The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington: They Helped Steve Jackson Games Hand the Feds a Stinging Defeat in Court. Their ‘Open Platform’ Proposal is the Heart of Gore’s Infobahn Policy. They Lead the Coalition Fighting the Clipper Chip. In Short, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the Preeminent Defender of Our Civil Rights in Cyberspace. But Just Who Are These People?

The idea is to go further than the Open Platform, further than the National Information Infrastructure. The idea is to reclaim Washington … The Net, the very network itself, you see, is merely a means to an end. The end is to reverse-engineer government, to hack Politics down to its component parts and fix it.

Wiring Africa: You Go to a Small Village in Africa. People Are Hungry. Is the Real Solution 100 Kilograms of Corn – or an Electronic Mailbox?

Say you go to a small village. People are hungry. Is the priority an electronic mailbox … or 100 kilograms of corn? What we’ve learned, over the past 20 years, is that the mailbox may well be the priority.

Wiring Africa: You Go to a Small Village in Africa. People Are Hungry. Is the Real Solution 100 Kilograms of Corn – or an Electronic Mailbox?

Africa doesn’t have to go from drums to telegraph to telex. We can go straight to satellites, electronic media, and a computerized newsroom.

Bit by Bit on Wall Steet: Lucky Strikes Again

The future of the computer and communications industries will be driven by applications, not by scientific breakthroughs like the transistor, microprocessor, or optical fiber. The problems now stem not from basic material sciences but from basic human needs. To focus on the future of the “bit” industry, there is no better place to set one’s tripod than on the entrepreneurial, business, and regulatory landscape of the United States, with one leg each in the New York, American, and NASDAQ exchanges.

The Infobahn is Not the Answer

Another way to think of roadkill on the information highway will be the billions who will forget there are offramps to destinations other than Hollywood, Las Vegas, the local bingo parlor, or shiny beads from a shopping network. Not couch potatoes but mouse potatoes! It’s not the wonderful things they could do with new media, it’s what they will be convinced they should do. This is a new tragedy in the making. No democracy that is less than 10 percent literate can survive in the driving forces of society. Television should be the last mass communications medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon general’s warning!

The Infobahn is Not the Answer

Like the printing press, the new computer media will bring forth its own very special ways to think about complexities we have not been able to deal with up to now … Much care has to be taken with design and education in order for the change to be positive. We don’t have natural defenses against fat, sugar, salt, alcohol, alkaloids – or media.

The Dean of Disaster: Plane Crashes, Nuclear Reactor Accidents, Explosions at Chemical Plants – If Computers Were At Fault, Peter Neumann Knows All About It

If we were able to know in advance what the requirements were – and we really had them correct, and we were able to design something that was consistent with those requirements, and we had really gifted people who could implement the system in such a way that was consistent with its design, and we had gifted people who would operate the system, remembering what the original requirements were, so they wouldn’t compromise, and we had a user community that was fairly intelligent – then we might have a chance at having computer systems that we might be able to trust … There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong.