From Harald_Lakatha@rdb.edvg.co.at Wed Sep 4 01:44:32 1996 Received: from firewall.edvg.co.at (firewall.edvg.co.at [192.164.36.131]) by suburbia.net (8.7.4/Proff-950810) with SMTP id BAA10386 for ; Wed, 4 Sep 1996 01:43:09 +1000 Message-Id: <9609040045.AA5278@lngate.notes.edvg.co.at> To: best-of-security@suburbia.net (best-of-security) From: Harald_Lakatha@rdb.edvg.co.at (Harald Lakatha) Date: 3 Sep 96 17:35:34 EDT Subject: (fwd) WATCH Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain The following article was posted on alt.2600.moderated. No author had been specified, the signature is from the newsgroup moderator. (Aug 26, 1996 00:05 a.m. EDT) There is no privacy in obscurity anymore. The tangled skein of loopy interconnections that once made the Net an unfathomably complex and mysterious place is rapidly unraveling. No longer can the shadowy habitants of the alt.sex.fantasies.barney newsgroups rest secure in the knowledge that their lascivious thoughts about large purple dinosaurs will be shared solely by the few trusted cybersouls who are similarly obsessed. Thanks to powerful new search tools like Deja News (www.dejanews.com) , anyone with a Web browser can extract everything you've said, on any subject, in any newsgroup, no matter how underpopulated or esoteric. Talk about getting a complete picture; maybe too complete; of what makes a person tick. When Digital Equipment first released Alta Vista (altavista.digital.com), the deepest, most comprehensive search engine yet, word swept through the virtual realm like wildfire. The first thing everybody did, of course, was run a search on their own names. Reactions ranged from amusement and amazement to shock and di smay when we saw fragments of our personalities, intellects, and predilections c aptured in Alta Vista's vast, billowing, extremely fine net, carried to the surface, and exposed to the light of day. For those who thought they'd been floating gently through cyberspace, leaving barely a ripple in teir wake, Alta Vista was a revelation: There's evidence of our existence everywhere. We're snared by hyperlinks, hooked into digital realities that we never knew existed. My pal Jon Carroll, whom you may also know as Computer Life's back page columnist, discovered links from halfway around the world to his San Francisco Chronicle column via that paper's Web site. That explaine d the fan mail from places outside his circulation area, like Norway. Thanks to the Web, he put it, "I'm syndicated without being syndicated." It doesn't take much to become a public figure on the Net. You don't even have to own a computer. Web-based white-page services like Switchboard (www.switchb oard.com), Four11 (www.four11.com), or Yahoo's People Search (www.yahoo.com/sear ch/people) will turn up individuals as resolutely unwired as my mom. Whether the contact info they give you is accurate is another story. My own listing showed an out-of-date phone number, a city where I haven't lived in a dozen years, and a ZIP code I've never claimed as my own. It's a mixed blessing, I suppose. Digital directory assistance raises some pesky privacy issues. On the plus side, there's the reunite-with-old-friends-or-people-who-want-to-fling-money-at-you factor. But on the downside, it makes us much more accessible to people whom w e might prefer not be able to find us; telemarketers and e-mail spammers being a mong the most benign possibilities. But is easy access the same as invasion of privacy? Psychologically, it may feel like that way, but I'm not at all sure that it is. The Web scales everything up; it just broadcasts your hometown telephone book to the universe at large. Where do you draw the line between what's an acceptable amount of access and what' s not? Try this as a basic operating assumption: There are no secrets online. If you have a listed phone number, you must recognize that unless you takesteps to unlist it, it's available, right now, to several million people. If you post in a newsgroup, no matter how obscure, or publish something on a Web site for the del ectation of your friends, remember that the whole world is watching, or might be . That includes your parents (or your kids, for that matter), your business comp etitors, current and potential employers, not to mention various self-appointed minions of the Decency Police. Paranoid? Moi? I don't think so. The inescapable truth is that cyberspace is a lot bigger than it sometimes seems, and it's growing larger all the time. I wi nce when I see enthusiastic newbies who don't yet realize the size of the audien ce they're playing to posting their intimate true confessions in some public for um on the Net. I love the varied and often outrageous voices that make the virtual realm such a fascinating place to live. I want that edginess and diversity to continue and to thrive. But the rule of thumb applies: Never say anything onlin e that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of The New York Times. -- -=-GRAHAM-JOHN BULLERS=-=AB756@FREENET.TORONTO.ON.CA=-=ALT.2600.MODERATED-= Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.The courage to change the things I can.And the wisdom to hide the bodies of the people =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=I had to kill because they pissed me off=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=