Web Fed News Yearbooks - July 2001

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

It was a quiet month in Fed, with everyone concentrating on doing summer-type things. The newsdroids got a week off from the Fed Chronicle, and Fedders headed to Chicago for a Fed Meet - see the report in the Inside Scoop section on this Yearbook.

Fed Survivor came to an end. Two of the Chronicle's regular newsdroids took part (Jelly and Danny), and wrote about their experiences - see Inside Scoop.

Out in real life space, an Internet tycoon from South Africa started training to be the second space tourist. Mark Shuttleworth started undergoing medical tests near Moscow, in hope of taking the trip of his life.

STARDATE: 212000

The millennium was a big deal, because even though the division of time into thousand year chunks is entirely artificially, there's something satisfying about seeing the calendar reach a number that looks significant. It's just like seeing your car mileage flip from 9999 to 10000.

Federation DataSpace itself reached such a milestone last week. On Monday, the stardate went from 211999 to 212000. This has absolutely no significance whatsoever in terms of the history of Fed - the stardate didn't start at zero on the first day that Fed was available - but it looks kind of neat!

Incidentally, if you want to know what the stardate was on Fed's first day, check out the archives at http://www.ibgames.net/archives/fed/webyearbooks/2000/wyb0007a.html#4.

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

There was a lot of running around last night, because of power problems at AboveNet, the facility where the ibgames computers live.

The cause was ConEd, the power company, who announced earlier in the week that they had to make emergency repairs to the buildings power supply, and as a result they would be turning off the power on Saturday night.

We knew about the plans, and we knew that if all went well there would be no problem and that our service wouldn't be affected.

Of course, AboveNet has backup generators which are supposed to kick in when the mains power goes off, but this kind of thing always makes engineers and techies nervous. After all, it's hard to test things like backup power, without actually turning off the power... so often, you can't be sure that emergency procedures work, until there actually is an emergency!

So Freya was standing by in New York, where the computers live. Nightdroid had worked out shutdown procedures in case there was an emergency, and was on hand to advise. Bella was just getting up for the day (time zones working in our favour). Power went off at midnight eastern. Battery backups cut in to carry the load while the emergency generators ran up to speed, and then took over.

All was going smoothly, and the engineers and techies were starting to heave sighs of relief, when at 1.30am the generators cut out, leaving everything running on emergency batteries again! Estimates of how long the batteries would last ranged from 45 minutes to 4 hours - AboveNet had never actually ran them into the ground before, and besides, the rate at which their power drained depended on how heavy the load on them was.

At this stage, Bella gave Freya permission to terminate the universe - she was instructed to jump into a taxi, and get herself down to the AboveNet building, so she could close down our machines in an orderly fashion, before the power died. It was important to do a proper shutdown, because if the servers just stopped, it risked corrupting any files which were in memory - such as the Fed persona file! Not to mention the possibility of damage to the actual hardware. So Freya raced downtown, ready to press the "big red buttons" on all our computers.

Five minutes after she arrived, AboveNet's engineers found out what was wrong with the generator - a radiator hose had blown! Fortunately, like good little boy scouts who had Been Prepared, a spare had been laid in so the problem was fixed and the generators were brought back up.

Freya stuck around to make sure everything continued to run smoothly, while Bella sat in Fed broadcasting bulletins to the players, just in case we did after all have to shut everything down. Meanwhile, Nightdroid was having problems with his ISP and got disconnected.

The final straw... ConEd announced they had decided not to do their emergency repairs after all, and turned the power back on.

So Fed stayed up all night, and our machines were in no danger... but what a night!

THREATS FOR THE MODERN AGE

You would think that as the demi-goddess I wouldn't ever have to resort to threats to get my way. Surely, everyone simply obeys my orders and caters to my every whim because of my demi-divinity. Sadly, you just can't get the staff these days and I often have to accompany my polite requests by threats to kill the minion in question, or nothing ever gets done.

But it occurred to me recently, when I was pointing a twin laser at Macnbc's head in order to force him to comply with a quite reasonable directive, that death no long inspires the fears it used to. In this modern era, with instant cloning replacing the dying body, it simply means a short period of inconvenience. We need more up-to-date threats that truly inspire terror.

Therefore, from now on I will no longer threaten to kill people who displease me. No, I will threaten NOT to kill them - to keep them alive, and in pain, suffering horribly but never reaching the point where the cloners bring them blessed relief.

Or for a slightly more hands-off approach to tyranny, I could tamper with the insurance records which are held centrally on Venus - wipe out record of someone's insurance, and then threaten to kill them. An even more fiendish outcome would be provided by mixing up the DNA samples so that my victim's records get spliced into Alsatian's records - after death he, she or it would find him, her or itself a ghastly mixed-up creature (or more ghastly and mixed-up than most Fedders already are).

Of course, for the ultimate deterrent, I would reserve the threat to wipe out a person's very existence. A time machine and a contraceptive, a visit to one of their ancestors, and they would never have been born...

Oh yes, threats of death really are out of date!

GA ARCHIVES SHOW LAW ENFORCER'S COMMS FEARS

The Galactic Administration recently opened its archives to show previously sealed records dating back to the early dates of the expansion throughout the Galaxy, and some very revealing documents have come to light.

A great many reports relate to the introduction of new technology, and its effect on society. In particular, law enforcement organisations published a large number of commentaries on the dangers of criminals and terrorists using new technology. Attempts were made to restrict the use of, or ban outright, certain developments that it was felt gave law-breakers too much of an advantage.

For example, there was great concern about the comm unit. This small gadget revolutionised communications in the Galaxy. It could be purchased by anybody from local shops, and be linked to planetary boosters it enabled people to contact each other instantly, individually or in groups, with no connection delays, no matter how far apart they were - even on opposite sides of the Galaxy. Intelligence services and police forces united in their condemnation of the availability of this powerful new technology, claiming it allowed terrorists and criminals to co-ordinate their criminal activities in a way never before possible. The prospect of organised crime becoming even more organised was not a welcome one to the Galaxy's cops.

In fact, law enforcement agencies and governments were so concerned about the use of comm units by criminals that they first tried to have the whole comm system banned; they considered universal communication to be far too dangerous to be allowed in the hands of the masses, but wanted it restricted to officials only. When that didn't work, they tried to regulate its use, so that only licensed and registered operators would be able to to use comm units, but campaigners defeated that move too.

Finally, although the government organisations of the time bowed to the inevitable as far as general use of the comms went, they still wanted control, and hatched a plan to have the planetary booster stations store copies of every comm message sent through them for up to seven years. Of course, the sheer volume of message traffic made this completely impractical.

With hindsight the furore seems ludicrous, and the attempts to restrict the technology laughable. Criminals would have ignored any restrictions, found a way to use comms units to their advantage even if they were illegal, and the only people inconvenienced would have been legitimate users.

Law enforcers finally gave up trying to stop the general public from talking to each other, and had to find other ways to foil criminals.

LAW ENFORCERS OPPOSE TELEPORTATION

More documents released from the Galactic Administration's archives show that when teleportation technology became available to Dukes, law enforcers tried to ban the device. They argued that a teleporter made it possible for a criminal to vanish instantly having committed a crime. Consequently, they argued, police officers would be unable to follow suspects' get-away vehicles and apprehend them.

Intelligence services, too, were against the technology being used by the general public. While a teleporter was a boon to spies, who could pop into a location, take copies of documents, and pop right out again, but the spooks were not happy at the idea of freelance spies, or indeed ordinary people, being able to do the same to them.

Clearly there were social problems when teleporters were introduced. A locked door was no longer a bar to thieves - or, for that matter, door-to-door salesmen. However, most people felt that banning the technology would simply mean that only those engaged in illegal activities would use it, and that if criminals were going to have access to it, it might as well be in general use so that the public at large could benefit from it.

The argument raged for several years, with police forces from around the Galaxy becoming more and more desperate to see the technology banned, but in the end consumer power won. The later invention of the teleport shield solved many of the social problems by allowing people to protect their homes from uninvited intrusion, and offices to stop unauthorised entry to secrets or valuables. The teleporter was here to stay, although the technology remains so expensive to build and run, it is out of the reach of any but the highest ranked dignitaries of the Galaxy.

It is interesting that reading between the lines of the hysterical protests, you can see that police may have had another reason for opposing the technology. The real reason police hated teleporters was because it meant the end to high-speed car and spaceship chases, which cops really love!

REAL LIFE NEWS: SURVEY SHOWS BILLIONS NOT INTERESTED IN THE INTERNET

A survey recently carried out in 30 countries has come up with the fact that, despite the seeming ubiquity of the Internet, only about 6 percent of the world's six billion people are on the Internet. The most common reason given by those who aren't hooked up to the net - over 40 percent of them - is that they have no need to.

"In the developed world, a substantial number of people who could very easily go online have decided not to," said a spokesman for the company that carried out the survey. "They see no compelling reason to be on the web. The hype and the promise of the Internet clearly hasn't impressed them."

I am somebody whose job is wholly based on the Internet, so I spend most of my time immersed in it, and dealing with people who are the same. Sometimes I forget that there is a big world out there, outside of the virtual one that lives in our computers. Yet when I think of the people with whom I come in contact outside of my work, outside of the Federation universe - people who work in the shops where I buy my food, people I talk to in pubs, just ordinary people - most of them don't have Internet access, and don't want it.

Even people I know who do have Internet access don't see it as a necessity. Sure, they use email and find it a useful way to keep in touch with relatives in other countries, and they find it handy to be able to get up to date weather reports or find information about various things when they need it - but they don't consider it an essential part of their lives, and they wouldn't really miss it if they didn't have it. Most of them use free ISPs to connect to the Internet, and although they grumble about the bad quality, the dropped lines, the engaged tones and so on, it wouldn't occur to them to switch to a better quality ISP that they would have to pay for. The Internet just isn't important enough, or compelling enough, that they are willing to pay for access.

I guess the dream of everybody being connected to everybody else is still quite a long way away!

REAL LIFE NEWS: PERVERTED DEPRESSED COMPUTER

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had the character of Marvin the Paranoid Android, a perpetually depressed robot. Now researchers have, more or less accidentally, created a computer that is a sexually deviant depressive!

The Generic Artificial Consciousness project, launched year, is designed to provide a huge database of common-sense knowledge which will then be used to train an artifical neural network. To help compile the database, the computer scientist in charge, Chris McKinstry, enlisted the help of Internet users from around the world. They were asked to submit statements describing everyday experiences, such as "I like dogs" or "Traffic jams make me mad". After submitting a single statement, each contributor was then asked to rate 20 statements already in the database as true or false. In this way, GAC builds up a series of views that are the average of all the people who contribute.

But now McKinstry is concerned about the type of people who have been contributing to the project. "The demographic tends to skew towards the adolescent male," he says. "So it's appearing a little depressed and a little sexually deviant".

To test the mood of GAC and find out how it's faring after 40,000 contributions, McKinstry has asked a Harvard psychologist to assess it using a standard personality test, to see how it compares with ordinary people.

I will be looking out for the result of the test eagerly.

You can get more information the GAC project at http://www.mindpixel.com/.