Can you remember when you came home from work or school, and you didn't have anything to do? So you'd call up your friends and hang out, or go to a movie, or play road hockey, or basketball, or maybe read a book...

But what do you do now when you get home from work or school? Do you toss something into the microwave then park yourself in front of the computer? Do you check your email, delete the spam and then hit Send & Receive again just in case the mail server missed something in the last 30 seconds? Or maybe you're sifting through dozens of emails from several mailing lists and checking your favorite newsgroups for a reply to your witty but off-topic comment?

Is this worth giving up your spare-time for?

Some of you may be too young to remember this, but there was a time when the odds were much higher that you might get a busy signal when you called a friend on the phone. It didn't mean they were more popular, it just meant you couldn't get through. There was no call waiting back then, and no opportunity for someone to say, "Can I put you on hold?" and then put you on hold without waiting for your answer. We all just plain old waited until the other person was off the line. And when you finally did get on the phone you probably talked for 10 minutes then said, "See you tomorrow".

And that group of friends you'd hang around with was small, maybe a dozen people at most. And you'd do stuff together, work together, and play together. And even though the group of people you hung out with was small, maybe a dozen, you still didn't really know everybody. And maybe a couple of those people made you suspicious. Maybe you didn't like them for some reason. So you avoided them, and you were careful.

But now we're connected man. Some of us more permanently than others, but we're definitely all connected. Emailing, FTPing, surfing, researching, gaming, and chatting. Yeah, I've been there too. In a "room" with forty or fifty people at one time, typing furiously and catching only snippets of the two dozen conversations that were taking place trying to figure out what all the LOL's and ROTFLMAO's meant. And the more I hung out in the the chat room the more I began to think I was someone important, because people would remember me from the night before, and they'd welcome me with their caps lock key firmly locked on.

And for some bizarre reason I felt like I could trust some of these people. Private chats made you feel even more secure than the anonymity provided by your nickname. And out would come the secrets, and the personal crisis, the emotional chaos, and the suicide threats.

Yeah, one guy msg'ed me in a private chat that he wanted to kill himself. What do you type to something like that? Is the person legit, or pulling your chain? Or is it a cry for attention, a plea for real help? I'm just another anonymous chatter, not skilled in assessing serious psychological disorders or distress.

What would you do?

Someone else eventually told me this guy threatens to kill himself with every new person who shows up in that particular chat room. That was an eye-opener all right.

But hey, now that we're connected, and we can recognize the kooks from the legitimate chatters, it's okay right?

Hmmm...

Enough about chatting. There are other things to do when we're connected that don't get us all tangled up in someone else's problems. Online gaming for one. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Tribes was a great online multi-player game. Used to play it every night with some buddies from work. Even came up with a team name and challenged some other teams. We were pretty good, when we actually worked together. That was cool. Really got a team vibe going sometimes. But like all games, Tribes got boring and something else was announced to take over it's throne... in 2 years. It was still under development.

Surfing isn't as cool as it used to be. I feel like I've seen it all. From the porn sites that claim to be free to the video clip of the wrestler who broke his leg to the graphic pics of the crash victims to the driver download sites that make you fill out a form that would make a credit card app look simple. Been there done that. The only thing that really seems to change are the news sites. But even they start to look all the same after a while.

E-mail is still cool. Being connected all the time means you could get an email any moment, twenty-four hours a day. It's especially exciting to press that SEND button and post a fanfic story to a mailing list, then sit back and see what happens! Will they hate it? Will they like it? Will they think it's an incredible new angle that no one else has thought of? Or will they even comment at all? Should I comment on someone else's story so more people might comment on mine? So you post the story, and you wait...

And you wait...

And you-- wait! Someone has posted a comment! What does it say?

Nice chapter. Keep up the great work. Can't wait to see more!

Well, they didn't say it sucked. That's good, I guess...

And I didn't get a virus from an attachment.

Feeling insecure about the net? Well I was feeling pretty secure until someone slammed my web server with a DOS attack. What's a DOS attack? No, it's not a Microsoft thing. It's when someone intentionally floods your server with so much information that your web server can't keep up with it all, and no one can see your webpage. You're down man. You're precious content is offline.

You're disconnected. Not a nice feeling.

Now imagine you're the CIA, or the FBI. How would you feel if someone hacked your servers? Pissed off? Surprised? Ready to hire the perpetrator to fix the leaks?

We read about it all the time. "Weakness in latest Microsoft operating system provides hole for hacker." "Government websites defaced." "Amazon.com website brought to its knees by Denial Of Service attack." And then we watch the interview with the guy from the FBI saying they are working on ways to monitor these threats to national security and will punish hackers to the furthest extent that the law allows, even though laws for computer crime were scarce or non-existant at the time.

I have one question... why are the FBI's computers, with all their sensitive information, connected to the internet in the first place? Why is the military's computers connected to the internet? Why is NASA connected to the internet?

This may seem naive to many of you out there at first, but why not just disconnect them if they don't need to be connected to you and me? Give them their own private internetwork to send their sensitive information back and forth on. You can't hack someone if you can't connect to them.

Based on that simple concept, I am predicting that in 5-10 years you and I will be surfing and emailing on something called the Public Internetwork or PubNet for short, while the government, the intelligence agencies, the military, inter-bank communication, and any other institutions or organizations requiring secure transmission of data will be emailing and surfing on the Private Internetwork, or the PriNet. Yeah, there'll still be hacking on PubNet, but at least my money will stay in the bank and the shuttle's life support won't get hacked.

So what do we do in the meantime? You get a router with a firewall, and you try to block the "hackers" out. Hmm, your router doesn't have that feature? Now what do you do? You call your ISP, and they tell you there's not much they can do either, even if we do know the IP address of the machine that is sending me the equivalent of a volcanic eruption down my 1/2 inch pipe. You feel helpless, you feel pissed off, and you feel strangely depressed that this once exciting new playground of shared information has deteriorated into... dare I say it?

Work.

Hmmm...

The novelty has worn off, definitely. I don't leave my computer running all the time anymore, just when I get home from work. Yeah, I'm not permanently connected anymore. Only semi-permanently. I'm not subbed to more than 4 mailing lists anymore. I'm not a "member" of all the anime newsgroups anymore. Things seem a little more manageable. I still think we should make a day 30 hours instead of 24. Or maybe I should just go outside when I feel light-headed?

Nah. I've got a website to update.

E-mail me

Andy Skuse - Dec 01 2001