota" would not be a problem to someone who really knew about encryption. Finally, there is my field, viruses. It makes no sense to create a virus for a one-of-a-kind computer, since viruses, as you eventually do point out, are meant to reproduce. Most of what you say about viruses makes no sense, including "mutation strings" and "rotating cleartext." Viruses do not infect data, or, if they do, they just corrupt it, rather than continuing to spread. I suppose you can "cross-breed [viruses] into oblivion," but it's easier to delete than overwrite them. And finally, what you have isn't a virus, and, no, it isn't a worm either. (Worms reproduce, too.) What you have is the classic, common or garden trojan horse. The bane of greedy net surfers everywhere. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998 BKDGTLFT.RVW 980222 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 Apr 1998 14:20:54 -0800 From: "(--Todd Lappin-->)" Subject: File 5--Internet porn restriction moving ahead in Congress Internet porn restriction moving ahead in Congress WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - Legislation to restrict pornography on the Internet, backed by conservative lawmakers but opposed by civil libertarians, is picking up momentum, Congressional staff members said on Thursday. Last month, the Senate Commerce Committee approved a bill authored by Dan Coats, Republican of Indiana, that would require commercial Internet sites containing material deemed harmful to minors to prohibit access by children. Within a few weeks, a companion bill will be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Republicans Mike Oxley of Ohio and Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania, an Oxley staffer said. "Senator Coats has done a good job of building momentum," the staffer said. ------------------------------ From: "Frank Knobbe" Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 23:07:17 -0600 Subject: File 6--Re: "tagging color printers" (CuD 10.22) > Date--06 Apr 1998 15:29:44 -0400 > From--Mark Atwood > Subject--File 3--US Govt wants to "tag" color printers [...] > "In addition, Castle said, practical and realistic measures to tag > scanners and printers must be considered, in order to identify the > source of the counterfeit notes." > > In other words, he wants every color printer to embed some sort of > signature into its output, so that the "authorities" can determine > where it came from. > > I remember, back in high school civics, one of the bits of patriotic > propaganda that was dispenced to us, was that the USSR required all > photocopiers to embed a machine id and page number into its output, > so that the "authorites" could control their use as publishing > tools. > > Now the USA wants to do the same thing. [...] Great! I'm so curious to see how they are gonna tackle this issue. Put an ID on top of the page? Sure, go right ahead, I have to use my scissors anyway to cut out the Lincoln's. The only way this would work, would be to overlay the copy with a fine barcode type output, where the lines stretch across the whole page. Which means the ID changes when the fuser gets old'n'dirty. Plus, imagine how many people would return that copier because "it's broke and procudes crappy output". How about mandatory copier paper with a watermark? All you need to do is equip the copier's paper cassette with a padlock. Of course, alternatively you could try to improve security with newer dollar bills that have additional security features such as holograms, etc. but that would be too easy.... The world is going crazy, and it's not gonna get better... ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 10:47:04 -0500 From: Neil Rickert Subject: File 7--Re: File 1--proposal of technical solutions to spam problem "Vladimir Z. Nuri" writes: >the software problem > Currently the large mass of internet sites use a mail program called > Sendmail developed chiefly by Eric Allman. Will all due respect to the > author and maintainers, IMHO the program is an embodiment in awkward > and monolithic legacy software. It features many extremely arcane > syntax rules and inscrutable conventions. Vladimir has misdiagnosed the problem. Granted, most systems use sendmail, and granted, sendmail uses methods that many consider arcane and inscrutable. But that is mostly a matter of internal design, and has very little to do with spam. If Vladimir wants to criticize, he should get to the heart of the matter, which is the SMTP protocol. This protocol requires no sender authentication (other than a simple syntax check), and could not easily be extended to prevent spam. The nucleus of the problem really goes back to the way the network has evolved. In its early days most computing was done by multi-user systems. Thus there was a core of trustworthy machines administered by technically compentent professionals, most of whom had a sense of ethics and public responsibility. Most of the network protocols were designed under the assumption that the machines you would communicate were trustworthy. However, we now have a network composed mostly of individual machines, too often untrustworthy, and usually run by novices and in some case by unethical novices (spammers, for example). There is little hope of resolving the spam situation unless we recognize the nature of the problem. The best solution would be a return to the idea of a central core of trustworthy machines. This would still allow a network of mostly individual machines. But it would require that each individual machine forward outgoing mail to a core machine that is capable of identifying it. And each non-core machine would only accept email from its own users or from a core machine. And each core machine would only accept email from other core machines or from machines it could identify and authenticate. Then you would have to design new protocols which carried authentication information in the message envelope. Spam is only partly a technical problem. It is partly a social problem. We could not re-establish a core of trustworthy machines without setting up social conventions to accredit those machines, and to identify which they are. And we could not find a technical solution to network problems such as spam without some concept of trustworthy machines. > One of the deficiencies in sendmail is the inability to reject email > based on header information alone. The alternative would be like having a "big brother" or "post office nanny" machine attached to your mailbox, which automatically shreds mail if it does not begin with "Dear person" and end with "Yours sincerely." We don't need such a machine. Automated rejection of email on the basis of header information is *evil*. What is needed is some sort of authentication information, including an estimation of the degree of trust to be placed in the purported origin of the message. This information should be transported in the envelope (separate from the message content and headers), so that it can be dynamically updated as the mail is tranferred between machines. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 21:05:20 -0400 From: Jonathan Wallace Subject: File 8--for CuD FEDERAL COURTS USE CENSORWARE; FREE SPEECH ADVOCATES OBJECT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Jonathan Wallace daytime: 212-513-7777 evening: 718-797-9808 email: jw@bway.net New York, April 22, 1998--The Censorware Project , an organization which battles the use of blocking software by public institutions including schools and libraries, announced today that it has learned that federal courts are using the WebSENSE censorware product, at least in the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth judicial circuits (covering twenty-two states and Guam). WebSENSE was installed by the Administrative Office of the Courts, apparently without the knowledge or consent of the judges themselves. "I am really disturbed that the federal court administrators have installed censorware, especially in light of federal judge Leonie Brinkema's recent decision in the Loudoun County, Virginia case," said James Tyre, a First Amendment attorney who is a founding member of the Censorware Project. "In that decision, available at http://www.venable.com/ORACLE/opinion.htm, the judge suggested that blocking a web site in a library is like pulling a book from the shelves. It is particularly shocking that the Administrative Office of the Courts thinks that federal judges need to be protected against the Internet--and that our tax money is being spent to buy censorware for this purpose. It would be ironic indeed if Judge Brinkema is prevented by WebSENSE from visiting the very sites at issue in the Loudoun County case, blocked by X-Stop, a competitor of WebSENSE." One site erroneously blocked by the WebSENSE product under its "Hacking" category is http://www.digicrime.com -- a humorous site created by security experts to educate the public about computer crime. "WebSENSE apparently took the site for a real computer crime site," Tyre said. "DigiCrime is not just one bad block out of 200,000: it is one of 54 hand-picked sites by the makers of WebSENSE itself included in the downloadable demo versions of the product. Although The Censorware Project has not done a full analysis of WebSENSE, one must seriously question its claims to accuracy if it cannot even get its demo blocks right." WebSENSE also reportedly blocks A Different Light Bookstore, http://www.adlbooks.com/, specializing in gay or lesbian literature. The company claims that the product blocks 200,000 sites. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 16:07:31 -0500 From: Richard Thieme Subject: File 9--Islands in the Clickstream. Densities. April 11, 1998 Islands in the Clickstream: Densities Steven Hawking noted in a netcast from the White House that the next generation of humans will live inside a common sense world of quantum physics the way we have lived inside a Newtonian landscape. "Common sense" is simply what we're taught to see, he said, which is why new truths always appear at the edges of our thinking. Or, as George Bernard Shaw put it, " All great truth begins as blasphemy." Is it any wonder we are all beset by "cognitive dissonance" and see our reality-frames flickering the way clairvoyants (excuse me, "remote viewers") see images of distant sites? One moment we are living happily inside Newtonian space, walking down a straight sidewalk toward a right-angled corner when poof! with a puff of smoke, we experience ourselves bent along a trajectory like light pulled by an immense gravitational tug. Then we remember that how light bends IS gravity and what we thought was a "pull" is simply the topography of energy wrinkling and sliding into whorls of various densities. In a museum the other day I watched a marble spiraling down a funnel of smooth wood, circling toward the vortex. I thought of light travelling along the curves and bumps of space-time ("the universe is shaped like a potato," Einstein said, "finite but unbounded.") I thought of gravitational lenses, created when galaxies that are closer to us magnify and distort more distant galaxies. Einstein predicted sixty years ago that a massive object would bend and intensify light, generating multiple images or stretching an image into an arc. When everything lines up just right, the distortion becomes a perfect circle, like the galaxy pictured last week in Science News (Vol. 153, No. 114). That's the long view. Turn the telescope around to see what's happening right here in our own digital neighborhood. Web sites are best characterized not by size but by density. A map of cyberspace would look like millions of galaxies and a map of the traffic between sites would look like a photo of electromagnetic energy across the entire spectrum. A browser is a knowledge engine that organizes information in flux so it appears momentarily frozen. A site such as Yahoo that links links is a kind of gravitational lens that boosts distant clusters into the foreground. If we could see ourselves interacting in cyberspace, we too would look like energy pouring through our monitors and moving at the speed of light toward densities around which our interests coalesce. Our monitors like worm holes let us bypass the long way around. Organizational structures, including web sites, are dissipative structures like whirlpools that retain their shape while exchanging energy and information. Humans too are modular structures of energy and information that interface over the Internet. That map of the energies of cyberspace is really a map of our Mind. Not quite common sense yet, is it? Words slip, slide, decay with imprecision, T. S. Eliot said of his efforts to fix in poetic form the world he discerned. In the world of printed text, the illusion that words and meanings are fixed is magnified. The same words in pixels are obviously transitory. Our media too function like gravitational lenses, magnifying meanings intrinsic to their nature. The digital world builds a "common sense reality" congruent with the quantum world, communicating by its very nature that words, meanings, and all things slip, slide away. We build this island for ourselves in the always sea and comfort ourselves with the illusion that we are on dry land. The trajectories of the energies of our lives - how they are organized, aimed, and spent- are determined by our deepest intentionality. How we intend to live our lives is how we wind up living them. Cyberspace is a training ground for learning to live and move at the speed of our minds, the speed of light, to inhabit a landscape that morphs or changes shape according to our will, intention, and ultimate purpose. The "sites" in our minds grow denser when our intentions coalesce like millions of marbles rolling simultaneously toward a single vortex. Space, time and causality may be woven into the very fabric of our minds, as Kant said, but in a quantum landscape, causality is a very different animal. An effect can precede its own cause. Which is exactly how our minds operate. Consciousness is always consciousness for or toward some end, always an arrow aimed toward a potentiality or possibility. As a mental construct, the image comes first. The effect precedes the cause and causes the effect to come into being. That's why some think consciousness is the origin as well as the goal of evolution. A recent reflection on maps, filters, and belief systems ("Imaginary Gardens - Filters. Filters of Filters.") brought from a reader an account of the moment he realized how much the Mercator projection exaggerated the size of the European community. He recalled the first time he looked at Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map that looks at the world from the North Pole rather than the equator. From that point of view, the world is seen as a single unified landmass. The world has never looked the same to him since Consciousness manifests itself in a visible medium like the Internet so we can see it. We can never see the thing itself, because there is no thing there. Nothing. But we can see some of the infinite ways it manifests itself. Working and playing on the Internet is one way to practice handling ourselves in a quantum world that is fluid, modular, and interactive, a trans-planetary world, a trans-galactic world emerging on the edge of the grid in which we have been living. That grid contained reality in nice neat boxes. But the grid is flexing, morphing like an animation even as we look at it, turning into another of its many possibilities. Seen, of course - it's only common sense, isn't it?- from just one of its infinitely many points of view. ********************************************************************** 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, 7 May 1997 22:51:01 CST From: CuD Moderators Subject: File 10--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 7 May, 1997) 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. The editors may be contacted by voice (815-753-6436), fax (815-753-6302) or U.S. mail at: Jim Thomas, Department of Sociology, NIU, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA. 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