human-nets@ucbvax.ARPA (10/27/84)
From: Charles McGrew (The Moderator) <Human-Nets-Request@Rutgers>
HUMAN-NETS Digest Friday, 26 Oct 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 66
Today's Topics:
Queries - Tarrifs on PC's &
Anyone From FEMA Out There?
Response to Query - Cancelling Electronic Mail (3 msgs),
Computers and People - Letting Email Pile Up &
Electronic Democracy,
Computers Networks 9600 baud Modems &
Banking at Home
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Date: 23 October 1984 17:10-EDT
From: Robert H. Berman <RHB @ MIT-MC>
Does any know about, or can anyone verify, the following: that
travelers who leave the U.S. with a programmable computer worth more
than $1000 must have a valid export license from the Department of
Commerce?. According to a piece of gossip I overheard, this license
applies to bussiness and professional travelers. Thanks.
-- RHB@mit-mc.arpa
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Date: 23-Oct-84 23:13 PDT
From: William Daul - Augmentation Systems - McDnD
From: <WBD.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA>
Subject: Anyone From FEMA Out There?
Does anyone know if there are any Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) people on the DDN/MILNET/ARPANET? Thanks, Bi\\
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From: mcb%lll-tis.arpa@lll-tis (Michael C. Berch)
Date: Tue Oct 23 23:19:39 1984
Subject: Re: cancelling electronic mail
I seem to remember from a few years back that it WAS possible to
recall U.S. Mail. The trouble was that you had to go to a post
office in person and fill out a form, and by the time the form
was processed, the mail was practically always delivered. So it
would have only been useful for overseas surface mail, or
registered, or whatever. Perhaps there's a postal employee on this
list who can clarify?
Even if USPS prohibits recalling mail, I think it would
be based on the impracticality of tracing and retrieving it
rather than on a policy of irrevocability. With electronic mail,
the task is relatively easy -- at least for local mail.
I see no problem in letting people recall messages sent in haste
or error. I wonder how many homicides or wars would not have
occurred if letters written in the heat of passion could have
been recalled? (Before the days of telegraph and telephone.)
It's one thing to encourage responsibility in electronic
communication, but quite another to design a procrustean standard
into a mail system.
Michael C. Berch
mcb@lll-tis.arpa
...ucbvax!lbl-csam!lll-tis!mcb
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From: <bang!root@Nosc>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 84 08:48:51 pdt
Subject: Cancelling electronic mail
The GTE Telemail system allows you to cancel messages only under
limited circumstances, i.e. when you specify a timed delivery (deliver
after the 15th and before the 20th) etc. Otherwise once you 'post' an
electronic letter, its the same as dropping it in a mailbox. Its
gone. You are assured of delivery and the recipient knows that it
cannot be recalled if the sender changes his mind. All items so
posted are time/date/serialized for the senders records. If an item
did not get delivered, then there is a flaw in the system (unlikely).
I wish they'd tighten it up even more and disallow cancelling all
messages.
Bret Marquis
bam@NOSC
(ihnp4, sdcsvax)!bang!bam
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Date: Wed 24 Oct 84 11:02:39-EDT
From: Janet Asteroff <US.JFA%CU20B@COLUMBIA.ARPA>
Subject: Cancelling Electronic Mail
Cc: mrc@SU-SCORE.ARPA
The ability to cancel electronic mail messages poses several very
interesting questions/problems. Particularly, the geneal area of
applying the same contraints, regulations, freedoms, etc. of PRINTED
mail to ELECTRONIC mail, the latter having several different
properties which make it worthy of very separate considerations.
Perhaps at base it is our ATTITUDES toward printed mail that will have
to be examined, especially how they transfer over to electronic mail,
and becoming aware of applying policies and developing attitudes about
one technology to another.
When should we not impose our attitudes about old media on new media?
When should we?
Some general thoughts I would like to throw out for further
discussion:
- Applying federal postal rules to this area, even in theory, may take
us down a road we may not want to travel, i.e., federal regulation.
How would this differ for people using MCI mail or EasyLink
(commerical services) to those using local mail facilities at a
university, or, networked services as different as Arpanet mail and
Bitnet mail, which are regulated very diferently.
-- Will the content of mail (personal or otherwise)
be scrutinzed by the postal service?
-- We have already applied some administrative features of printed
mail to electronci mail, i.e., some mail systems already do have a
return receipt requested. How does everybody feel about that?
-- Mark's comments, I think, get more to the heart of who uses email,
what they are using it for, and how experienced they are given the
nature of the medium.
I would think, based on my own experiences, that heavy users of
email, or those who have used it for a few years, tend to
send very little mail they would like to cancel, because they are
aware of the problems of this kind of communication. New users
probably send more mail they would like to cancel. When do new
users become sophisticated enough to appreciate this?
Perhaps the main issue is: does the rapidity of communication, and
the ephemeral nature of electronic print (not written on paper,
therefore not carved in stone) lead to different kinds of
communication than in a written letter, and therefore should the
freedom to manipulate it (cancel a message) be greater?
I think the intervention of the machine, and the impermanent
nature of the text, as well as the rapidity of transmission
CAN (automatically) heighten the sense of irresponsibility about
communication among inexperienced as well as experienced users.
How do all of these properties change our attitudes about
what is proper and improper? I know I say things in email I
would not think appropriate for printed mail, not because they
are wrong or too personal, but the nature of the medium lends
itself to different kinds of expression.
/Janet
------------------------------
Date: 25 Oct 84 0803 PDT
From: Robert Maas <REM@SU-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Boss letting email pile up?
Subject: boss letting important mail pile up
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 84 6:07:56 EDT
From: Stephen Wolff <steve@BRL-BMD.ARPA>
Sure -- letting mail pile up is dumb, boasting of it even dumber.
What would YOU do if you received 300 or more
messages a day, NOT including junk/list mail?
Well, if I really did receive 300 important messages a day, I'd be an
important person (an unimportant person doesn't get that many
important messages) and I'd hire a staff to sort the messages into
degrees of urgency and degrees of need-personal-reply. The really
urgent ones would come to my attention right away. The ones that don't
need a personal reply would be answered by my staff. The rest would
wait until I had time to get around to them. If the company doesn't
think I'm important enough for a mail-filtering staff, I'll do the
filtering myself on the company's time. If the company claims the mail
isn't really important, I'll let it pile up until they realize they're
wrong.
Earlier this year I was receiving about 200 messages a day, but they
were mostly junk from the BandyKin mailing list. I tried to filter the
junk out at high speed, but even so it took me hours a day just to do
the filtering. After a few weeks I got disgusted and started
complaining to the people who were generating the most volume of utter
trash, but they complained back that if I didn't like the trash I
should get off the list, so I did.
It's not so easy in the real world. A local advertising newspaper
which I consider trash (because the ads aren't sorted in any order or
into any categories, just bulk ads instead of classified ads, so to
find anything of interest you must skim the whole damn newspaper) has
been delivered against my wish for the past several years. Sometimes I
am up&around when the deliverer comes around and I throw it back and
say I don't want it delivered, but next week it's back. Sometimes
after I throw it back it gets thrown back at me or snuck back when I'm
not looking. (Isn't there a law against littering? Unfortunately I'm
just renting.) Also I've been getting misleading advertising from a
company called MarriageMail (tm) and don't know how to suppress that.
Arpanet mailing lists are easy to get off of by comparison.
------------------------------
Date: 22 October 1984 20:31-EDT
From: "Marvin A. Sirbu, Jr." <SIRBU @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Bell Labs and Modems
The CCITT has recently adopted a standard V.32, for 9600 baud
communications on ordinary dial-up lines. Sound impossible? Well,
you have to be very tricky. Each signal (baud) carries 5 bits of
information I believe, 1920 times per second. That means each signal
would have to be one of 32 different values in terms of phase shift
and amplitude. Hard to recognize changes of phase of only 45 degrees?
You bet. It turns out, however, that if you make the problem
apparently even harder by sending 6 bits per baud, but use the extra
bit to code redundant information for error correcting the 5 data
bits, you can do pretty well. This is in fact what is specified in
the V.32 standard; it's called Trellis Coding.
At any rate, the key research work on the Trellis coding principal for
V.32 was done at Bell Labs. A similar, but incompatible scheme was
proposed by IBM Europe. The CCITT selected the Bell Labs version. I
haven't checked lately to see if AT&T actually has their version of a
V.32 modem on the market yet, but Codex does.
Marvin Sirbu
------------------------------
Date: 23 Oct 1984 14:20:01 PDT
Subject: Home Banking and MCI mail
From: Alan R. Katz <KATZ@USC-ISIF.ARPA>
I have been using Bank America's home banking for a few months. True,
it is somewhat primative, but it is useful. For me, it is worth the
service charge ($8.00/mo) because I save over half that amount in
stamps alone! Also, I really hate stamping, etc many envelopes at the
end of the month. It saves me alot of time, even if it is cumbersome
to use.
One problem with it is that your password is actually a 4 DIGIT
passcode!!! Another is the electronic mail system. To send a message
you type in a series of <40 character lines (!!). If it is over 40
characters, you get to RETYPE THE ENTIRE LINE. When you are done, the
only thing you can do is to either send it or not (if you screwed up).
My main gripe, however, is that these people (and others) don't seem
to know how to use electronic mail. I sent them a message complaining
about the lack of security of 4-digit passcodes, they sent me a form
letter type response thanking me for my suggestions on improvements to
their service. I then sent another message essentially saying "Look
morons, that wasn't meant as a suggestion, why did you guys implement
such a stupid system" (not in those words though). I got a response
back asking me if I felt my passcode was known by someone else. In
other words, even though you have this new medium of electric mail, it
seems they only have a few stock replies that they send out.
(By the way, if a message is more than about 10 lines, it gets
continued in the next message!!!!!)
I have a similar gripe with MCI mail. Here, you have an OK mail
system (not great) which is reputed to get electronic mail to the
masses. Apparently, some MCI sales types would like to discuss with
me uses of MCI mail. But...did they send me an electronic message
telling me whatever it is they want to say?? NO, they have been
leaving me phone messages. They want to tell me about how wonderful
using electronic mail is, but don't use it themselves when they want
to talk to you!!! (needless to say, I'm not going to answer their
phone messages, unless they use their own electronic mail system to
tell me what its about).
Alan
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 84 23:14 EDT
From: Dehn@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA (Joseph W. Dehn III)
Subject: electronic democracy???
WYLAND@SRI-KL's proposal for proxies: "Wouldn't it be nice to be able
to choose - directly, by ourselves - what our tax money is spent on?"
This is a very nice suggestion, except for one slight problem: the
whole POINT of a tax system is to spend your money on things that you
don't want it spent on. This has nothing to do with whether the
government doing the taxing is a "democracy", electronic or otherwise.
If you are going to have the ultimate choice about how your money will
be spent, there is no need for representatives or proxies or tax
collectors; you just write a check (oops, sorry... an EFT request) to
whatever enterprise you want to support. If you don't want to make
all the decisions yourself, you can give to a fund that supports
various worthwhile (according to your view) activities. Whether this
is how it should be, or not, is presumably a discussion that belongs
in a different digest.
However, it serves as an example of a more general point. Many of the
proposals that are being put forth in the name of "electronic
democracy" really have nothing to do with "electronics" (or
computers). They are rather proposals to change fundamentally the
nature of the political process in ways that only sound new because
they are described in terms of "email" and such. In fact, many of
these issues have been around for a very long time. For example, the
idea that direct democracy was not considered in the past because they
didn't have telecommunications: this is simply not true. It IS true
that it was not possible to have direct democracy on a national scale,
but direct democracy was considered (and tried) on a smaller scale and
rejected for completely different reasons.
I am in no way suggesting that we should not consider changes to our
political system, but we should make some attempt to understand which
issues are really new ones brought about by computers, and which are
really independent of our new technology.
-jwd3
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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