Human-Nets-Request%rutgers@brl-bmd.UUCP (Human-Nets-Request@rutgers) (11/09/83)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Tuesday, 8 Nov 1983 Volume 6 : Issue 69
Today's Topics:
Administrivia - Error with Digest #67,
Query - Digesting Standards,
Responce to Queries - Archiving Ephemeral Periodicals (4 msgs) &
Cellular Radiotelephony,
Computers and the Law - File Privacy &
Computer Network Crimes &
`Whizzy' Kidnicks/Urchins,
Information: Interactive structuring of information
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Date: 30 Oct 83 13:15:54 EST
From: Charles <MCGREW@RU-BLUE.ARPA>
Subject: Administrivia
Due do an error on my part, two copies (one with incorrect "Today's
topics" headers, and a second one with the correct headers) of V6 #67
came out. I apologize for any confusion that may have resulted from
this.
Charles
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Return-Path: <andya@bbnccp>
Date: 31 Oct 1983 10:21:45 EST (Monday)
From: Andy Adler <andya@BBN-UNIX>
Subject: Mail Digests
Are there standards in use by interest groups that digest their
messages? I think not. If we could come to some sort of agreement of
the form of these digests, such as how to mark the individual messages
in the digest, then it would be possible to write filters to process
them, for example to put each sub-message on a separate page or to
index a year's worth of messages. Currently, one must resort to
heuristic approaches.
Andy Adler
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Date: Sun 30 Oct 83 12:12:22-PST
From: Richard Treitel <TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Archiving ephemerals
(Isn't that a contradiction anyway?)
I once read a short SF story in which there were colour TV cameras and
microphones on every street corner and in every building, and
everything they picked up was being archived, just in case (massive
shades of 1984). The physical space occupied by the data storage was
reaching grotesque proportions, and in the end either/or the guy in
charge of maintaining the records, or a group of dissidents, or both
(can't remember for sure) wiped out the whole shebang.
Point is, some things just aren't worth keeping by any reasonable
criterion, given current storage and retrieval technology. Think how
scanty the records are that we have from some eras of past history!
We can now deal with much larger archives than we could even ten years
ago, but we'll never be able to keep everything that anyone could ever
want. There comes a point where it may make more sense to re-research
and re-write an occasional article than to keep shiploads of stuff
that will never be re-read. And who decides what to keep, then?
Anyone who is interested enough in a particular item, or thinks
someone else will be -- plus Congress or whoever is in charge of the
Nat'l Archives, but let's not boondoggle it.
- Richard
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Date: Sunday, 30 Oct 1983 19:58-PST
Subject: Re: Information from ephemeral peripherals
From: greep@SU-DSN
In at least some fields, most of the information in the popular
magazines becomes outdated fairly quickly. I would not want to read a
50-year electronics or radio magazine except as a historical
curiosity. TV Guide basically outlives its usefulness after one week.
National Enquirer shouldn't even be published in the first place, thus
making its useful lifetime negative. Granted, there may be some
marginal benefit in keeping almost anything, but it has to be weighed
against the costs.
I read about an article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results
claiming that North America could be expected to sink within the next
n years (I think n was something like 20 to 50) under the weight of
the collected National Geographic magazines which many people never
throw away. This projection might have to be revised if every local
public library starts keeping all its holdings.
- greep
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Date: Sun 30 Oct 83 23:18:31-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Misinformation
A couple of months ago I read a article on computers in a women's
magazine (LHJ, I think). A noted authority was quoted as saying,
among more reasonable things, that floppies were the way to go for
home systems because rigid disks were only for big computers and could
only be written on once. I'm sure he said no such thing, but current
editorial practice generally does not allow an interviewee to check
the article before publication.
The November issue of High Technology magazine has a fairly good
article on DES and public-key cryptosystems. A tutorial box on
substitution and transposition ciphers, however, badly botches the
latter. The example claimed that a transposition cipher was
generated by transposing the letters of the alphabet and then
substituting them, which would be equivalent to a simple substitution
cipher. Again, we have a case where the misinformation could have
been caught by having a single knowlegeable person proofread it.
I am not crazy about the idea of saving every article ever written, as
has recently been suggested in this list. If the historians and
sociologists want the magazines saved, let them do the saving. My
concern is that "knowledge" should not be lost nor should it be
available only to those who can stomach a search through thousands of
trivial and possibly inaccurate articles. Once we have computers
routinely extracting the true content of our text streams, I suspect
that we will find that content to be rather small. The Encyclopedia
Galactica will be unable to detail the life history of everyone who
ever lived, but the Earth's composite knowlege of gardening, cooking,
crafts, science, etc., can probably be stored rather succinctly. AI
programs will be available to extract information for any particular
purpose and reformat it for any audience. Accuracy will be
guaranteed, within the limits of the target vocabulary. I think
that's worth working toward.
-- Ken Laws
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Date: 31 October 1983 12:05 EST
From: mday @ DDN1
Subject: information overload
Date: October 31, 1983
Text: To those who urge archiving of all information on nets and in
publications I address this question: where are you going to put it?
And, more to the point, how are you going to find it? Already there
is so much "junk" surrounding the information we want to retrieve that
research is difficult; how will having this information lying around
make my life easier if I can't find it? It seems to me that our
ability to produce information has far outstripped our ability to
catalog it, and in the absence of any better algorithm we all simply
discard whatever does not seem likely to be of future value as a
resource. Do you retain everything you've ever written or received as
information sources for the future? Libraries have to do some kind of
pruning or ignoring.
--Mark
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Date: 1 Nov 1983 14:20:26 EST (Tuesday)
From: Adam Moskowitz <amoskowi@BBN-UNIX>
Subject: Cellular Radiotelephony
REPLY TO: adamm @ bbn-unix
Robert,
I remember reading an article way back when in "Popular
Science" about C.R.T. (too long to spall out). I do believe
that YOU are right about the intent of the word "cellular".
The system is indeed set up to have the tota-talkies switch
channels/cells as the carrier (human, that is) moves from
cell to cell. The idea that cellular refers to the power
source is absurd. If it's not, why don't we call all
"walkie-talkies" "portable cellular trancieving devices" ?
AdamM
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Date: 28 Oct 1983 15:22:19-EDT
From: dee@CCA-UNIX (Donald Eastlake)
Subject: re: File Privacy
While it depends on what sort of implicit or explicit agreements are
in place, it is generally the case now that an employer has the right
to examine all employee files on a computer the employer owns. It is
not even like stuff locked in your desk since the employer does not
need to bypass any locks to just take the physical disk packs or
whatever and print out every bit on them. If you are worried about
this you should, at a minimum, encryt anything that is sensitive in
this context.
+ Donald E. Eastlake, III
ARPA: dee@CCA-UNIX usenet: {decvax,linus}!cca!dee
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Date: 30 October 1983 15:48 EDT
From: "Marvin A. Sirbu, Jr." <SIRBU @ MIT-MC>
Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest V6 #67
A company called Public Systems Evaluation here in Cambridge recently
completed a study for the Justice Department to develop statistical
categories for keeping track of "computer network crimes". They
developed a set of categories for keeping track of the incidence of
such events.
Marvin Sirbu
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Date: 30 October 1983 01:23 EDT
From: Andrew Scott Beals <BANDY @ MIT-ML>
Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest V6 #66 `whizzy' kidnicks/urchins
Well... I still disagree. It would still be the same thing as having a
secret login or hacking some system program to put a privledged shell
(to flick os'es here on you) on a terminal... However, if the system
security audit is smart (and because in this case, the easy way just
so happens to be the smart way), it will use the exact same
information to display current system status that is used by the
system itself. And, of course, people who aren't logged in shouldn't
be allowed to do anything!
Trojan horses work only the first time >if< they're detected... No
doubt that there are a number that haven't been and are used every now
and then (of course, more use constitutes a greater probability that
it will be found, but then again, some system administrators, while
paranoid, aren't clever enough to use the right tools!).
:-),
Andy
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Date: 29 Oct 83 1812 PDT
From: David Lowe <DLO@SU-AI>
Subject: Interactive structuring of information
I have recently written a paper that might be of considerable interest
to the people on this list. It is about a new form of structuring
interactions between many users of an interactive network, based on an
explict representation of debate. Have you ever used computer
bulletin-boards or mailing lists like HUMAN-NETS and wished that you
could respond point-by-point to other contributions and have the
computer keep track of the debate and show you the best arguments for
and against each point of view? That is one of the goals of this new
medium. It contains many other mechanisms for indexing and
structuring information in an attempt to make the best information
available to anyone examining a particular topic.
A copy of the paper can be accessed by FTP from SAIL (no login
required). The name of the file is PAPER[1,DLO]. You can also send
me a message (DLO @ SAIL) and I'll mail you a copy. If you send me
your U.S. mail address, I'll physically mail you a carefully typeset
version. Let me know if you are interested, and I'll keep you posted
about future developments. The following is an abstract:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE REPRESENTATION OF DEBATE AS A BASIS
FOR INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
By David Lowe
Computer Science Department
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract
Interactive computer networks offer the potential for creating a body
of information on any given topic which combines the best available
contributions from a large number of users. This paper describes a
system for cooperatively structuring and evaluating information
through well-specified interactions by many users with a common
database. A working version of the system has been implemented and
examples of its use are presented. At the heart of the system is a
structured representation for debate, in which conclusions are
explicitly justified or negated by individual items of evidence.
Through debates on the accuracy of information and on aspects of the
structures themselves, a large number of users can cooperatively rank
all available items of information in terms of significance and
relevance to each topic. Individual users can then choose the depth
to which they wish to examine these structures for the purposes at
hand. The function of this debate is not to arrive at specific
conclusions, but rather to collect and order the best available
evidence on each topic. By representing the basic structure of each
field of knowledge, the system would function at one level as an
information retrieval system in which documents are indexed, evaluated
and ranked in the context of each topic of inquiry. At a deeper
level, the system would encode knowledge in the structure of of the
debates themselves. This use of an interactive system for structuring
information offers many further opportunities for improving the
accuracy, accessibility, currency, conciseness, and clarity of
information.
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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