True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
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Authors: Vernor Vinge
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Contents
Preface to the E-book Edition: James Frenkel
“A Time of Transition/The Human Connection”: Danny Hillis
“True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy”: Timothy C. May
“Eventful History: Version 1.x”: John M. Ford
“Satan's Computer: Why Security Products Fail Us”: Bruce Schneier
“How Is the NII Like a Prison”: Alan Wexelblat
“Intelligent Software”: Pattie Maes
Special Note: “The Right to Read”: Richard Stallman
“Cryptography and the Politics of One's True Name”: Leonard N. Foner
“Habitat: Reports from an Online Community”: Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer
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To Marvin Minsky,
godfather to a new age
It is not without a certain irony that this first e-book edition of
True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
is being published in 2015. When the novella “True Names” was published in 1981, the setting of the story in 2014 was undeniably “the future.” A lot has changed since then.
In 1981, the ARPA net had yet to be expanded to become the Internet. When this book was published in 2001, the Internet had been up and running for well over a decade; the World Wide Web had been in operation for more than five years. E-commerce had already begun to develop into the business environment it has become.
What hasn't changed? The contributions of the scientists and advanced thinkers whose articles and stories comprise this book are still impressive in their evidence of original thinking and bold innovation. Their seminal ideas contributed to the development of the Internet and the enormous variety of applications that have blossomed into the unique digital sphere that continues to evolve and expand in ways nobody can entirely predict.
As science fiction readers have known for decades, while SF is very often set in the future, the themes are most often firmly rooted in contemporary reality, or in the recent past. Stories written in the 1950s were full of thinly veiled cold-war scenarios; mid-and late 1960s SF was chock-a-block with overpopulated future Earths inspired by the nascent ecological movement and concerns raised by such books as Paul Erlich's
The Population Bomb
; many SF tales of the late 1960s and early 1970s contained terms like “galacticreds” and other jargon inspired by early credit card initiatives of the time.
Conversely, as I write this new preface in 2014, we have Google Glass, cloud computing, and advanced AI. Add the specter of the technological Singularity that someâincluding Vernor Vingeâsee just around the corner, and it seems like we are living in a science fictional age. Whereas decades ago, science fiction was a genre known and loved by those who loved the idea of the future, we have gone past the point where the future used to be an unknown country, to a reality with a texture so science fictional that the boundary between the present and what one might read about or see in a work of science fiction is all but invisible.
Think about it for a minute. If you're under the age of twenty-five and grew up in a middle class family, you don't remember a time when computers were not a normal part of your life. You may spend most of your waking hours online, checking your e-mail, paying your bills, Instant Messaging, dealing with Facebook, or doing by digital means just about anything else you may once have done using non-digital means. The point is very simple: what once was recognizably strange, futuristic or just plain science fictional is now nothing more than everyday reality.
People have short memories, and there are those who are convinced that, just as sociologists and psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s were sure that television was going to turn our minds into dysfunctional organs no longer capable of higher thought, the Internet is destroying the attention span of this generation. And maybe they're right. With Twitter implanting 140-character thoughts, and the blogosphere filled with short posts followed by an almost immediate deluge of responses, it's an arguable point.
Computer dating, credit services, insurance companies, shoppingâlocal or globalâstreaming downloads of films, podcasts, webinars, you name it. The Internet is the eternal “now.” All these services could easily have been features of a richly imagined future world conjured by a science fiction writer in the 1960s, 1970s or even 1980s. But today, they are merely some of the many aspects of twenty-first century reality that would seem utterly strange to anyone whose baseline reality is pre-1980. That year, 1980, ushered in the first desktop computersâthe first
personal
computers. Prior to that time, the giants of the computer industry did not seriously consider the possibility that non-computer-industry people might be interested in having computers for their personal use. There wasn't even a lot of SF about personal computers in the sixties.
Most science fiction writers make no serious claims to be predicting the future. They're spinning scenarios, some of which turn out to be better educated guesses than others. Isaac Asimov didn't foresee the miniaturization of computers that has developed over the past thirty-plus years. He wrote stories about computers so powerful and so huge that they were the size of whole planets. Unless one of those is hiding on the dark side of the moon, that hasn't happened. On the other hand, Arthur C. Clarke was, for a long time, famous for having written about communications satellites in a story from the early 1950s at least a decade before the launch of the first such satellite.
And of course, there are many developments in science, technology and society that science fiction in previous decades, and “True Names” in particular, didn't really guess about at all.
In
our
2014, which is also the fictional setting of “True Names,” “net neutrality” is being threatened by the most fearsome monster to have been unleashed on an unsuspecting world, a scourge so old that the framers of the United States Constitution worried about it, even including in the preamble the phrase describing one of the main purposes for the Constitution: “to promote the general welfare.” I refer to big business, the most dangerously powerful of which in the late eighteenth century was the East India Company. I won't name modern analogues to the East India Company. It would be silly to do that. Company names inevitably change as they merge, are bought or sold, and otherwise morph into new, ever-larger multi-national colossuses with financial resources that beggar the imagination. Suffice it to say that companies in entertainment or communications media are, as any corporations will do, acting to optimize their profit. Their Internet-based business interests drive them to seek the advantage of greater bandwidth and faster download speeds for their offerings.
The Federal Communications Commission has been wrestling with the issue of net neutrality since 2002. In that year, they redefined Internet Service Providers, changing the classification of their function from that of conduits of informationâlike those companies that operate telephone transmission lines or water pipes, public utilitiesâto suppliers of content, a very different animal, and one which has been considered by the FCC to merit special consideration because of this re-classification.
The problem this poses for the Internet is all too clear. As of right now, anyone can start a new Internet service. If you want to blog, if you have a service of any sort you can perform or provide via the Internet, you have the same access to the Internet as anyone else, whether they are individuals or huge corporations. If the major Internet players get their way, their download speeds will be much faster than the speed of downloads from less high-powered and well-funded sites.
In other words, the level playing field that has enabled innumerable Internet businesses to get started up from nothing would change completely so that any new startups would be at a competitive disadvantage. The freedom of expression and entrepreneurship that have characterized the Internet to date would be a thing of the past, and the Internet, which has until now resisted the forces of corporate clout, and has maintained open and equal access for individuals as well as for corporate entities, would become a failed dream for small-fry entrepreneurs who try to start something new or different online.
In addition to the threat of corporate domination of the web, another threat has come into public consciousness, and that is the rise of surveillance in society at all levels. Whether it's cameras monitoring traffic or human traffic in public places indoors and out, or the monitoring of phone calls and email by the National Security Agency, the lives of everyone in the United States and other digitally developed countries have become an open book to thoseâin government or otherwiseâwho want to track our communications and other actions. Even the simple action of buying an e-book is something that cannot be accomplished without the customer leaving a digital footprint.
Richard Stallman, a free software advocate and the head developer of the GNU operating system, is rightly concerned about the loss of privacy that has steadily grown into a web of information that is available to the government and other organizations with an interest in the details of our lives. For a single simple example, consider Internet companies like Google and Amazon. Every time someone sends an e-mail through Gmail; every time someone searches for a book on Amazon; every search initiated via Googleâthey all provide information about our habits, our interests, our buying patterns. Before the digital age in which we live, governments had to physically spy on people to find out this kind of information. Now, the simple act of ordering any bookâeven
this
bookâleaves a digital imprint of the identity of every single person who has done so.
If you bought a copy of this book in a bookstore, you could have paid cash for it, and nobody would have to know about it except you and the clerk who made the sale. There is no good reason why governments or other organizations should be able to know what books you buy ⦠or about anything you do that isn't illegal or that somehow threatens the security of the United States. In protest against the pervasive encroachment on our privacy, Stallman has withdrawn from this e-book edition the article of his that appears in the print edition of this book. In place of that article, “The Right to Read,” he has provided a note explaining his stance on this issue of privacy.
The other change in this e-book edition is the inclusion of an article that was not in the original print edition of this volume, “Satan's Computer: Why Security Products Fail Us,” by Bruce Schneier. It's a thought-provoking exploration of the difficulty inherent in creating completely secure digital systems.
As you read “True Names” and the other works that comprise this e-book you are, with the exception of this new preface and Richard Stallman's statement, viewing historical documents. We have not materially altered any of the contributed articles here and, of course, “True Names” stands as originally presented in the print edition as well. Immediately following this preface you'll see the original preface to the print edition of this book, and it will be immediately obvious that it, too, is now a historical document, having been written more than a decade before this new preface.