From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis)
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 95 17:53:53 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: "The Net"
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSD/.3.91.950803110646.12078E-100000@escape.com>
Message-ID: <9o809c19w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Ray Arachelian <sunder@escape.com> writes:

> On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:
> > terrible. The star should NOT have appeared in a bikini. Yech.
>
> Why not, she had the right 'assets' for that scene, no? 8-D

Tastes vary. If she were my friend, I'd recommend stuffing that bra. :) :) :)
(With something steganographic, of course. :)

> > In a typical suspenseful scene (not a spoiler), the heroine sneaks into an
> > office and sets off a fire alarm. Everyone leaves, including a villaine, wh
> > doesn't log off.
>
> is this way.  Very few care about security.  Here at work I have to fight
> extra hard with idiots who log in and leave their machines -- users with
> Supervisory access!

I once was a consultant at a small financial services firm, and a (young,
disturbed) user was going around playing stupid pranks on unattended PCs. I
mandated the use of screenblankers that kicked in after 3 minutes of inactivity
and required a password to get back. The user would then reboot the PCs; some
password was needed to get onto the LAN, but he'd mess with the local
config.sys's. He eventually got fired and I do something else.

> > (One of the IP bytes was 344, by the way.)

> Re: ip #'s: Yeah, it's like all the phone numbers in every movie are
> 555-xxxx.  Probably they didn't want to get sued by posting a real net
> address and get sued.

I see! I remember reading that they discovered in the 30's that if they used a
real phone number in a movie, some people would actually dial it to see what it
is in real life, so all the phone numbers are in the nonexistent 555 exchange.
I guess if a valid IP number were used, some folks would ping it or something.
I guess byte values>255 are the IP equivalent of 555. Better than 127.0.0.1 -
someone might telnet to 127.0.0.1, then ask mgm/ua whose address this is. :)

> > "hot chats" on an her Mac, and hooks up the text to a voice synthesizer.
>
> can be telnetted into.  But the voice synths are possible.  Apple does
> provide that capability.  You'd have to get the irc client to use it.

My 6yr-old's IBM Aptiva comes with a sound board and the software that reads
English text and pronounces it in much more lifelike manner than the gizmo in
the movie. That gizmo sounded annoyingly computer-like, but had intonations
obviously coming from a human actor.

> it either.  It wasn't much of a "hot" chat.  It could have been much
> steamier.  The sex content of this movie was pretty lame though...

Hotter than any I've had in many, many years...
So, will they ever show some real X-rated hot chat in a real R-rated movie? :)

> > (If they all exchange so much e-mail, why do they bother FedExing diskettes
>
> More secure to fedex a disk.  Nobody on the net can read what's not on
> the net. ;-)  Now if the author of this movie knew about pgp... totally
> different story.

Better yet, if they were shown sending each other PGP-encrypted e-mail over the
Cypherpunks Anonymous Remailer Network... :) :) Maybe in the next movie.

> > (E-mailed from an open-access computer at a computer show, I might add)
>
> Not unlikely.  A lot of trade shows do provide machines with net access
> as demos of the internet.  Though it's usually manned by the ISP and not
> out in the open.

The notion is very realistic (but the flashy displays in the movie were not).
At the recent PC Expo at the Javitz Center in NYC, there were tens of PCs
running various Web browsers to try out. No one was watching over most of them.
I entered the URL telnet://uunet.uu.net:119, and sure enough, got connected.
It accepted 'IHAVE', but I was too lazy to type in an entire Usenet article.
I (and the heroine) could have telnetted to someone's port 25 just as easily.

---

Dr. Dimitri Vulis
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps