Computer underground Digest Wed 4 Nov, 1998 Volume 10 : Issue 54 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, #10.54 (Wed, 4 Nov, 1998) File 1--[press] XS4ALL to appear in Court File 2--Some Snippets on Technology & Education (From Netfuture #79) File 3--Islands in the Clickstream. Modules and Metaphors File 4--Crypto lunacy hits the UK. File 5--EFF Search for Executive Director File 6--Tim O'Reilly's "Open Letter to Microsoft" File 7--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: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 10:44:51 +0100 From: Maurice Wessling Subject: File 1--[press] XS4ALL to appear in Court Press release Amsterdam, 5 november 1998. XS4ALL to appear in Court XS4ALL has been summoned to appear in Court in Utrecht on 20 November 1998 in connection with its refusal to assist with an Internet tap. The facts In November 1997, XS4ALL refused to comply with an order of the Ministry of Justice to tap the Internet communications of one of its users in connection with a criminal investigation. XS4ALL takes the view that there are insufficient legal grounds for the order. XS4ALL therefore regards the order as an illegal method of investigation. On 31 October 1997, a detective and a computer expert from the Forensic Science Laboratory delivered the order to XS4ALL. The Ministry of Justice wanted XS4ALL to tap all Internet communications to and from the user for a month, and pass the information on to the police. This would cover e-mail, World Wide Web, news groups, IRC and all other Internet services used by this person. XS4ALL was to make all necessary technical provisions itself. The reason for refusing XS4ALL does not wish to cooperate with invasions of privacy without an adequate legal basis. Furthermore, XS4ALL has a commercial interest, in that it cannot risk its users taking civil actions against it for acting unlawfully. This could happen in the event of a provider making an intervention like this without a foundation in law. Cooperating with the order could set an undesirable precedent with far-reaching consequences for the privacy of all Internet users in the Netherlands. The legal basis for the order The Ministry of Justice based its order on Article 125(i) of the Netherlands Code of Criminal Procedure (Wetboek van Strafvordering). This Article was introduced in 1993 as part of the Computer Crime Act. It gives examining magistrates the power, during preliminary inquiries, to order third parties to hand over data stored in computers in the interests of reaching the truth. The history of the legislation shows that it was never intended that this provision should be used for orders covering future periods. The legislature is still working on provisions to fill that gap in the arsenal of investigation methods, by analogy with the tapping of telephone conversations (Article 125(g), Code of Criminal Procedure). The Constitution and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms require a precise legal basis for any invasions of fundamental rights such as privacy and the privacy of correspondence. Telecommunications Act The First Chamber has very recently passed the new Telecommunications Act. This means tapping Internet communications will become legally possible in the near future. At a conference organized by XS4ALL and De Balie in February 1998, it was clear that lawyers and market participants are very critical of this new legislation. For example, the government has never said just why large-scale tapping, including of Internet communications, is supposed to be an effective, and cost-effective method of investigation. A recent report commissioned by the European Parliament shows that the European Union has collaborated with the American FBI to plan an extensive European tapping network, without consulting national parliaments. The new Telecommunications Act creates the necessary conditions for such a network. More information The case against XS4ALL will be heard on Friday, 20 November at 11 a.m. in de District Court, Hamburgerstraat 28, Utrecht, Netherlands. For previous releases also see: http://www.xs4all.nl/spotlight/tap_e.html Press contact: Maurice Wessling XS4ALL Internet BV tel. +31 20 3987654 maurice@xs4all.nl ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 14:55:47 -0500 From: Stephen Talbott Subject: File 2--Some Snippets on Technology & Education (From Netfuture #79) ((MODERATORS' NOTE: Here are a few exerpts from NETFUTURE address education and computers. Over the next few months, CuD will increase commentary on computer-enhanced education, especially distance learning. Steve Talbott's NETFUTURE is an excellent source for those those interested in this topic)). NETFUTURE Technology and Human Responsibility ========================================================================== Issue #79 A Publication of The Nature Institute October 27, 1998 ========================================================================== Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com) On the Web: http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/ You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes. ========================================================================== WHY INFORMATION IS NOT ENOUGH Lowell Monke (lm7846s@acad.drake.edu) Letter from Des Moines October 27, 1998 TALES FROM A HIGH SCHOOL COMPUTER LAB Recently, one of my students designed and managed a Web page for a project involving the comparison of cultures from various parts of the world. This student gathered and categorized hundreds of messages so that others could reference all contributions easily. For several months he did just what proponents of "Information Age Education" say we need to teach our students to do: he organized, selected, processed and even electronically published information that was sent to him every day. He did such a good job and was so proud of his work that we decided he should enter the Web page in a contest. But the entry form completely baffled him. He spent an hour pondering and asking me for help with the question, "What is the value of your project?" With all of his hard work he didn't seem to have any idea how to express why he had spent so much time developing this extensive body of information. Finally, I gave in and told him what I thought the value of his project was but it did little good. He soon came back, unable to remember the exact words I had used. This nice, hard-working young man, who can gather and process information off the 'Net so well, has nevertheless been failed by all of us in the educational system. His problem had nothing to do with technology or information and couldn't be fixed by them. His problem was lack of insight, the inability to discover meaning by finding relations between experiences and ideas. In a truly educational environment experiences and ideas interact to create knowledge and the insights that feed the seed of wisdom. This recalls T. S. Eliot's famous lament, "Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?" (1963, 147). Still, our infatuation with technology has blinded us to this discrimination and resulted in data and information being lifted to exalted status. The promoters of information have inflated its definition to absurd dimensions (Machlup 1983). John Perry Barlow (1996), for example, claims that "Information is an activity. Information is a life form. Information is a relationship". As information becomes a "living" entity inhabiting the electronic grid, once-prized attributes of human life like wisdom and truth -- which technology cannot traffic -- have become empty terms almost embarrassing to utter. "Living in the bureaucracies of information, we don't venture a claim to that kind of understanding" (Birkerts 1995, 74). Even in education we no longer speak in those terms, and end up with students who have no idea how to find meaning in the information they process. As Theodore Roszak has pointed out, "An excess of information may actually crowd out ideas, leaving the mind (young minds especially) distracted by sterile, disconnected facts, lost among the shapeless heaps of data" (1986, 88). The Internet provides us with nothing so much as an excess of information. How the Quest for Power Displaces Learning ---------------------------------- So why have so many embraced information as the cornucopia of education? It is my contention that it is, in part, because they have confused and substituted for the greater purpose of education -- the development of a responsible, thoughtful individual able to live a fulfilling life -- its occasional consequence, power. The real significance of the Internet for students lies not in its educative capacities but in the power it confers. Look carefully at the hype swirling around the 'Net as a means of education and you will find that it is all about power, or what Perelman (1992) calls "intellectual capital": power to access information any time from any place; the power to "go" and communicate with anyone anywhere in the world; the power not only to access but to publish mountains of information. In short, the power to overcome time, distance and the limitations of our own physical bodies. Learning in the era of the 'Net tends to get degraded from comprehending ideas through experience and thought into enhancing personal power through the possession of information. All of the attributes of power cited above may be valuable in the world of business or politics, but in the realm of education they are deadening. They focus attention not on developing thoughtfulness and insights but on improving performance. In part because of the mindset encouraged by the computer, the words of Kenneth Keniston are, if anything, even more on target today than they were when he spoke them over a decade ago: we measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principle yardstick for our definition of our children's worth (Keniston, quoted in Elkind 1984, 53). It is the pursuit of ever higher levels of performance that guides educational policy today, not a concern for developing strong, deep comprehension of the world. Students have to produce measurable skills at every rung of the educational ladder. With the emphasis on performance and the measurability of that performance, there is neither the time nor the payoff for letting children sink those deeper, less measurable roots of understanding from which meaningful knowledge can eventually emerge. Rather, we search for the vendor who can sell us the machinery with the necessary skill built into it to help the children meet decontextualized standards of performance. And already a disturbing trend can be observed: the more we rely on the ever increasing capabilities of the machinery, the more time and effort we invest in learning the technical skills necessary to get performance out of the machine. From the moment our children enter the school system we systematically sacrifice reflection upon ideas and experiences for the development of skills that will "empower" them. And more and more this empowerment is seen as coming through the computer-based accumulation and manipulation of information. References ---------- Birkerts, Sven. *The Gutenberg Elegies -- The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age*. Faber and Faber, Boston 1994. Barlow, John. *The Economy of Ideas*, part 2. www.nirvanet.fr/bienvenue/cybergate-fr/cibrary-fr/economy2-xfr.html. 1996. Eliot, T.S. "Choruses from The Rock". *Collected Poems 1909-1962*. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1963. Elkind, David. *The Hurried Child -- Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon*. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA 1981. IBM. "IBM's Reinventing Education Partnerships," advertisement in *The New Yorker*, p. 125, October 20 & 27, 1997. Machlup, Fritz. "Semantic Quirks in Studies of Information" in *The Study of Information*, eds. Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield. Wiley, NY 1983. Perelman, Lewis. *School's Out*. Avon Books, NY 1992. Rheingold, Howard. *The Virtual Community*. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA 1993. Roszak, Theodore. *The Making of a Counter Culture -- Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition*. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY 1969. Weizenbaum, Joseph. *Computer Power and Human Reason -- From Judgment to Calculation*. W. H. Freeman and Company, New York 1976. ========================================================================== ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER NETFUTURE is a newsletter and forwarding service dealing with technology and human responsibility. It is published by The Nature Institute, 169 Route 21C, Ghent NY 12075 (tel: 518-672-0116). The list server is hosted by the UDT Core Programme of the International Federation of Library Associations. Postings occur roughly every couple of weeks. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of *The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst*. Copyright 1998 by The Nature Institute. You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes. You may also redistribute individual articles in their entirety, provided the NETFUTURE url and this paragraph are attached. Current and past issues of NETFUTURE are available on the Web: http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/ http://www.ifla.org/udt/nf/ (mirror site) http://ifla.inist.fr/VI/5/nf/ (mirror site) To subscribe to NETFUTURE send the message, "subscribe netfuture yourfirstname yourlastname", to listserv@infoserv.nlc-bnc.ca . No subject line is needed. To unsubscribe, send the message, "signoff netfuture". Send comments or material for publication to Steve Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com). If you have problems subscribing or unsubscribing, send mail to: netfuture-request@infoserv.nlc-bnc.ca ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 14:59:00 -0500 From: Richard Thieme Subject: File 3--Islands in the Clickstream. Modules and Metaphors 1998 Islands in the Clickstream: Modules and Metaphors As the pace of reorganization has accelerated, the modular construction of reality has become the norm. Businesses, governments, and individuals have shortened the horizon of planning and hold "long range planning" lightly, knowing that the variables that will interact to create the future are too many to be factored. In our personal lives, we identify "developmental stages" and imagine the trajectory of our lives as a long swim from island to island. When the experience of our lives is congruent with our descriptions of them, it feels like we know what we're talking about. The metaphors we have adopted become mistaken for literal descriptions of the landscape, protecting us from "the shocks and changes that keep us sane." Our beliefs work as a filter until they don't. When I look at my current assumptions about modular life, I see that many of them derive from my interaction with the digital world. There (or here) I experience nested levels of modular reality that mediate the unthinkable complexity of our civilization. "Civilization" is a name for the way we mediate energy and information. Information is retained in storage media appropriate to the task, but all media are dead or dying, including ourselves. Once organic media like dinosaurs or Neanderthals are no longer viable, they disappear. The evidence indicates that all storage devices are temporary, modular pieces that snap together in serial time as well as horizontally in space. Long before humans worried about killing off other species, thousands of organic media disappeared along with their unique ways of filtering data. Many of the tidbits of information that find their way to my desktop computer concern genetic engineering and the splicing of humans and computers into new symbiotic configurations. Sheep ranchers in Australia, for example, are injecting Bioclip, a naturally occurring protein, into sheep to cause fleeces to drop out. That saves money on shearing. But sheep shearers have a romantic image of themselves - as well as a union. They will fight to save the structure of their lives and the self-image with which it is fused, but it's only a holding action. It's more likely that they'll adapt, die, or save "Sheep Shearing Land" as a simulated touristic environment for children to visit like a "Living Farm." Clearly evolution was served by a conservative stance toward memory storage and knowledge modification. Tribes and cultures that resisted change survived for a while. But our environment is changing rapidly, so how do we change modules in a gradual way while still changing them as fast as necessary to stay connected to the changing environment? And when those environments are themselves symbolic modules, the simulated life we call "life" consists of a mental game, maintaining equilibrium among nested levels of symbolic reality that exist at different levels of complexity. Just like a computer game. Which is exactly what, for many of us, life has become. Life inside a simulated civilization rewards those who are detached from their bodies until it doesn't. Until the cost of living inside simulated images butts heads with the "givens" of our lives - the way our bodies regulate themselves automatically, the way life on earth has evolved to deal with this planet at this point in time. Because I studied literature in my formative years and then worked as an Episcopal priest for sixteen years, I learned how the modular symbols that make the most sense of our lives are constitutive of our self-image both as individuals and societies. In any religion, the "conversion process" involves the reconstruction of reality, substituting modular images that disclose life-giving possibilities for those that are dead-ends. Religious communities maintain those symbols at the center of their affirmations. When we think those images are identical with reality, we think we are them and they are us. That those images might change threatens who we think we are. But the evidence is that we are not and never have been who we think we are. All of it - businesses, individuals, religions, societies - are always morphing. The symbols of our dominant religions evolved when the medium of writing enabled human experience to be reconstructed in written images. Now that our images are digital, that is, interactive, modular, and fluid, our communities, our global economy, our religions are reconstructing themselves in ways aligned not only with those images but with how those images are generated. Our experience is back-engineered from our interaction with our technologies of information and communication. Businesses see this or, to their peril, do not see it, and disappear. The reorganization of work, the manufacture and distribution of goods, services, and images, is driven by a technological revolution. Because organized religions are part of the world, they too are being reinvented. And because religions are predicated on a particular definition of self, as that sense of self is altered by the digital world, religious structures will have to morph to connect with our intuitive grasp of experience, our "common sense," which is simply what we have been taught to perceive or believe. Genetic engineering is a way of altering the information storage and delivery of complex systems. So are computer networks. So are we. We are a medium of exchange between "organic" systems and "inorganic." But those names are already obsolete. The difference between a pacemaker and a chip in our heads is one of degree, not kind, and so are the distinctions we create and then believe that describe both "body" and "soul" - another dichotomy stretched to the breaking point. The simple truth is, we are inventing ourselves. But maybe - from the point of view of the single system that is the universe -we always have. It's just that "we" are so much bigger than we knew. We thought that our "species," one of many modular conscious molecular clusters, was unique. Instead, it looks as if life is singular, the universe gregarious, and what it will all look like in a hundred years to whoever calls themselves human is beyond our capacity to imagine. ********************************************************************** 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: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 11:04:01 +0000 From: Stefan Magdalinski Subject: File 4--Crypto lunacy hits the UK. Yoz, as you can see, I've submitted your mail note to CU-DIGEST. Stefan ------ I'm sending this to all@tdv.com because not only is it important to the company, but also to every individual in it. Your privacy is at risk, business on the Internet is at risk, and you should know about it. The Department of Trade and Industry has just announced the "Millennium Bug and Electronic Commerce" bill, which contains new legislation and controls relating to encryption services, mainly implementing key escrow policies as law. The above sentence will probably look meaningless to most people reading it, which is why nobody's shouting particularly loudly at the moment. However, it conceals a whole load of new tactics that will allow the government, police and intelligence services to infringe on civil liberties in new and exciting ways. Basically, the new laws will allow them to listen in on your communications and go after your private data much more easily than they could before, and you won't even know about it, because it'll actually be an offence for them to tell you. The government hates the thought that it can't read your email and is pressuring business to supply only services which it can spy on. It's all to do with encryption technology, which allows you to encode your communications so that only the person intended to receive them can decode them. It may sound complicated, but if you use a mobile phone, ATM card or have ever paid for anything through the Internet, you've probably used cryptography without realising it. In an era where electronic communications of all types are becoming large and vital parts of everyday life, the potential for this bill to wreak havoc with civil liberties grows larger by the day. You wouldn't say that the police should have copies of the key to your front door, so why the key to your computer? This bill is very similar to the infamous "Clipper" bill that the US Government tried and failed to pass a couple of years ago. The bill was blocked after huge pressure from a public that had worked out what was going on; however, the UK bill is being sneaked through very quietly, and not enough people understand it to make a fuss. Ironically, the new legislation is totally contrary to a large chunk of Labour's pre-election manifesto, which stated: "Attempts to control the use of encryption technology are wrong in principle, unworkable in practice, and damaging to the long-term economic value of the information networks." That whole section has since been removed from the manifesto on Labour's website, which is a pity since it's very sensible stuff and chock-full of reasons why the new bill is wrong. The reason why it's relevant to TDV as a company is that electronic commerce relies on cryptography for secure transmission of sensitive financial data, such as credit card details. This legislation makes the use of cryptography in this country much more complicated and difficult, which makes it much harder for companies like us to do business. This is why many large technology companies such as Microsoft, Netscape and Sun Microsystems got together with America's largest civil rights groups to protest against Clipper. In consultation about the UK bill, companies such as BT, Virgin, Microsoft and Demon Internet argued against it. This is another irony: the government is trying to use big business to enforce a law that will make Internet businesses more difficult to operate. Also, because encryption services licenced in other European Union countries will not be recognised by the legislation, it'll make it harder to do business with Europe. This new bill is pretty much bad for everyone except the government and intelligence services, so how can it be stopped? Well, those pushing the bill through are depending on the issues being too complicated for people to realise that their privacy is under threat. They're also relying on most of Britain's big-and-still-growing IT industry to not realise how difficult it'll make everyday business transactions. So, shout about it. The more people who understand the importance of this bill and protest it, the harder it'll be for the government to pass it. (And there's always the old standby, writing to your MP - this'll help since most MPs don't understand the legislation either) Some useful/relevant URLs: Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain have good summaries of the new bill, as well as links and commentary: http://omnisite.liberty.org.uk/cacib/artview.php3?currentgroup=3&pid=15&type =news That section of the pre-election manifesto which was later removed (and which contains great arguments against the bill): http://www.tibus.com/encryptionuk/labour.html A good BBC News piece about crypto regulations: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/special_report/1998/encryption/newsid_57000 /57910.stm Foundation for Information Policy Research - an independent UK body, chaired by Prof. Ross Anderson (UK crypto expert) and funded by Microsoft, with lots of good info: http://www.fipr.org/ How to contact your MP: http://www.locata.co.uk/commons/ yoz@yoz.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 11:52:37 -0500 From: Barry Steinhardt Subject: File 5--EFF Search for Executive Director Dear EFF Colleagues, I write to ask that you widely circulate the attached job announcement for Executive Director of EFF. I have thoroughly enjoyed my tenure at EFF, which is made up of so many fine, dedicated people like yourself.J But, as you know, I have regretfully concluded that my family's situation rules out a move from New York to San Francisco and even prevents me from travelling to the West Coast frequently enough to effectively direct an organization based in the Bay Area. Indeed, I find myself a full fledged member of the "sandwich generation" withJ older parents and young children, both of whom have developed unexpected needs in the last few months. These unforseen developments have forced me to significantly curtail my travel schedule and, unfortunately, even on the Electronic Frontier, there is no substitute for human contact. I will be returning to the ACLU as Associate Director and Chair of the Cyberliberties Task Force by year-end. EFF and ACLU have frequently worked together and I am pleased that the two organizations have agreed to strengthen that bond with a number of cooperative projects. I expect to remain active with EFF in a new capacity and I have accepted Lori Fena's request that I serve on the Search Committee and work with our search firm Isaacson, Miller. Thanks for spreading the word about the position. An Invitation to Apply Executive Director Electronic Frontier Foundation San Francisco, California The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization founded in July, 1990 to protect and promote the basic civil liberties of the users of on-line and emerging technologies.J As the global community has expanded, EFF has helped to shape the electronic frontier, setting the standard for protection of the free exchange of ideas, one of the building blocks of our society.J After splitting his time between New York and San Francisco, current Executive Director Barry Steinhardt is stepping down for family reasons to return to his position of Associate Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. The next Executive Director is expected to expand EFFbs membership and global presence, heighten elected officialsb appreciation and understanding of Internet civil liberties, strengthen the organizationbs infrastructure, and create strategic alliances with individuals, corporations, and civil liberties advocates around the world.J The ideal candidate will combine a deep and abiding commitment to the protection of individual rights with a record of accomplishment in the area of civil liberties and public policy issues surrounding the Global Internet and other emerging technologies. In addition, s/he will have demonstrated successful experience in managing non-profit, membership organizations, and current, active connections within the high technology community. Inquiries, nominations and resumes may be sent in confidence to: Laura Gassner Otting or F. Jay Hall Isaacson, Miller 334 Boylston Street, Suite 500 Boston, MA 02116-3805 Tel: (617) 262-6500, 140 or 142; Fax: (617) 262-6509 E-mail: lotting@imsearch.com or jay@execsearches.com www.execsearches.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 10:39:16 -0800 (PST) From: Sara Winge Subject: File 6--Tim O'Reilly's "Open Letter to Microsoft" FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 4, 1998 CONTACT: Sara Winge, 707/829-0515 x285, sara@oreilly.com http://www.oreilly.com TIM O'REILLY SENDS AN "OPEN LETTER TO MICROSOFT" Tim O'Reilly, President and CEO of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., responds to the "Halloween Document", an internal Microsoft memorandum analyzing Open Source software and its potential impact for Microsoft. The memo, posted on the Internet by Open Source evangelist Eric Raymond two days ago, is at: http://sagan.earthspace.net/~esr/halloween.html ---------------------------- An Open Letter to Microsoft ---------------------------- In the already infamous "Halloween Document", you laid out a strategy for competing with the Open Source movement. You say: "OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market." The point that you seem to miss is that it is these simple, commoditized protocols and a culture of building freely on the work of others that brought us the explosion of innovation known as the Internet. And while the Internet has opened new areas of competition for Microsoft, it has also opened up enormous opportunities. I'm not just talking about new information businesses like Expedia. You have only to look at your two major breadwinners, the Windows operating system and the Office application suite, to see the positive impact of Open Source on your bottom line. Internet-enabling Windows and Office has been the major source of new features that make it worthwhile for customers to buy new systems or upgrade their applications. Lacking the Internet, you would have had to rely on such dubious innovations as Microsoft Bob to drive upgrade revenue. And now you want to undermine Open Source? Try to be serious! The collaborative, massively distributed development process behind the Internet and Open Source projects is not your enemy. It is your friend, the source of basic research that you can turn into your next generation of products. At bottom, the Open Source movement is an expression of the Western academic tradition, innovation and discovery through the free exchange of ideas. You rig that system at your peril. You have only to look at the stagnation of Soviet science and industry under a centralized autocratic system, versus the innovation that happened in our free markets, to see what fate you have in store for yourselves if you succeed. Microsoft is too smart a company to sacrifice long-term vitality for short-term advantage. Instead of trying to crush Open Source, you should follow the lead of companies like O'Reilly, IBM and Silicon Graphics, who are supporting various Open Source communities while finding ways to build commercial added-value products on the open platforms these communities provide. -- Tim O'Reilly President and CEO, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ABOUT O'REILLY & ASSOCIATES O'Reilly & Associates is recognized worldwide for its definitive books on open source software, the Internet, UNIX, programming, and Windows NT. From their pioneering bestseller "The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog" (the book that introduced the Internet to the public) to GNN (the first Internet portal and commercial website) to WebSite (the first web server software for desktop PCs), O'Reilly has been at the forefront of Internet development. Building on its expertise, O'Reilly has also produced award-winning Internet software and innovative web-based courses. The company's active support of open source software extends beyond its publishing program. O'Reilly has taken the lead in promoting and legitimizing open source software by hosting the historic April, 1998 Open Source Summit and producing Open Source Development Day and an annual Perl Conference. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1998 22:51:01 CST From: CuD Moderators Subject: File 7--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 25 Apr, 1998) Cu-Digest is a weekly electronic journal/newsletter. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically. 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