-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- =-=-=-=-=Copyright 1993,4 Wired Ventures, Ltd. All Rights Reserved-=-=-=-= -=-=For complete copyright information, please see the end of this file=-=- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= WIRED 2.03 Electric Word ************* Academy Awards of Interactive ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Lisa Goldman is on a mission. For the past two years, she has been on the road and on the phone, in search of the future of interactive multimedia. As director of the upcoming Interactive Media Festival, Goldman is trying to hunt down the planet's best interactive art and design to showcase at the Los Angeles Convention Center June 6-8. She and event organizers recently announced the selection of a 75-member international "Delegation of Nominators" that will select "significant examples of interactivity" in film, art, music, publishing, computers, and consumer electronics. "We want to get to the essence of what makes good interactive multimedia," Goldman said over the phone, between stops in London and Switzerland. "We're looking at the greatest possible diversity of expression and the widest possible geographical representation." The nominating committee list reads like a Who's Who of the world of digital art, entertainment, and commerce. Each of the nominators will choose two works for consideration. The festival, in seeking out the best in this emerging medium, has set no categories and is open to any type of material. Rather than rely on slides or videotapes in making its selections, the festival jury will evaluate each work in its native form, whether it's on a specific computer platform or at an interactive theme park. "It will be fascinating to see whether multimillion-dollar productions and projects developed on shoestring budgets end up side-by-side in the festival," said Harvie Branscomb, who is overseeing the competition part of the festival. The Interactive Media Festival has established an Internet mailbox (info-request@media.festival.com) where developers, artists, and others can get more information on the festival and post descriptions of projects for possible consideration in the event. The festival is, in the words of its press release, "Powered by Motorola," and is a joint venture of Seybold Seminars and the public relations firm Cunningham Communications. For more info call (800) 573 1212, +1 (415) 357 0100. - Gareth Branwyn =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Holy Ghost in the Machine ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Greg Garvey isn't expecting his Automatic Confession Machine to become a regulation church fixture any day soon. Instead, Garvey, an artist and lapsed Catholic, is showing off the computerized confessional on the nascent electronic-art circuit. Here's how it works: A penitent, perhaps attracted by the red neon cross or the stereoscopic image of a winking Christ, steps up to the gleaming black Plexiglas kiosk and kneels on the machine's red naugahyde stool. To start the confession, the user presses the Amen key, then selects from a menu of the seven deadly sins and the Ten Commandments. The priest-in-a-chip asks the user a series of questions, taking a special interest in sins of the flesh. After the confession, the machine's expert system prints out the prescribed penance on a handy wallet-size slip of paper and signs off with a blessing. The Automatic Confession Machine (ACM) wasn't created as a "diatribe against the Catholic Church," Garvey says, but as a method of examining the way that "technology has intruded into our lives, mediating what used to be human-to-human transactions." Despite the system's manifest advantages - Garvey says it can conveniently provide the Church with a vast datastream for spotting sin trends among the flock - the ACM is unlikely to spring from gallery hall to hallowed hall anytime soon. In order for the ACM to be anything more than an artist's prank, the software must be ordained. "Not likely," admits Greg Garvey, "but one must bear in mind that the Church only recently admitted to the correctness of Galileo." Garvey's e-mail address: ggarvey@vax2.concordia.ca. - Adam Fisher =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Telegeography The Balance of Global Telecommunications Traffic ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ In 1992 the people of the planet Earth spent a total of 40 billion minutes on the phone. To be more exact, they spent 40 billion minutes (or 76,000 years) sending information over telephone lines: voices, faxes, e-mail, and plain old data. But for most of those billions of telephone-minutes only the caller paid for the connection, even though both a caller and a callee benefited from a conversation. The asymmetrical nature of communication costs are reflected in this global map of telegeography for 1992. The red-colored areas denote countries that make more calls than they receive (thus incurring a deficit in the global telecommunications cost balance). The blue denotes countries with more incoming than outgoing calls (a surplus); yellow-colored countries have a balance (outgoing and incoming traffic with less than a 10 percent difference); uncolored areas mean there is no data. The United States ran a deficit by initiating (and paying for) 3 billion more minutes of telecommunications than it received. Other deficit sponsors of outgoing calls were Germany and Saudi Arabia (with many guest workers), Switzerland (where fully 5 percent of all phone calls are international connections), and Japan. An analysis of international phone usage suggests that social calls last longer than business (or "instrumental") calls by a factor of ten - 20 to 30 minutes talking to Aunt Maria compared with 2 to 3 minutes communicating to Abdul on the factory floor. Gregory Staple, editor of the monograph TeleGeography, from which this map is adapted, suggests that the huge telecommunication deficit of the US should be considered part of its service environment, and a bargain in the new information economics. - Kevin Kelly =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Electronic Paperbacks ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ When NEC and Fujitsu developed their handheld electronic book players, they decided not to use CD-ROMs. All that storage would be wasted on the trashy novels, self-help guides, and comic books that straphangers on Japan's overcrowded trains like to read. Instead, both players will use writable media. NEC's Digital Book Player has floppies, while Fujitsu's View Art uses memory cards. Fujitsu is still dithering over whether to turn its prototype into a commercial product, but NEC's device went on sale in Japan in early November, with a list price of Yen29,800 (around US$300). NEC says that it plans to ship one million units over the next three years, and has announced an initial 30-odd titles, with over 100 scheduled to be avail-able by the end of the year. Which medium suits you better - floppies or memory cards - depends on how much you're willing to pay for low weight. Floppy disks cost next to nothing, but are heavy and power-hungry. Memory cards are expensive - 512 Kbytes worth will set you back about US$200 at current prices - but light and energy-efficient. And, as Fujitsu points out, you just need one card for your reader: They envisage downloading (probably via NiftyServe, a local, Fujitsu-sponsored version of CompuServe) books onto cards. The other difference between the two players is the interface. Fujitsu's player features just two buttons plus an on/off switch. You only need one thumb to operate it. NEC's player forces you to contend with ten twiddly buttons. Of course, electronic book readers, being made largely from off-the-shelf components and containing little in the way of proprietary technology, will be kid's stuff to clone. The real money is going to be in the books - just ask the subway commuters who tear through a different 300-page manga (Japanese comic book) every day on their way home from work. NEC Corp: +81 3 3798 6511; Fujitsu Ltd: +81 3 3215 5236. - Bob Johnstone =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Robot War Games ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Here's an old movie plot: To minimize the human impact of war, the nations of the world agree to have robots do the fighting. Of course, one side is bound to not like the outcome ("It wuz fixed...we wuz robbed") and so may start a war over that. The plot may be fiction, but the robot battle is real. Marc Thorpe is waging the first "Robot Wars" on August 20 and 21, 1994 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. "I don't feel uncomfortable about destruction," says Thorpe. "Promoting combat between robots instead of people is a healthy alternative. That it's aggressive, combative, and survival-oriented gives it a kind of energy that professional football has." Thorpe has launched a PR blitz for "Robot Wars," inviting mad mechanics, technophiles, and movie special-effects teams to build radio-controlled robots designed to rip, punch, and impale each other to scrap metal and frayed rubber while onlookers scream like ancient Romans at the Colosseum. And if mere robot opponents aren't enough, hydraulic shears and presses placed within the 40-by-60-foot arena will chomp, stomp, and sayonara any dull-witted robot who happens to linger too long in the wrong place. There are three contests: one-on-one survival of the fittest, a mob scene, and the neatest, where your bot has to escort a defenseless dronebot across the arena. The three weight classes were set up so your delicate, 25-pound, eighteen-legged centipede doesn't have to face a 100-pound crusher with a snorting chainsaw for a beak. And it's not quite "anything goes" - no explosives, corrosives, fire breathing dragons, or "untethered projectiles" (guns); no radio jamming or interfering with the other human operators allowed. Entry fees per robot are US$50 for individuals and $500 for corporations. (It's a business expense: Put your logos where the TV cameras can see them.) For details and an entry form e-mail robotwars@aol.com, or phone +1 (415) 453 6305. - Jef Raskin =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Comix Redux ^^^^^^^^^^^ Comic Power: Independent/ Underground Comix is a massive traveling exhibit chronicling 30 years of underground and independent comix. For the uninitiated, comix are not about superheroes. They venture into territory that aboveground comics rarely acknowledge: relationships, politics, angst, and sexuality. The content and format of comix are constrained only by the imagination of the cartoonists, not by the blue pencil of corporate censors. This show is remarkable for its number of artists and amazing array of styles and subject matter. Included are over 90 artists and 250 pieces, ranging from single panels to full stories. Among these are the famous: Robert Crumb ("Zap"), Bill Griffith ("Zippy the Pinhead"), Art Spiegelman ("Raw" and "Maus"), and Matt Groening ("Life in Hell"). But there are also many lesser-known but destined-to-become-famous artists such as Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez ("Love and Rockets"), Chester Brown ("Yummy Fur"), and Julie Doucette ("Dirty Plotte"). Also included are two historical sub-shows: one of blacklisted political artists, curated by hyperpolitical painter Sue Coe; and one of newspaper strips from 1898 to 1945 that includes early comic art geniuses Windsor McKay ("Little Nemo") and George Herriman ("Krazy Kat"), among others. The sheer size of the show (running at the Vancouver Art Gallery from April 15, 1994 through June 15,1994, then at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, September 7-18, 1994) is daunting. There is very little filler, and Comic Power requires many hours of viewing to digest. That said, the show effectively demonstrates that comix really can be art and literature, still maintaining that precious ability to rot our brains. - Peter L. Herb =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Network of the Stars ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ A programmer debugs a mainframe from his living room across town, a broker in Seattle studies his NYSE screen for blue-chip trades - now common occurrences thanks to digital telecommunications. In the entertainment industry, San Francisco-based Entertainment Digital Network (EDnet) is rapidly convincing producers, performers, and entertainment executives that traveling the information superhighway can save them from real-time gridlock as well. But how does a musician or actor telecommute? Using fiber-optic lines to transmit digital signals, EDnet has established, in two years, a global network of nearly 80 sound studios and editing houses. The web allows exchange of high-quality audio, compressed video, and multimedia data transmission. Combining entertainment-industry and technical expertise with digital telecommunications, the fledgling company hopes to "enable creative talent in the industry to be virtually anywhere," says David Gustafson, EDnet's vice president of marketing. The company's high-tech connections allowed actor Ben Kingsley to re-record spoken parts of last year's Searching For Bobby Fischer from London, and Tom Selleck used EDnet to record his voice-over for the AT&T i-Plan commericals. Duets, Frank Sinatra's latest CD, found the crooner in Los Angeles, singing with Liza Minelli in Brazil and Bono in New York over EDnet's lines. For filmmakers, the company connects Lucas Digital's Skywalker Sound South in Santa Monica with its Northern California counterpart, allowing directors hundreds of miles away to supervise audio mixes and remotely control high-speed dubbing projetors, as Ron Howard did for Backdraft. EDnet claims that it owes its success to entertainers' growing preference for working and living nearer to their families and away from hubs like Los Angeles and New York. Talent can use local EDnet-affiliated sites to reduce the need for travel or courier systems. Pop star Gloria Estefan will shortly connect her own in-home studio with the network, which requires some US$9,500 for hardware, plus monthly and hourly operating costs and fiber-optic connection charges. Video links run from $15,000 to $20,000. So has telecommuting come to the entertainment community? Comparing his company's services to the intimacy of a live studio setting, Technical Services Manager John Wheeler explains: "The interaction is still there; the producer has a very intimate relationship with [a performer] behind glass in a darkened room. The only difference now is that the glass happens to be 3,000 miles thick." EDnet: +1 (415) 274 8800. - Colin Berry =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Security Through Obscurity ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The cypherpunks' latest contribution to privacy is called "Stego" and comes from Romana "Cypherella" Machado, a software developer (at left), from Cupertino, California. Stego uses steganography, an encryption-like technique that complements, rather than replaces, more familiar encryption methods such as Phil Zimmermann's PGP (see WIRED 1.6, page 25). Instead of creating a message or file that draws attention to itself because it looks like secret code, Stego camouflages messages inside innocuous digitized picture files. This is possible because of the way pictures are stored in a computer. Every picture is made up of millions of pixels (picture elements), each of which is made up of a string of bits. For example, a monochrome picture might have 8-bit pixels, giving the image 256 different shades of gray, from totally black to totally white. Stego uses the least significant bit (LSB) in each pixel to hold one bit of the hidden message. In half the cases, the LSB will remain the same. The rest of the time, the shade of the pixel will be altered 1/256 in grayness - completely undetectable with the naked eye. Stego is fully compatible with more traditional forms of encryption. This means you can encrypt your deepest secrets using PGP and then hide the resulting cyphertext in your favorite swimsuit photo of Claudia Schiffer or Fabio. The bad guys have to jump through two hoops to get at your secrets. First, they have to figure out that the bathing beauty has more to hide than is apparent at first glance. Second, they must crack your traditional encryption. Stego is shareware. It's free via anonymous ftp from sumex-aim.stanford.edu in the info-mac/Recent directory. If you like the shareware version of Stego, you can register your copy for US$15 and get periodic updates and additional features. As of this writing, Stego is only available for Apple Macintosh PICT format files. Work is currently underway to port Stego to PCs and other platforms. In addition, future versions of Stego will be able to hide messages in other media such as digital audio and video. Romana Machado's e-mail: romana@apple.com. - Sandy Sandfort =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Needling a Virtual Cadaver ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Dr. George Sheplock has designed "Brachial Plexus Blocks," a Mac-based medical simulation that combines the richness of textbooks with the hands-on experience of a lab exercise. The simulation lets anesthesia residents practice doing nerve blocks (injecting a nerve with a compound such as novocaine) by manipulating a simulated needle, using the mouse. Trainees are able to practice placing the needle on the patient and then quickly getting clinical responses, such as the "patient" hollering, "Ouch! Do you know what you're doing?" According to Sheplock, a major in the US Air Force, staff anesthesiologist, and director of academic computing at the Wilford Hall Medical Center of Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, the main emphasis of the program is to help students visualize anatomy by bringing the experience of an actual cadaver dissection to a clinical setting. Students can call up images of the patient's underlying anatomy, looking at layers of muscle, nerves, and arteries based on digitized photographs of cadavers. They can also study 3-D illustrations of nerve structures, which can be rotated and viewed from various angles. Contact George Sheplock, MD: sheplocg@vax.cs.hscsyr.edu. - Jeff Baskin =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The Interactive Electric Sumo Scream Show ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Toshio Iwai is an innovator in Japan's game, art, and TV worlds. He doesn't make shoot-'em-up or beat-'em-up interactivity. His "Music Insects," a computer toy developed for San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum, allows users to make music with the help of digital insects. After the user paints a picture on a screen, the bugs - each with a different musical timbre or rhythmic personality - crawl over different-colored areas and play pitches assigned to those colors. Some bugs play the drums. Iwai's latest hit is a Japanese television show called Ugo Ugo Lhuga (Go-Go Girl pronounced backwards - sort of). Ostensibly a children's program, many of its fans are from the nightclub and art scenes who tune in every day for a dose of psychedelic cartoon fun. In the show, which incorporates surrealistic Amiga image files manipulated in real-time, two children travel through virtual worlds with virtual characters (whose lips are synched to live narrators via MIDI signals). The soundtrack is also live, with some of Tokyo's hippest "rave" DJs doing their thing. Besides its atypical imagery - a "Mr. Feces" that rises out of the toilet to share a daily piece of wisdom (no kidding!), a museum of sounds of different animals mating, and a tomato on the verge of a nervous breakdown - there are also interactive spots. Take "Voice Sumo" for example. Kids from all over Japan draw monsters on postcards and send them in. The drawings are scanned into the computer and put into a cartoon sumo ring, poised for battle. Kids phone up the show, choose a side, and scream as loud as they can into the phone. Whoever raises the highest voltage over the phone pushes the opponent's creature out of the sumo ring. Now that's interactivity. - David D'Heilly with Masuyama =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= WIREDTOP1O ^^^^^^^^^^ Ten most frequent downloads from MindVox BBS: 1. Doom 1.1 3-D game (DOS) from the makers of Wolfenstein 3D. 2. Doom Editor Cheat editor for same. 3. RedStorm Music file from local New York musician PKK's forthcoming CD. 4. UltraVox.gif Artwork by Voidmstr. 5. MacVoxPak Online Macintosh survival package, including compression and terminal emulation software. 6. SRI (IRC Conference Buffers) Text from 3 sessions where people from SRI (a Stanford-based think tank) interviewed "hackers" in Internet Relay Chat (IRC). 7. Overture Article MindVox editorial introduction by Patrick Kroupa. 8. PGP 2.3a The controversial encryption software. 9. 40Hex Online Virus Magazine A controversial zine about computer viruses with news, viewpoints, and (shudder) virus source code! 10. Agrippa William Gibson's art/poem piece. Ranked by number of downloads as of December 17, 1993. MindVox is a New York-based BBS. Info: +1 (800) 646 3869. Telnet: phantom.com =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Credit Card Abuse Made Even Simpler ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ If you use Quicken for your personal finances and you're tired of typing your credit card charges into your computer at the end of every month, the folks at Intuit (Quicken's publisher) have a new product that they would like to sell you: a Visa card with an electronic monthly statement. It works like this: At the end of each month, Primerica Bank, the card's backer, sends each Intellicharge customer a traditional monthly statement. A few days later, you'll get a floppy disk in the mail containing the electronic version of your statement. Pop it into the disk drive, then tell Quicken you want to reconcile your statement. Quicken will read the charges off the floppy (automatically matching up the ones you've already typed), mark the charges as "cleared," then give you the option of paying the minimum payment, the full statement balance, or a value of your choice. Intuit says that the Primerica Visa has "no annual fee," but after the first six months you'll be charged US$4.50 a month for "electronic statement delivery." If you choose, you can avoid the floppy disk and get the statement by modem for only $3. My advice? Take Intuit's six-month free ride, then decide whether the monthly fee is worth the time you'll save entering the charges manually. Quicken: US$69.95. Intuit: (800) 624 9060, +1 (415) 322 0573. - Simson L. Garfinkel =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= OneNet ^^^^^^ FirstClass BBS software has an intuitive graphical-user interface, quickness, and clean design that's attracting many users (including Senator Ted Kennedy, whose home office runs a FirstClass BBS in Massachusetts). Among the hobbyists who use FirstClass software is a fellow by the name of Scott Converse (left). In the fall of '92, when Converse received a FirstClass upgrade that had the ability to connect conferences, messages and files between other FirstClass BBSs, he invited other sysops to become a network, called OneNet. The response was enthusiastic - the Mac-based OneNet began garnering affiliates at the rate of five a week, and the system currently comprises more than 250 separate BBSes, as far-flung as London, Hong Kong, Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney, Toronto, and Barcelona. Converse estimates that OneNet now has 300,000 users. Some OneNet boards are free, others offer an average of 20 minutes of free logon time per day - and charge a subscriber's fee for additional access time. "It is sometimes easy to forget that the OneNet is little more than a year old," says Bernard Aboba, author of The Online User's Encyclopedia and a BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh User's Group) administrator. According to Aboba, "OneNet will become the largest Macintosh-oriented bulletin board network. At its current rate of growth, sometime in 1995 it will become the fifth largest store and forward network in terms of membership, behind FidoNet, UUCP, WWIVNet, and BITNET. By then it will probably also be among the top networks in terms of conference traffic." And as a global conferencing environment, its numbers will stack up well against established systems like America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy. FirstClass client software is available via ftp from info-mac-request@sumex-aim.stanford.edu in the info-mac/comm directory. OneNet: +1 (415) 948 4775. SoftArc (makers of FirstClass): +1 (416) 299 4723. - Will Kreth * * * =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=WIRED Online Copyright Notice=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Copyright 1993,4 Wired Ventures, Ltd. All rights reserved. This article may be redistributed provided that the article and this notice remain intact. This article may not under any circumstances be resold or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from Wired Ventures, Ltd. If you have any questions about these terms, or would like information about licensing materials from WIRED Online, please contact us via telephone (+1 (415) 904 0660) or email (info@wired.com). WIRED and WIRED Online are trademarks of Wired Ventures, Ltd. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=