Dear Prof. Thimbleby,
I write to you an open letter in relation to your talk "Problems in the global village", that you presented at the The British Association Annual Festival of Science yesterday. I was not present at the festival, but have read the extended abstract at "http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/village.html".
Your written statements surprise and alarm me, and as a fellow-european scholar I am concerned with the precedent and reference point your talk and accompanying text may become in the public mind.
As an active Internet denizen for many years, the world you describe is alien from the one that I work in, on a daily basis, for many years now.
Below, I will extensively critique specific points you make in the text. Indeed I will contest most everything you say. However, and I do not wish any reader of this letter to lose sight of this, most importantly your overall text, especialy the abstract, is inflammatory and severly out of perspective with the nature of the Internet. And it is especially alarming that you should take such a public position at this time given the sensitive stage the Internet is in now - with a generally technologically under-educated public being exposed to the posibilities (and risks) with the recent dramatic popularization of the Internet, and many countries, including Sweden where I work and live, are considering or debating legal or constitutional measures relating to the Internet.
Your comments are to me so extremely off-center that I can only conclude that you have completely misunderstood the nature of the Internet.
The public needs to understand and debate the benefits and risks of the networking revolution. They are not aided in this by poorly researched statements from leaders in academia.
It is my fervent hope that you will withdraw and repudiate the statements that you make in "Problems in the global village".
Respectfully,
Peter S. Magnusson
SICS
Problems in the global village by Prof. Harold Thimbleby Email: harold@mdx.ac.uk
World Wide Web: http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/harold
Middlesex University
London Abstract
The Internet brings pornography and computer viruses; it tells you how to take drugs and make bombs.
The Internet is a vast and complex communication medium, linking millions of people in a broad spectrum of activities. To state that the Internet "tells you how to take drugs and make bombs" is a rhetorical comment that could just as well be levied at the printing press and as such is meaningless. All users of the Net that I know are on the Net primarily for professional or academic reasons. It is the backbone that connects significant portions of all human research being conducted today, as well as a growing medium for public debate. Within my own field, computer science, it is an essential tool in accessing and distributing information.
We'll explain computer viruses and other forms of computer damage.(I return to commenting viruses below.)
Although we'll say less about porn per se - for obvious reasons - the technical problems of detecting it are the same, even to the extent of different people having different standards of what is acceptable.
This is patently untrue. "Porn", however you define it, is passive information and is technically "undetectable" because you cannot objectively define what porn *is*. Indeed, it is undetectable by wetware. Virus, on the other hand, can be detected and are routinely detected. Like the organisms from which they derive their name, however, they systematically take advantage of kinks in the armour of general operating systems and can, in combination poor administration of systems, do considerable damage.
The talk will show why the dangers are serious and why there can be no effective safeguards.
It would be intersting to see a transcript of the talk, since your text is unconvincing on this point.
Computer viruses Computer viruses are an electronic form of vandalism. They are a form of booby trap and cause destruction without the direct presence of the vandal. They can affect anyone who uses computers. There is evidence that most companies seriously attacked by viruses are out of business within a year, because they lose track of all their computer records: who owes them what and what their stock is.
The only evidence of significant commercial damage due to viruses that I've heard of occurred in combination with poor system administration. Also, the cause of damage in many of these cases are murky. System administrators, just like users, are quick to blame viruses rather than poorly maintained systems or low level of technical expertise. Very, very few viruses actually cause damage, for the same reason that real-life viruses are seldom deadly. Your terminology betrays a poor understanding of the field, since you fail to use more accurate terms such as "logic bombs".
Amongst virus writers there is a dubious argument that viruses and computer hacking improve computer systems by exposing weaknesses.The correct term is "cracking".
Part one of this talk explains what viruses are and how they work. We then show that viruses cannot be detected, though particular ones (such as Michaelangelo) may be recognised quite easily. Cryptography (where viruses modify and conceal themselves) is now routinely used and is making virus detection harder.
Viruses can be detected using any of a number of methods. Popular ones include fingerprinting binaries, and more recent developments include script languages where the execution environment carefully restricts the access rights of programs. Much of the problems today are due to poor default security models in the most common operating systems (Windows, DOS, MacOS, and Unix). Using the term "cryptography" as a label for viruses modifying themselves is a misnomer - such tactics are generally called "mutating" viruses, from the analogous tactic employed by e.g. the HIV virus.
Computer viruses will be around for as long as we want computers to be able to do anything. Calculators don't get viruses; but if you want a general purpose computer to run spreadsheets, word processors and games, it can also run viruses and Trojan Horses.
In general, your comments on computer viruses are totaly incomprehensible to me in the context of the Internet. Computer viruses are inherent to any digital distribution medium, including the sneakernet, a point that you completely gloss over. The vast majority of virus attacks today are related to Windows 3.x and Macintosh system, due to the poor protection infrastructure in their operating systems and the large amount of software being interchanged and multiple points of contact. The principal source of binaries for these platforms are floppy disks. Internet-based viruses are rare due to the considerably more advanced operating systems. And indeed this is an active area of research, visible in the presentation of the Java language to give one example.
The incomprehensibility arises in this last paragraph in the "viruses" section. There, you blandly state that "Computer viruses will be around for as long as we want computers to be able to do anything". If you believe this, and I agree with this statement, then why do you say that the "Internet brings ... computer viruses"? If any use of computers bring viruses, then this statement becomes a tautology.
Pornography Pornography is an increasing problem for anyone who uses the Internet, and a worry for parents and schools. It should be said immediately that the pornography on the Internet comes from many countries (including ones with different cultures and standards, such as Japan) and is very easily available.
What exactly is your norm here, from which the Japanese culture is "different"? This not only smacks of racism, but betrays a provincial attitute in your own mind when you analyze the nature of the Net.
Much of it makes "adult shops" in London's Soho look very tame indeed. Material
Exactly how many "adult shops" in London's Soho have you been into to verify this statement? I'll be visiting London in two weeks, indeed I'll be staying near Soho, and I can guarantee that I'll easily find the exact same material. Why? Because that is the *source* of the Internet material. It is scanned from magazines bought in "adult shops".
includes high quality graphics, instructions, stories, sounds, movies, shop
catalogues, ... - for both conventional sexual interests as well as all
variations. Moreover, the Internet supports bulletin boards and interactive
chat sessions: these facilities are heavily used.
Some people are very liberal about pornography; they often think
pornography is limited to pictures of humans posing in titillating
ways. There is certainly that on the Internet; exchanging and
publishing photographs is commonplace. However I have found text, film
and sound material that I find extremely disturbing, for example
You fail here to put things in perspective. The hardcore material you mention are not only specific to Usenet (for various technical reasons that you fail to mention in your text), they are rare even by Usenet standards.
involving instructions for killing minors. Overtly sexual pornography
is not the only problem. The Internet has information on every
activity that Amnesty International and, I believe all sensible
humans, would wish to eliminate from the planet. What I say here
I'm glad that you added "sensible humans" since, as we know, this is a disjoint group from Amnesty International.
about pornography applies to all other forms of information.
Paedophile and other groups use the Internet to organise rings and
meetings, for sexual and other encounters.
The also use the telephone and public transportation system. Today there is no evidence that they use the Internet in any greater or lesser extent than other communication channels, nor that their portion of that channel is any different. Nor is there any evidence that existing laws and law enforcement techniques are either less or more successful in countering this activity on the Net than elsewhere.
Is it really a problem? Many people who deny this, I believe, have not
got full access to the Internet, or haven't tried hard enough to
This strikes me as a very strange comment. I challenge you to find any significant number of "deniers" who are not Net denizens. It is their very access to the Internet that makes them, and apparently myself, deniers.
find anything, or haven't got a helpful teenager!, or possibly hold
extreme liberal views.
Approximately 10% of shops using the Internet sell 'erotica'
(figure from First Virtual). Approximately 10% of
So what? What on earth does this figure mean? More than 10% of magazines in most newsstands I've seen are pornographic. People are interested in sex, and they have been for quiet a long time. You also fail to note that First Virtual only allows sale of information. They don't allow sale of hard goods due to their method of clearing payments. Thus, your statement leaves the false impression that erotica is 10% of all business carried out on the Net. You also fail to note that to use First Virtual you need a credit card, so is effectively restricted to adults. Finally, you fail to note that it is very cheap to "set up shop" using First Virtual. Your figure says nothing about what amount of business, if any, these "shops" actually do.
bulletin boards I can access directly from the University are
pornographic (I used stratified sampling, sampling 50 random BBS
out of 50000). Of an analysis of searches made
Ditto.
via a Web search engine by people all around the world, 47% of
the 11000 most often repeated searches were pornographic (like
everything else, this is a subjective estimate because, for
example, I counted searches for "hardcore" but
You count "hardcore" as sexual???
Let me enlighten you on brittish vocabulary:
Let me also educate you a little on your own culture:
These sort of lapses are easy to make when doing sloppy, unreviewed research and then presenting it as fact.
I did not count searches for "gay" or "lesbian"). There were 17
searches for a certain abbreviation which (as of writing) match
nothing, but on other search engines find plenty of sites (the
first site on this topic I looked at told me I was the 44963rd
person to look at it); such
Again a betrayal of poor technical understanding. That figure was most certainly a count of http hits, not distinct people visiting the site. Something that your audience, especially the general public, wouldn't know unless they were knowledgeable in the workings of HTTP daemon log files. Needless to say, few people are.
results suggest that users are well aware of what Internet
abbreviations to search for.
Like the case with viruses there is a strong element of rationalising
self-justification, particularly in the US where the constitution permits
free speech. There is also an argument that participants should know how to
do
As opposed to the UK? There are several countries that, unlike the UK, guarantee free speach in the constitution - Sweden is one of them. And that is precisely one of the principles of a free society that I am trying to defend against poorly researched attacks like your own.
potentially dangerous activities but safely. A number of bulletin boards are supposedly in aid of victims, but also serve to make new contacts and to share techniques of, for instance, child entrapment.
This is a slander by insinuation on the large number of serious support groups on the Net, several of which litterally help people survive. If you truly surfed the Usenet, you would know this.
By using graphic images as an easily understood example, part two of the talk shows how easily pornography can be concealed in several ways. However, the discussion applies to any form of information, graphic, textual, animation or whatever.
You are cleverly combining pornography with cryptography and viruses to give the reader the vivid impression of this horrible material creeping into our systems. That is just not happening, and you present no evidence whatsoever to support your case. Concealment of pornography only makes sense when there is censorship on the Net. Those who would push the material in your face are a fringe minority.
We conclude that there is no reliable way - technical or otherwise - to detect or intercept pornography. Below we give a brief review of partial answers.
You have yet to present any arguments, so based on what are you drawing your conclusions?
Technical mechanisms
* Self censorship
Sites either register themselves as 'adult' or their adult material
includes standard keywords indicating it as restricted access. User's
machines recognise the restrictions and restrict actual access. This
approach is similar to the proposed V-chip for US television
censorship.
The method has obvious advantages: it is simple and easy to
understand. It would limit access to some material. Arguments against
it are, in the main, two-fold: it enables parents/guardians to be
over-zealous, and therefore perhaps reduce revenue for legitimate uses
of the medium (an argument more relevant for TV); secondly, anyone who
willingly registers themselves is unlikely to be a problem anyway.
What exactly is the danger in over-zealous parents? How can you be arguing on the one hand for the dangers of Internet, and on the other consider it a disadvantage to any partial solution to the problem if it involves over-zealous guardians?
On what do you base the statement "anyone who willingly registers themselves is unlikely to be a problem anyway". The vast brunt of the pornography business has no interest in making material available to children, for two simple reasons. Doing so invites legal repercussions, and kids don't have money to spend. The problem today is that the Net has been an adult world, i.e. much like Soho, which doesn't need censorship because adults by definition can generally take care of themselves.
* Indirect censorship
Users run software (possibly with hardware help) that restricts access
to selected Internet sites. Here we don't rely on self censorship, but
we have to take on trust that the list of excluded sites is both
sufficient and acceptable. This method is used by SurfWatch.
The method, as currently implemented, is easy to subvert by local
hacking which would certainly not be beyond teenage hackers. Note that
it need not be your child who is the hacker - there need only be one
person in the playground able to supply the necessary skills.
This is a prepostrous statement. Even if there are specific problems with the product SurfWatch - something which you do not present evidence for - that does not obviate the concept. SurfWatch uses a TCP/IP filter that could just as easily be built into a family-oriented version of the operating system, something that would challenge all but the most competent teenage hackers. Contrary to the media image, and apparently your own, teenage hackers are not half as competent as Hollywood movies make them out to be.
And you keep making use of a clever semantic trick. Whenever in the text you warn of some danger, you use the word "child" (you use the word in a negative and threatening context 9 times). However, whenever you criticize some measure to protect children, you cite the wily technical abilities of teenagers (3 times). The unattentive reader will miss this mix-up, and not realize that you never state the obvious: that "children" (by definition prepubertile) will *not* be able to work around these safety nets.
* Blanket censorship
There are available simple programs that stop viewing all graphics.
Though of some use for text bulletin boards, these programs defeat the
value of the World Wide Web for any purposes. Moreover, pictures
themselves are probably the least worrying aspects of the Internet's
porn.
Who on earth is arguing for such silly measures??
* Rapid response
Systems like SurfWatch can be updated automatically. It is therefore
possible to subscribe to sites listing exclusions. As soon as an
official watchdog detects undesirable material at some site, it can be
listed amongst the exculsions. Note that the watchdog may make finer
classifications, such as violence, sex, racism, and users of the
system may have personal preferences.
This is just not true, and yet another unsupported claim confusing product with technology. Again, this might be possible with a particular version of a particular product, but it is *not* generic to the method, which could easily employ encryption to make it difficult to subscribe to such lists.
Also, you omit the small detail that just as exclusion lists can be listened to, the exclusion list servers know who is listening: thus they can check against a valid list of recipients and, when a new one is found, check whether it is just such a "exclusion provider". Furthermore, such a mirror site would automatically violate copyrighted material, and so would not be a tenable solution.
* Monitors and access logs
Systems can summarise what sites have been accessed. This may be
useful for parents reviewing children's Internet use, for example.
Note that many sites use aliases and code words, if not accessed via
anonymous servers, so that the names of sites may not be much help!
Some
Again, you're painting an implied picture of children who are savvy to URL naming etc. Are you seriously arguing that children will note what URL is about to be followed, and make a decision as to whether or not parents will recognize the site as unsuitable.
systems (e.g., the Internet Filter) automatically email other people
(e.g., the parents) when a specific site is explored.
Ironically, doing an internet search for 'surfwatch' or 'internet
filter' will pick up pornographic sites complaining about these
programs as well as sites describing their actual use or how to obtain
them. Of the sites mentioning SurfWatch, half approved of it, half
disliked it - half of those intend to publish the sites SurfWatch
classifies to make them more
Again, you're making technical errors. Listing sites that are censored by SurfWatch will not allow you to bypass SurfWatch, something that you seem to imply in the above.
easily available. About a tenth use its classification of them as
proof that their site is bad enough to be classified by it.
* Limited access
Many Internet provides, such as CompuServe and America Online, provide
simple restricted access to the Internet.
Yes? So does this work? If so, then how can you conclude (as you do above) that there are no technical solutions?
* Cryptography
Secret code systems (such as PGP, Pretty Good Privacy) are already
used on the Internet to protect privacy. As pornographers use these
encryption methods for their own purposes (e.g., to evade detection),
increasingly their material will anyway become inaccessible to people
who don't have the right keys. This may make the problem
self-limiting.
Again, what is the point of this? If the problem is self-limiting, then is it a problem?
Authentication (people know who they are, and people cannot
impersonate others) is closely related to cryptography. At present, it
is easy for a 12 year old to pretend to be 40 or vice versa. Some
pages claim to be made
It would have to be a pretty mature 12 year old to produce a driver license, credit card, etc that are all needed to access most BBS:es.
by children so young (including their photograhs) the information must
have been assembled by older people. Authentication technology (plus
What point are you making here? How does pretending to be young in designing a web page damaging to young people? Will they be offended by the association?
national IDs!) makes impersonation harder.
Good, so, then it's not a problem? Or?
Non technical mechanisms
* Better material
The Internet has very little interesting material; it needs more. When
How on earth can a computer science professor make such a statement? The Internet is awash with fascinating material, everything from following comet collisions blow-by-blow, to reading the latest CNN story on-line including movie clips, to reading reviews of movies and wines, touring museums, to reading the latest in computer science research. There are literaly gigabytes of interesting information on-line today.
it has more, it is just possible that pornography etc will slip into
its statistically appropriate place, one aspect of humanity, but not
the most
You have yet to demonstrate that it is currently statistically inappropriate.
prominent on the Internet.
I've made a list of interesting places in London with their own Web
sites. It isn't very long. Why isn't there more good material
available?
I'm confused. What does geographical location have to do with anything? Who cares where it is, the whole point of the Net is that it doesn't *matter* where the information is!
There are several 'electronic libary' projects that aim to make books
and information more easily available - see Project Gutenberg for
example. The British Library has a useful presence; but where is
everyone else?
If the British Library's books were all on the Web, it would
quite rightly contain some pornography. (This is a common
pro-pornography line of argument.) But it would also contain a
lot of other stuff, and the pornographic material might be more
in perspective.
"Might"? So you don't think that by definition the perspective of pornography in the British Library is a proper one?
There is a huge amount of very valuable information, for instance on
AIDS. (In some cases, the valid warnings about infection become
covers for explaining activities that arguably do more to increase the
problems.)
You really delight in making negative insinuations about every single positive aspect of the Net that you can think of. So, we are to infer from the above that yes, there are valid warnings about infection, but this too is harmful?
* Clear thinking
Many believe the Internet brings automatic benefits, and naturally
leads to democracy, peace and general good will. There is little
evidence of
Who argues for this?
this, though there one must not forget the 1992 Russian revolution
(see an IRC log), Tienanmen Square and a few other notable exceptions.
What?? How can you say "little evidence" and then quote significant contributions in political developments in the Soviet Union and China? What exactly is your perspective on the significance of the democratization of the two largest countries on earth (one by surface, the other by population)?
Particularly in the US, freedom of speech is idolised, and indeed it
is very easy to ridicule censorship, particularly with 'thin end of
the wedge' arguments.
How does the fact that ridicule come easy make the ridicule any less poignant?
Very few people are aware of the proper statistics. A newsworthy
incident, say of an Internet organised child abduction, can be made to
appear to be a world wide problem. Though child abductions in cars are
far more frequent, who'd argue against cars on those grounds?
Note, anyway, that statistics from the Internet may under-estimate
potential problems: one child in a school playground might access an
undesirable site and then distribute information around the school
using floppy disc. Thus statistics might give an impression of low
activity, whereas there need only be a very few selective people who
pre-select material before sharing it with others who perhaps do not
even have Internet access.
Wow. There's so much unfounded speculation in those two paragraphs that for once I'm at loss for words.
There is evidence that teenagers have attached pornography to computer
viruses. The viruses then spread the material automatically, without
the original perpetrator being directly involved.
Ah. Again the "evil viruses spreading pornography" theme. We're getting the gist.
There is a lot of news coverage of Internet pornography. A lot of this
is driven by voyeurism, so possiblyly over-estimating the significance
of the issues.
Again, I don't see the point. Are you saying that this is all a non-issue? If so, why on earth have you written this paper??
* Education
Though the emphasis on the protection of children is narrow (and is
often used to displace further argument), it is certainly the case
that children
Does the use of the argument make it invalid?
have to grow up and live as best they can in the world in which they
find themselves. The fact that there are nasty things someplaces isn't
reason in itself to avoid those places; many people live in London,
for instance. People do need to learn, sometime, to be wise.
For once I agree with you. Funny that you bury this comment this far down.
Many people argue that parental responsibility is the core issue. "You
had children, now be responsible for them." This view seriously
under-estimates the difficulty of being responsible when children
often have much better technical knowledge and access to material on
the Internet. Teenagers are often unsupervised, and they are ones
likely to search out sexually interesting material. A report in the
British Medical Journal shows that boys given sex education at school
were less likely to take part in under-age sex, and girls were no more
likely than otherwise. More research like this is needed.
??? Again, you are arguing that this is all *not* a problem, yet concluding that it is.
Conclusion The Internet has been called a global electronic village. If so, most of it is a heavily-used red light district. Too few people are providing any other
You have presented no evidence whatsoever for this.
interesting or useful services on the Internet.
Ditto.
"I have seen the future and it needs work"
I have news for you: the Net is not the future, it's been around for a while and it is unfolding as we speak.
I shall very briefly describe my own attempts at providing interesting World Wide Web material. Further reading (World Wide Web references are indicated throughout this article; they can be clicked on to obtain the information. They are probably underlined or otherwise easy to see on your browser.) "Sex online: what parents should know," similar stories in both Newsweek and Time, July 3, 1995. Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Descriptions, Short Stories, and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces, and Territories, by Marty Rimm, Carnegie Mellon University.
Why on earth are you citing only this study? If you've actually read it, as I have, you should conclude that it is mostly drivel, the intent to create a stir being painfully obvious.
Note. "Reader Advisory: Due to the nature of the studied material,
Minors and Those Who Are Going To Be Easily Offended are hereby warned
of strong language and sexual content. Leave now if dealing with such
things is going to be a problem for you."
A critical review of it by Brian Reid. Another review by Donna L. Hoffman &
Thomas P. Novak and a reponse to its criticisms.
If you've read these reviews, which are extremely critical of Rimm's work, then why on earth do you cite Rimm?
The future does not compute, S. L. Talbott, O'Reilly & Associates, 1995. See also the review by Harold Thimbleby, to appear in Times Higher Education Supplement. "An organisational solution to piracy and viruses," by Harold Thimbleby, Journal of Systems and Software, 25(2), pp207-215, 1994.
I did quick-read this paper. I found the scheme painfully naive.
... many popular Internet magazines, such as .net.
Harold Thimbleby is Professor of Computing Research, Middlesex
University, London.
Phone: +44 181 362 6061
Email: harold@mdx.ac.uk
Web pages: http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/harold