About the Net *we* want: (Call for Papers^H^H^H^H Help!)

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Hi to all of you, 

All the of the people included in the To: header of this mail are Internet
users -aka NetIzens- like me <Salva.Bosque@stud.uni-erlangen.de>, and with
most of you we have already meet and know each other for a while in this
kind of thing called "real life".

So this is *not* a spamming, just wait and read a little bit more before you
press the (D)elete key.

[and oh yeah, this message is being posted at the same time in
misc.news.internet.discuss and the www-talk mailing list. Because I'm
looking hungry for feedback, not only coming from the NetIzens I've meet in
"real life" but from any other people out there willing for expressing his
opinion about the Net nowadays]

In short, I'm looking for your opinions, for your points of view about the
influence of Internet on our society. I'm a catalan guy trying to finish
before the end of this century ;-) his Diplom Thesis here at Erlangen,
Germany. The subject of my Thesis is:

			 Study on the performance
			   of the HTTP protocol,
			    and their efficient
			 realization among others
	    with Formal Description Techniques such as SDL/MSC.
				     
After more than a year engaged with this project, I've realized at last
that an study on HTTP and the Internet in general needs, in my humble
opinion, not only a technical point of view but also at least a little bit
of attention about the influence of our lovely Arpanet'95 on our society
and our lives.

That's why I will try in my paper to, apart from studying the
inefficiencies of the HTTP protocol and proposing some technical
alternatives to improve it, give my *personal* point of view about the
"state of the art" of Arpanet'95. This will include, among others, the
following topics:

	- The possibility for the first time in history to create Virtual
 Communities, groups of people that share just an opinion, an idea or a
 taste and come from different countries, cultures, religions and/or social
 layers.

	- The possibility of what I call "distributed thinking" and
 "distributed programming", too. I think you will agree with me, that
 without Internet we wouldn't have available by now so huge, complex and
 powerful programming efforts such as Lin*x, Emacs, WINE, Hurd and many
 others... I heard somewhere that somebody compared once the Emacs project
 with the landing of man on moon (in greath and complexity terms): no
 company by itself (no IBM, no DEC, no Sun, no Cray Corp.) could have
 *ever* managed to elaborate such a complex programming project like the
 (gnu|x}emacs we can enjoy nowadays. (yeah, I said *enjoy*, you vi-freaks
 out there ;-)

	- [here your ideas and feelings  about what the Internet has
 brought to your lifes]

...but unfortunately not *everything* on the Net is so fine and
beatific. I can see among others the following dangers on our lovely
Arpanet95: 

	- Ok, on the Net you can find *everything*. But are we the humans
 ready to assimilate accordingly all this huge amount of information that
 changes at a ultra-fast pace?? I mean, a paper-book has not yet
 hyper-links, and that's why I manage to finish most of them and at least
 try to *assimilate* them. I mean *assimilate*, not just store them on my
 hard disk for a later occasion...that's what I do with most of the
 postscript files and www pages I "surf" from time to time. I mean, is it
 meaningful??

	- A really frightening addiction/dependence danger: how many people
 out there on the Net have disconnected already from "real life" and are by
 now immersed in their own, self-created Internet-world?? How risky, how
 easy is to become a Internet-junkie?? Are there available
 medical/psychological studies on the influence on the Internet on our ways
 of behaving??...oh well, I happen to know a couple of guys or, uh sorry,
 NetIzens that literally don't speak with anybody, just with his IRC
 channel. Is this what we wanted???

	- Security holes: with the new Java object oriented language,
 *cool* applets can be written for your www-browser to display an animation
 or play some game. But, how *secure* is Java? Or, more specifically, how
 secure is the implementation of Java on the Not-Escape!2.0 web-Navigator, a
 product that crashes more or less 50% of the applets, a product which
 "100% secure" RSA public key cryptosystem was cracked recently by two
 students??? Can we really trust Not-Escape? yeah, I know, it's cool &
 fast...well, anyway, it is not faster than Arena
 <http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Arena/0.96>

	- By the way, NotEscape tries to impose *his* NHTML (netscape-html
 or no-html, as you like, but it is *not* *clean* html3.0 anyway!!) "forced
 de facto" standard. I ran a test just a while ago and some of this *cool*,
 full of background gifs and client-side maps netscape-enhanced-pages are
 *not* viewable *at all* by any of the following browsers: Mosaic, Arena,
 tkWWW, EmacsW3, lynx...(See
 <http://www7.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~srbosque/all.www.clients.screen-shots.zip>)
 I mean, is this the Open Systems Architecture I heard sometime about?? Is
 this the Net we want??

Of course there were many more other topics I would like to discuss, but
these are just enough by now and for me. 

In my paper I don't want to make a scientifical, serious study of the
sociological influence of the Internet. All these topics will be covered in
just a sometimes serious, sometimes humorous Appendix that I would like to
call
		       "Internet or the Art of Zen"

(no, no "Zen or the Art of the Internet", and no, no "Zen or the Art of the
Archery")

And for this Appendix I need your help, you guys, you friends of mine, you
NetIzens. I need your opinions on these topics, and if you have other ideas
to add, just make them notice to me. 

Just a reply to this mail (much better a reposed, long awaited reply than a
fast one) would be sufficient for me. And then I would be *really* thankful
with all of you.

At the end of this message I attached some excerpts from some mail exchange
I had lately with the author of a "soft-spamming" I got last week. I think
they're kind of a good illustration of the topics I would like to write
about in the "not so scientific" appendix of my Thesis.

So just take your time, think a little bit about what is Internet for you
nowadays, what *should* it be from your point of view and send your
thoughts and feedback please to me <Salva.Bosque@stud.uni-erlangen.de> 

[Sorry but I will only read the email specifically addressed to me. I don't
have the time to read Usenet news or subscribe to a mailing list by now]

I'm willing for your feedback, your opinions about Arpanet95.

Thanks a lot (for your patience)
Salva
- - - -- 
Salvador Bosque i Puy                <Salva.Bosque@rzmail.uni-erlangen.de>
URL:                      http://www7.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~srbosque
PGP public key: finger -l srbosque@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de | pgp -f
Key fingerprint:          3E E6 3A 0D 20 D3 29 CC  42 C9 AD F2 6C EE F4 CE


- - - ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> On Fri, 1 Dec 1995 04:30:58 -0500 (EST),
>>>>> Steve R Peterson
>>>>> who can be reached at: srp@gedisa.com
>>>>> (whose comments are cited below with " Steve> "),
>>>>> had this to say in article <199512010930.EAA24185@clark.net>
>>>>> concerning the subject of Re: Editorial Gedisa

 Steve> Salva I am the person that e-mailed you from Editorial Gedisa. I
 Steve> designed and maintain thier page as well as do some Internet
 Steve> surfing for them, basically looking for potencial clients. That's
 Steve> how I ended up at your page, which I linked from the "Païsanos
 Steve> Catalanos" page. And, yes, we do use a form letter (saves time) to
 Steve> mail to people that we think would be interested in what the
 Steve> company has to offer, but we only send one at a time - so it's not
 Steve> a bulk "target" mailing.

You're a lucky person and Gedisa is a lucky company...I must confess that
my first impulse when I received your mail was to fill your mailbox@gedisa
for at least the next 200 years. (Yeah, I *could* do that, but don't be
afraid, I *won't*. 8-X...I'm too naive and a nice and friendly guy to do
that. But maybe other hackers on the net could do it, so be warned)

I don't know what you or Gedisa think about or if you have ever heard about
commercial spams and hosts and powerful sites closed by hacker-attacks
(just people angry because somebody tried to use his lovely internet to
make some business)

I hope you really *know* what you're doing sending mail in this way. 
So good luck, really. You will need it. 

[...]

 Steve> Also, I'm not sure how you feel about taking advantage of Netscape
 Steve> extensions, but by using the simple <body bgcolor= "#RRGGBB hex
 Steve> value"> would give a nice attractive color background. 

Well actually I use the bgcolor NHTML (some people read it as Netscape-HTML,
the people that have an idea about what is *or should* be our lovely
internet read it as no-html ;-> on
<http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/user/srbosque/my_photo.html> and
uh well, I'm not really happy with this decission:

Yeah, it looks *cool*, really. But surprisingly I could see this page quite
well with Netscape 1.2 until Not Escape! 2.0J was released: with this kind
of browser, on my grayscale monitor here at my cute SunSPARC 20 box I can
only appreciate a dark background, and I'm not able to read now
anything. What an upgrade. Yeah, that's what it's called
80%-netscape-compatibility, may I presume? ;->

 Steve> You can contol the color of your text and links too this way. This
 Steve> is a touchy subject with some people but with 80% (and growing) of
 Steve> the people on the net using Netscape, I feel it makes sense to take
 Steve> advantage of (even though they may not be "techinically"
 Steve> recognized) these powerful extensions,

Well, not *only* I personally think that you and 80% of NetIzens are wrong,
the World Wide Web Consortium <http://www.w3.org> and the Internet
Engineering Task Force< <http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/> agree with me:

In short, the main objective of our internet back in the 70's (aka
Arpanet'95) was to create an Open Systems Architecture. This means that an
heterogeneous bunch of computers (unixes, vax-vms, dos, windoze, mac, cray)
could share data and network resources thanks to something called
*standard* Protocols (have you ever heard about the International Standards
Organitation--Open Systems Interconnections (ISO-OSI) reference model??. 

Well, do you have an idea how hard is to make that Sun Microsystems, DEC,
IBM and lots of manufacturers agree with a proposed standard?? Anyway, at
last they managed to agree. And now on 1995 there's a company author of a
cool but dirty -technically speaking netscape is bullshit, may I say- www
browser and pretends to *impose* *his* standard. 

Well anyway, maybe there's a lot of people out there using NotScripe, but
an Open Systems Architecture means that your page at
<http://www.clark.net/pub/srp/home.html> should be readable on all kind of
platforms (not only Win95) but among others including Unixes (running
VT-100 or X Window System), VAX-VMS, MS-DOS, Mac's, Crays...).

And oh well, your page is cool, really. 

But in fact *I cannot read a word* of your page here at my greyscale
monitor of my Sun SPARC box, because your background appears at my screen
as black. Black, dark black. 

Well anyway, here I happen to have a Silicon Graphics IRIS Indigo and your
page appears really cool, may I say.

Are you really suggesting that all 40e6 people on the net should buy an
Silicon Indy??? Or should I downgrade to Win95???

 Steve> ESPECIALLY if your using the new Netscape 2.0 browser.

As I said, you're a lucky person if your hard disk hasn't been erased in
the last few clicks at your Not Escape 2.0J(ava). Have you ever heard about
security holes?? Have you ever hard about the SSL-bug?? Netscape allways
said that his encryption algorithm was 100% secure to send private and
confidential information until two bored students at Berkeley cracked his
(deficient) implementation of the algorithm. 

Oh really, Java is still in beta phase and Not Escape 2.0J makes a
Java-complient browser that crashes 50% of the applets!!! Should I now
trust that no architecture-independent-viruses, no finger-attacks, no
intruder-trojan-horses may attack my system with just a click on Not Escape
2.0J?????

Oh really, as I said, netscape it's cool, really cool. But dirty, really
dirty too. And *really* dangerous. Netscape could kill the internet, some
people out there are now suggesting. 

So go right ahead with your bgcolor until some Java trojan horse makes the
following on *your* system: 

$ rm -rf /

Well I don't know if you're fond on Unix, the last 9-character command
erases without confirmation in 2 seconds all the system files, user zones
and absolutely *everything* on a Un*x box. 

And Java is architecture-independent, so be warned. 

 Steve> You asked about the accents. Your first letter came through showing
 Steve> the tilde over the "n" (ñ) just fine, but you second note looked a
 Steve> bit funny.  For example it put and "s" for ó (o with an accent)
 Steve> some "a" did not have accents ( in the word "más" for example) and
 Steve> some times there was accents all by themselves. This is strange
 Steve> because I use the MIME complient EUDORA vs. 1.52 and usually I get
 Steve> all the accents and stuff. If I get something from a non MIME
 Steve> complient mailer I get the ASCII code (ex: &3G) instead of the
 Steve> accent. Your 2nd message was the first one I've seen like this.

 Steve> BTW - I run Windows 95

mmhh, well, may I suggest that's the reason??? Windoze95 = Mac84 !!!

Anyway, what follows is a friendly, not ironical and real proposal of this
student trying to finish his Master Thesis here at Erlangen:

Could you please help me on my Thesis? I need the opinions of somebody like
you fond on surfin' the net and on sending commercial spams^H^H^H^H^H^H
messages on the Net. Just a reply to this mail, with your opinion on my
opinions would be sufficient for me.

Would you do that for me? Oh thanks!! Can your address appear in the
acknowledgements part of my thesis?? Oh thanks!!!

[That was a *true, sincerely* offer to help me in my project just with your
opinion on the topics of this mail]

 Steve> PS Have you checked out Editorial Gedisa's or my page yet? Let me
 Steve> know what YOU think!

See my comments on the bgcolor nhtml tag. ;-)

Well have a really nice day fightin' against those hacker' attacks that
probably will your site become in the next few days.

[ehem, maybe your company needs a network security advisor? May I suggest
an unemployed catalan guy here at Erlangen? ;-)]
- - - ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue Dec  5 16:32:05 1995


Hi Steve, 

I'm really pleased and thankful with your answer. It sure will be included
partially with my self, personal view and other contributions from other
sources at the appendix of my paper where I will try to explain, in a
sometimes humorous, sometimes serious point of view, what is the state of
the art of our lovely Internet by now: Arpanet'95.

>>>>> "Steve" == Steve R Peterson <srp@gedisa.com> writes:

 Salva> I don't know  what you or Gedisa think   about or if  you have ever
 Salva> heard about commercial spams and hosts and powerful sites closed by
 Salva> hacker-attacks (just people angry because somebody tried to use his
 Salva> lovely internet to >make some business)

 Steve> Your right - in a  way it is spamming.  But you must understand [...] 

mmh, yeah, that's what I supposed and that's why you didn't received an
attack yet from mephisto.informatik.uni-erlangen.de ;-). You sure won't
become it as far I am concerned. By the way, have you received any
attack/complain from anybody out there about your "softspamming"??

 Steve> Where there is money to be made, there will be people ready to take
 Steve> advantage  of   this, for better     or worse.  Take Netscape   for
 Steve> example.  Your right -  it  is dirty and is   not sticking with the
 Steve> proposed  standards   and protocols   but    with the  demand  from
 Steve> businesses for slick in-line images, plug-ins , and colorful pages,
 Steve> of course,  Netscape  is going to develop  thier  own extensions to
 Steve> handle this. Do you blame them? 

 Steve> Who wants to  see a plain dull grey  background and black text when
 Steve> you  can   use  colors  (and  gifs,jpegs)  for your  background and
 Steve> text. Why not use frames and Client-side image maps?  Let face it -
 Steve> Netscape is moving ahead and pushing the limits  of what one can do
 Steve> with a home page. 

Why don't take then *real* html3.0 or the Arena browser from W3O
<http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Arena/0.96>??. It's a cool, multiple
asynchrone multithreaded connections, real html3.0 browser too, and it's
clean, well behaved and following the standards!.

 Steve> And why? Because there is money to be made. 

oh, I see. Still, why don't arena, for instance??  [unfortunately Arena is
more of a experiment and test field for the html3.0 spec and the
WWW-Library of Common Code, but still, it's a good browser!]

 Steve> As a business (or basically your average net-surfer) you probably
 Steve> don't care if your following "set" protocols (your average user
 Steve> probably doesn't even know what they are) you going to want a cool
 Steve> page full of graphics, frames ect....Apparently it's working - like
 Steve> a I said before 80% of the browsers on the net are Basically,
 Steve> Netscape is giving people what they want,

oh well...it's the eternal question: does the marketing follow the tastes
of the market or viceversa???

 Steve> Salva, I think the  days of the  Internet as we  know it  today are
 Steve> numbered........

yeah, I agree with you. But it's up to all of us here on the net to decide
which way to follow, isn't it??

 Salva> Well   anyway,   maybe there's  a lot  of    people out there using
 Salva> NotScripe, but an Open Systems Architecture means that your page at
 Salva> <http://www.clark.net/pub/srp/home.html  Salva> should be  readable
 Salva> on   all kind  of  platforms (not   only   Win95) but among  others
 Salva> including Unixes  (running   VT-100 or X Window   System), VAX-VMS,
 Salva> MS-DOS, Mac's, Crays...).

 Steve> Like I mentioned above....if 80% of the people on the net are using
 Steve> Netscape   why bother trying  to design  something that will please
 Steve> everyone, or  rather, people using  LYNX, Mosaic, ect... My page is
 Steve> designed for the browser Netscape and anyone using this browser can
 Steve> see  it

Well not really. I have for instance problems reading your page with both
netscape 1.12 and netscape 2.0 on my greyscale monitor, as you can see in
the gif screenshots available at
<http://www7.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~srbosque/all.www.clients.screenshots.zip>
I hope you can decode this zip file, please make me notice if you have a
problem or whatever)

 Steve> To be   perfectly frank and honest  with  you Salva,  if someone is
 Steve> still surfing the net  using LYNX or  some other text-only browser,
 Steve> they're probably so   far behind the  times  in everything that   I
 Steve> really don't care if they can see my page or  not - missing out one
 Steve> or two people no and then is not going to break my heart.

Well, as you can see from the screenshots, I think you're going *too far*
with your netscape tags. Not only lynx, but Mosaic, Arena, tkWWW *can't*
read *a word* of your page. Is this what you wanted??  Do you get money
from Netscape to make of your page only-netscape-viewable?? I mean, what do
you take in profit with this decission? I mean, it's not *so* difficult to
please not only 98% but 100% of the people out there...;-)

 Steve>     Something interesting - I run a backend CGI program that
 Steve>     e-mails me everytime someone comes to my page, For example,
 Steve>     this was you:

 Steve> " From: NET@listserv.clark.net
 Steve> Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 04:57:08 -0500
 Steve> To: srp@clark.net
 Steve> Content-Length: 80

 Steve> faui70f.informatik.uni-erlangen.de in Germany was the 620th to
 Steve> visit this page"


 Steve> The  "NET"   tells    me  that you      were   using Netscape  2.0b
 Steve> (hmmmmm..interesting). 

oh well, I use among others netscape2.0J, netscape1.12, Mosaic, arena,
lynx, tkWWW and my self-written-still-not-perfect wwwbrowser...I'm writing
a paper on www clients, as you sure remember...

 Steve> Your right. Java is still   in the BETA   phase. Even though I  use
 Steve> Netscape 2.0,  I don't mess with  Java Aplets. Not safe enough. But
 Steve> give it time.....

Good, you're a responsible and informed computer user. But what about
trillions of people out there seduced with the *cool* applets that soon or
later will erase their hard disks??? Is it not *too* dangerous??? Do you
have an idea what an architecture-independent-trojan-horse is capable of?
Aren't we risking *too* much for just a couple of *cool* java-animations???

 Steve> I assume that  your not fond of  the Windows operating  system. I'm
 Steve> not even going to touch this  one - Windows  vs. Mac 

oh well, I'm not a mac-guy (although I would choose mac vs windoze if I
were forced to) but more of a linux-un*x-guy. Yeah, linux has the best
qualitity/price ratio in the market: 1/0 = infinity, isn't it??

 Steve> You probably are right with a lot of your points. You are the
 computer Steve> expert, not me.

oh please, I'm only a humble student here. 

 Steve> But would will be interesting to talk again in a year or so. If the
 Steve> WWW changes at the same  pace as it  did in the past year.....well,
 Steve> let's just say that you  and I probably   both will be have  proven
 Steve> right (and wrong) on some of our views.

As I said, the www doesn't evolve on its own. It's up to the users, up to
you and me, which way to follow. 

 Steve> I hope  that this  letter helps you  with your  paper. You probably
 Steve> don't agree with me on some of my views but that's OK - everyone is
 Steve> entitled to his or her opinion, correct or not - right?

Oh really my most sincere thanks. And you're right, everyone is entitled to
his/her opinion. And that's precisely the beauty and greath of our lovely
and sometimes misused Internet, in my humble opinion. And that's why I'm so
engaged with my paper nowadays and asked for your help. Of course I'm
willing for your feedback again [but please take your time, don't forget
your duties at Gedisa. For me it's much better and precious a reposed, long
awaited mail than a short and fast reply]. Ask your colleagues/friend at
Gedisa/whereever too. All kind of point of views are welcomed here.

 Steve> BTW- I got your mime-attached gifs. Nice touch!

I hope you get the *huge* zip file with the gif screenshots too. 

See ya, moltíssimes gràcies de veritat, 
Salva
- --
Salvador Bosque i Puy                  <Salva.Bosque@stud.uni-erlangen.de>
URL:                      http://www7.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~srbosque
PGP public key: finger -l srbosque@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de | pgp -f
Key fingerprint:          3E E6 3A 0D 20 D3 29 CC  42 C9 AD F2 6C EE F4 CE


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Received on Friday, 8 December 1995 10:43:10 UTC