Racism on the Internet

The internet can be regarded as a mirror of the variety of interests, attitudes and needs of human kind. Propaganda and disinformation in that way have to be part of it, whether they struggle for something good or evil. But the classifications do no longer function.
During the last years the internet opened up a new source for racism as it can be difficult to find the person who gave a certain message into the net. The anarchy of the internet provides racists with a lot of possibilities to reach people which they do not possess in other media, for legal and other reasons.

In the 1980s racist groups used mailboxes to communicate on an international level; the first ones to do so were supposedly the Ku Klux Klan and mailboxes like the Aryan Nations Liberty Net. In the meantime those mailboxes can be found in the internet. In 1997 about 600 extreme right websites were in the net, the number is growing, most of them coming from the USA. The shocking element is not the number of racist pages, because still it is a very small number compared to the variety of millions of pages one can find in this media, it is the evidence of intentional disinformation, the language and the hatred that makes it dangerous.
A complete network of anti-racist organizations, including a high number of websites are fighting against racism. For example:

http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x32/xr3257.html

http://www.aranet.org/

http://www.freespeech.org/waronracism/files/allies.htm
http://www.nsdapmuseum.com
http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Racism.asp

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Content as Transport Medium for Values and Ideologies

With the dissemination of their content commercial media are among other things also able to transport values and ideologies. Usually their programming reflects society's dominant social, political, ethical, cultural and economical values. A critical view of the prevalent ideologies often is sacrificed so as not to offend the existing political elites and corporate powers, but rather satisfy shareholders and advertisers.

With most of the worlds content produced by a few commercial media conglomerates, with the overwhelming majority of companies (in terms of revenue generation) concentrated in Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia there is also a strong flow of content from the 'North-West' to the 'South-East'. Popular culture developed in the world's dominant commercial centers and Western values and ideologies are so disseminated into the most distant corners of the earth with far less coming back.

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Timeline 1970-2000 AD

1971 IBM's work on the Lucifer cipher and the work of the NSA lead to the U.S. Data Encryption Standard (= DES)

1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman publish their book New Directions in Cryptography, playing with the idea of public key cryptography

1977/78 the RSA algorithm is developed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman and is published

1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act

- The Hacker Quarterly is founded

1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is passed in the USA

- Electronic Communications Privacy Act

1987 Chicago prosecutors found Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force

1988 U.S. Secret Service covertly videotapes a hacker convention

1989 NuPrometheus League distributes Apple Computer software

1990 - IDEA, using a 128-bit key, is supposed to replace DES

- Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard publish their work on Quantum Cryptography

- Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance network nationwide


1991 PGP (= Pretty Good Privacy) is released as freeware on the Internet, soon becoming worldwide state of the art; its creator is Phil Zimmermann

- one of the first conferences for Computers, Freedom and Privacy takes place in San Francisco

- AT&T phone crash; New York City and various airports get affected

1993 the U.S. government announces to introduce the Clipper Chip, an idea that provokes many political discussions during the following years

1994 Ron Rivest releases another algorithm, the RC5, on the Internet

- the blowfish encryption algorithm, a 64-bit block cipher with a key-length up to 448 bits, is designed by Bruce Schneier

1990s work on quantum computer and quantum cryptography

- work on biometrics for authentication (finger prints, the iris, smells, etc.)

1996 France liberates its cryptography law: one now can use cryptography if registered

- OECD issues Cryptography Policy Guidelines; a paper calling for encryption exports-standards and unrestricted access to encryption products

1997 April European Commission issues Electronic Commerce Initiative, in favor of strong encryption

1997 June PGP 5.0 Freeware widely available for non-commercial use

1997 June 56-bit DES code cracked by a network of 14,000 computers

1997 August U.S. judge assesses encryption export regulations as violation of the First Amendment

1998 February foundation of Americans for Computer Privacy, a broad coalition in opposition to the U.S. cryptography policy

1998 March PGP announces plans to sell encryption products outside the USA

1998 April NSA issues a report about the risks of key recovery systems

1998 July DES code cracked in 56 hours by researchers in Silicon Valley

1998 October Finnish government agrees to unrestricted export of strong encryption

1999 January RSA Data Security, establishes worldwide distribution of encryption product outside the USA

- National Institute of Standards and Technologies announces that 56-bit DES is not safe compared to Triple DES

- 56-bit DES code is cracked in 22 hours and 15 minutes

1999 May 27 United Kingdom speaks out against key recovery

1999 Sept: the USA announce to stop the restriction of cryptography-exports

2000 as the German government wants to elaborate a cryptography-law, different organizations start a campaign against that law

- computer hackers do no longer only visit websites and change little details there but cause breakdowns of entire systems, producing big economic losses

for further information about the history of cryptography see:
http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/html/timeline.html
http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~crypto/Timeline.html
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~paul/cryptology/history.html
http://www.achiever.com/freehmpg/cryptology/hocryp.html
http://all.net/books/ip/Chap2-1.html
http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm
http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/enigma/eni-intro.htm
http://www.achiever.com/freehmpg/cryptology/cryptofr.html
http://www.cdt.org/crypto/milestones.shtml

for information about hacker's history see:
http://www.farcaster.com/sterling/chronology.htm:

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Economic structure; digital euphoria

The dream of a conflict-free capitalism appeals to a diverse audience. No politician can win elections without eulogising the benefits of the information society and promising universal wealth through informatisation. "Europe must not lose track and should be able to make the step into the new knowledge and information society in the 21st century", said Tony Blair.

The US government has declared the construction of a fast information infrastructure network the centerpiece of its economic policies

In Lisbon the EU heads of state agreed to accelerate the informatisation of the European economies

The German Chancellor Schröder has requested the industry to create 20,000 new informatics jobs.

The World Bank understands information as the principal tool for third world development

Electronic classrooms and on-line learning schemes are seen as the ultimate advance in education by politicians and industry leaders alike.

But in the informatised economies, traditional exploitative practices are obscured by the glamour of new technologies. And the nearly universal acceptance of the ICT message has prepared the ground for a revival of 19th century "adapt-or-perish" ideology.

"There is nothing more relentlessly ideological than the apparently anti-ideological rhetoric of information technology"

(Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, media theorists)

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History: Communist Tradition

Following the communist revolutions of the 20th century all "means of production" became the property of the state as representative of "the masses". Private property ceased to exist. While moral rights of the creator were recognized and economic rights acknowledged with a one-time cash award, all subsequent rights reverted to the state.

With the transformation of many communist countries to a market system most of them have now introduced laws establishing markets in intellectual property rights. Still the high rate of piracy reflects a certain lack of legal tradition.

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Public Relations and Propaganda

Public relations usually is associated with the influencing of public opinion. Therefore it has subsequently been linked with propaganda. Using one of the many definitions of propaganda "... the manipulation of symbols as a means of influencing attitudes on controversial matters" (Harold D. Lasswell), the terms propaganda and PR seem to be easily interchangeable.

Still many authors explicitly distinguish between public relations, advertising and propaganda. Unlike PR, which is often described as objective and extensive information of the public, advertising and propaganda are associated with manipulative activities. Nevertheless to treat public relations and propaganda as equivalents stands in the tradition of PR. Edward L. Bernays, one of the founders of public relations wrote "The only difference between propaganda and education, really, is the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don't believe is propaganda."

Also institutions like the German Bundeswehr use the terms publics relations and propaganda synonymously. After a 1990 legislation of the former minister of defense Stoltenberg, the "psychological influence of the enemy" was ceased during peace time and the Academy for Psychological Defense renamed to Academy for Information and Communication, among other things responsible for scientific research in the field of public relations.

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Internet Software Consortium

The Internet Software Consortium (ISC) is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to the production of high-quality reference implementations of Internet standards that meet production standards. Its goal is to ensure that those reference implementations are properly supported and made freely available to the Internet community.

http://www.isc.org

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Caching

Caching is a mechanism that attempts to decrease the time it takes to retrieve data by storing a copy at a closer location.

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Disney

American corporation that became the best-known purveyor of child and adult entertainment in the 20th century. Its headquarters are in Burbank, Calif. The company was founded in 1929 and produced animated motion-picture cartoons.
In 1955 the company opened the Disneyland amusement park, one of the world's most famous. Under a new management, in the 1980s, Disney's motion-picture and animated-film production units became among the most successful in the United States. In 1996 the Disney corporation acquired Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which owned the ABC television network. The Disney Company also operates the Disney Channel, a pay television programming service.

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Chappe's fixed optical network

Claude Chappe built a fixed optical network between Paris and Lille. Covering a distance of about 240kms, it consisted of fifteen towers with semaphores.

Because this communication system was destined to practical military use, the transmitted messages were encoded. The messages were kept such secretly, even those who transmit them from tower to tower did not capture their meaning, they just transmitted codes they did not understand. Depending on weather conditions, messages could be sent at a speed of 2880 kms/hr at best.

Forerunners of Chappe's optical network are the Roman smoke signals network and Aeneas Tacitus' optical communication system.

For more information on early communication networks see Gerard J. Holzmann and Bjoern Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks.

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Wide Application Protocol (WAP)

The WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including e-mail, the World Wide Web, newsgroups, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

While Internet access has been possible in the past, different manufacturers have used different technologies. In the future, devices and service systems that use WAP will be able to interoperate.

Source: Whatis.com

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ARPAnet

ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of wide area networks, the possibility of remote computing, it was created for resource sharing between research institutions, not for messaging services like E-mail. Although research was sponsored by US military, ARPAnet was not designed for directly martial use but to support military-related research.

In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute.

But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972.

Before it was decommissioned in 1990, NSFnet, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation, and a separate new military network went online in 1986. In 1988 the first private Internet service providers offered a general public access to NSFnet. Beginning in 1995, after having become the backbone of the Internet in the USA, NSFnet was turned over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers. This and the launch of the World Wide Web added to the success of the global data network we call the Net.

In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994.

Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.

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