Virtual cartels; mergers In parallel to the deregulation of markets, there has been a trend towards large-scale mergers which ridicules dreams of increased competition. Recent mega-mergers and acquisitions include SBC Communications - Ameritech, $ 72,3 bn Bell Atlantic - GTE, $ 71,3 AT&T - Media One, $ 63,1 AOL - Time Warner, $ 165 bn MCI Worldcom - Spring, $ 129 bn The total value of all major mergers since the beginnings of the 1990s has been 20 trillion Dollars, 2,5 times the size of the USA's GIP. The AOL- Time Warner reflects a trend which can be observed everywhere: the convergence of the ICT and the content industries. This represents the ultimate advance in complete market domination, and a alarming threat to independent content. "Is TIME going to write something negative about AOL? Will AOL be able to offer anything other than CNN sources? Is the Net becoming as silly and unbearable as television?" (Detlev Borchers, journalist)

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fingerprint identification Although fingerprinting smacks of police techniques used long before the dawn of the information age, its digital successor finger scanning is the most widely used biometric technology. It relies on the fact that a fingerprint's uniqueness can be defined by analysing the so-called "minutiae" in somebody's fingerprint. Minutae include sweat pores, distance between ridges, bifurcations, etc. It is estimated that the likelihood of two individuals having the same fingerprint is less than one in a billion. As an access control device, fingerprint scanning is particularly popular with military institutions, including the Pentagon, and military research facilities. Banks are also among the principal users of this technology, and there are efforts of major credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard to incorporate this finger print recognition into the bank card environment. Problems of inaccuracy resulting from oily, soiled or cracked skins, a major impediment in fingerprint technology, have recently been tackled by the development a contactless capturing device (http://www.ddsi-cpc.com) which translates the characteristics of a fingerprint into a digitised image. As in other biometric technologies, fingerprint recognition is an area where the "criminal justice" market meets the "security market", yet another indication of civilian spheres becomes indistinguishable from the military. The utopia of a prisonless society seems to come within the reach of a technology capable of undermining freedom by an upward spiral driven by identification needs and identification technologies.

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Face recognition In order to be able to recognize a person, one commonly looks at this persons face, for it is there where the visual features which distinguish one person from another are concentrated. Eyes in particular seem to tell a story not only about who somebody is, but also about how that persons feel, where his / her attention is directed, etc. People who do not want to show who they are or what is going on inside of them must mask themselves. Consequently, face recognition is a kind of electronic unmasking. "Real" face-to-face communication is a two-way process. Looking at somebody's face means exposing ones own face and allowing the other to look at oneself. It is a mutual process which is only suspended in extraordinary and voyeuristic situations. Looking at somebody without being looked at places the person who is visually exposed in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis the watcher. In face recognition this extraordinary situation is normal. Looking at the machine, you only see yourself looking at the machine. Face biometrics are extracted anonymously and painlessly by a mask without a face. Therefore the resistance against the mass appropriation of biometrical data through surveillance cameras is confronted with particular difficulties. The surveillance structure is largely invisible, it is not evident what the function of a particular camera is, nor whether it is connected to a face recognition system. In a protest action against the face recognition specialist Visionics, the Surveillance Camera Players therefor adopted the strategy of re-masking: in front of the cameras, they perfomed the play "The Masque of the Red Death" an adaption of Edgar Allen Poe's classic short story by Art Toad. According to Visionics, whose slogan is "enabling technology with a mass appeal", there are alrady 1.1 bn digitised face images stored on identification data banks world wide. When combined with wide area surveillance camera networks, face recognition is capable of creating a transparent social space that can be controlled by a depersonalised, undetected and unaccountable centre. It is a technology, of which the surveillance engeneers of sunken totalitarian regimes may have dreamt, and one that today is being adopted by democratic governments.

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Timeline 1600 - 1900 AD 17th century Cardinal Richelieu invents an encryption-tool called grille, a card with holes for writing messages on paper into the holes of those cards. Afterwards he removes the cards and fills in the blanks, so the message looks like an ordinary letter. The recipient needs to own the same card - Bishop John Wilkins invents a cryptologic system looking like music notes. In a book he describes several forms of steganographic systems like secrets inks, but also the string cipher. He mentions the so-called Pig Latin, a spoken way of encryption that was already used by the ancient Indians - the English scientist, magician and astrologer John Dee works on the ancient Enochian alphabet; he also possesses an encrypted writing that could not been broken until today 1605/1623 Sir Francis Bacon (= Francis Tudor = William Shakespeare?) writes several works containing ideas about cryptography. One of his most important advises is to use ciphers in such a way that no-one gets suspicious that the text could be enciphered. For this the steganogram was the best method, very often used in poems. The attempt to decipher Shakespeare's sonnets (in the 20th century) lead to the idea that his works had been written by Francis Bacon originally. 1671 Leibniz invents a calculating machine that uses the binary scale which we still use today, more advanced of course, called the ASCII code 18th century this is the time of the Black Chambers of espionage in Europe, Vienna having one of the most effective ones, called the "Geheime Kabinettskanzlei", headed by Baron Ignaz von Koch. Its task is to read through international diplomatic mail, copy letters and return them to the post-office the same morning. Supposedly about 100 letters are dealt with each day. 1790's Thomas Jefferson and Robert Patterson invent a wheel cipher 1799 the Rosetta Stone is found and makes it possible to decipher the Egyptian Hieroglyphs 1832 or 1838 Sam Morse develops the Morse Code, which actually is no code but an enciphered alphabet of short and long sounds. The first Morse code-message is sent by telegraph in 1844. 1834 the Braille Code for blind people is developed in today's form by Louis Braille 1844 the invention of the telegraph changes cryptography very much, as codes are absolutely necessary by then 1854 the Playfair cipher is invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone 1859 for the first time a tomographic cipher gets described 1861 Friedrich W. Kasiski does a cryptoanalysis of the Vigenère ciphers, which had been supposed to be uncrackable for ages 1891 Major Etienne Bazeries creates a new version of the wheel cipher, which is rejected by the French Army 1895 the invention of the radio changes cryptography-tasks again and makes them even more important

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The 2nd Chechnya-War In the summer of 1999 between 1.200 and 2.000 Muslim rebels from Chechnya fell into Dagestan. Rumors say that Russian soldiers closed their eyes pretending not to see anything. During the fightings that started soon, many persons got killed. The hole issue was blamed on Chechnya. At that time there were rumors that there would be heavy bombing in Moscow in September. And there was. Those two things together brought back the hatred against the Chechnya rebels. The 2nd War between Russia and the Muslim country began. While the first war was lost at home, because the Russians, especially mothers, did not understand why their sons should fight against Chechnya, this time the atmosphere was completely different. In the cities 85% and all over Russia 65% of the Russian population agreed with the war. This time the war was a national issue, a legitimate defense. The media emphasized this. Alexander Zilin, a journalist, found out that the truth was far from the one presented in the media: First of all there was no evidence that the Moscow-bombings were organized by Chechnyans. On the contrary it is more than probable that the crimes were organized by a governmental institution for national security. The disinformation was part of the strategy to make the population support another war with Chechnya. The media were part of the story, maybe without knowing. They kept on the government's and army's side, showing only special and patriotic parts of the war. For example the number of dead Russian soldiers was held back. The U.S.-behavior on this: The USA would like to intervene but they are afraid of ruining the weak relation to Russia. For years the main topic of U.S.-politics has been the struggle against terrorism. Now Russia pretends to be fighting terrorism. How could it be criticized for that? The reason for this war is rather cynical: it worked as a public relations-campaign for Vladimir Putin, candidate for the president's elections in. When Putin came into power as minister-president of Russia in August 1999, opinion polls gave him 2% for the elections in summer 2000. By the end of November he got already 46%! And finally he won. The public relations war worked well. At the same time a propaganda-campaign against his rival Y. Primakov (98), formerly the most popular candidate, was spreading lies and bad rumors. Opinion-polls showed very fast that he had lost the elections because of this black propaganda, even before the elections took place.

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Legal Protection: National Legislation Intellectual property - comprising industrial property and copyright - in general is protected by national legislation. Therefore those rights are limited territorially and can be exercised only within the jurisdiction of the country or countries under whose laws they are granted.

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Late 1950s - Early 1960s: Second Generation Computers An important change in the development of computers occurred in 1948 with the invention of the transistor. It replaced the large, unwieldy vacuum tube and as a result led to a shrinking in size of electronic machinery. The transistor was first applied to a computer in 1956. Combined with the advances in magnetic-core memory, the use of transistors resulted in computers that were smaller, faster, more reliable and more energy-efficient than their predecessors. Stretch by IBM and LARC by Sperry-Rand (1959) were the first large-scale machines to take advantage of the transistor technology (and also used assembly language instead of the difficult machine language). Both developed for atomic energy laboratories could handle enormous amounts of data, but still were costly and too powerful for the business sector's needs. Therefore only two LARC's were ever installed. Throughout the early 1960s there were a number of commercially successful computers (for example the IBM 1401) used in business, universities, and government and by 1965 most large firms routinely processed financial information by using computers. Decisive for the success of computers in business was the stored program concept and the development of sophisticated high-level programming languages like FORTRAN (Formular Translator), 1956, and COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), 1960, that gave them the flexibility to be cost effective and productive. The invention of second generation computers also marked the beginning of an entire branch, the software industry, and the birth of a wide range of new types of careers.

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Beautiful bodies However, artificial beings need not be invisible or look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator". "My dream would be to create an artificial man that does not look like a robot but like a beautiful, graceful human being. The artificial man should be beautiful". Nadia Thalman's hopes for beautiful robots may become reality in the work of MIRALab, a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva dedicated to realistic modelling of human functionalities. The laboratory has produced an artificial Marylyn Monroe showing just how beautiful artificial creatures can be, and there is a biography featuring details of her career and her - however virtual - love life. Yet beautiful creatures have been made before, at leas on the movie screen. Frank-N-furter, the protagonist of the Rocky Horror picture show ("I've been making a man / with blond hair and a tan / and he is good for relieving my /tension) did set remakrable esthetic standards. While in Hindu mythology, avatars are bodies chosen by gods for their representation on earth, often animals such as swans or horses, the avatars populating cyberspace have a different function. The cyber bodies of real people, often 3 dimensional images of creatures whose aesthetics reflects both the tastes prevalent in the entertainment and advertising industries as the state of art in visual representation.

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Feeding the data body

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Product Placement With television still being very popular, commercial entertainment has transferred the concept of soap operas onto the Web. The first of this new species of "Cybersoaps" was "The Spot", a story about the ups and downs of an American commune. The Spot not only within short time attracted a large audience, but also pioneered in the field of online product placement. Besides Sony banners, the companies logo is also placed on nearly every electronic product appearing in the story. Appearing as a site for light entertainment, The Spots main goal is to make the name Sony and its product range well known within the target audience.

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Who owns the Internet and who is in charge? The Internet/Matrix still depends heavily on public infrastructure and there is no dedicated owner of the whole Internet/Matrix, but the networks it consists of are run and owned by corporations and institutions. Access to the Internet is usually provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for a monthly fee. Each network is owned by someone and has a network operation center from where it is centrally controlled, but the Internet/Matrix is not owned by any single authority and has no network operation center of its own. No legal authority determines how and where networks can be connected together, this is something the managers of networks have to agree about. So there is no way to ever gain ultimate control of the Matrix/Internet. The in some respects decentralized Matrix/Internet architecture and administration do not imply that there are no authorities for oversight and common standards for sustaining basic operations, for administration: There are authorities for IP number and domain name registrations, e.g. Ever since the organizational structures for Internet administration have changed according to the needs to be addressed. Up to now, administration of the Internet is a collaborative undertaking of several loose cooperative bodies with no strict hierarchy of authority. These bodies make decisions on common guidelines, as communication protocols, e.g., cooperatively, so that compatibility of software is guaranteed. But they have no binding legal authority, nor can they enforce the standards they have agreed upon, nor are they wholly representative for the community of Internet users. The Internet has no official governing body or organization; most parts are still administered by volunteers. Amazingly, there seems to be an unspoken and uncodified consent of what is allowed and what is forbidden on the Internet that is widely accepted. Codifications, as the so-called Netiquette, are due to individual efforts and mostly just expressively stating the prevailing consent. Violations of accepted standards are fiercely rejected, as reactions to misbehavior in mailing lists and newsgroups prove daily. Sometimes violations not already subject to law become part of governmental regulations, as it was the case with spamming, the unsolicited sending of advertising mail messages. But engineers proved to be quicker and developed software against spamming. So, in some respects, the Internet is self-regulating, indeed. For a detailed report on Internet governance, click here.

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Timeline Cryptography - Introduction Besides oral conversations and written language many other ways of information-transport are known: like the bush telegraph, drums, smoke signals etc. Those methods are not cryptography, still they need en- and decoding, which means that the history of language, the history of communication and the history of cryptography are closely connected to each other The timeline gives an insight into the endless fight between enciphering and deciphering. The reasons for them can be found in public and private issues at the same time, though mostly connected to military maneuvers and/or political tasks. One of the most important researchers on Cryptography through the centuries is David Kahn; many parts of the following timeline are originating from his work.

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Sperry Formerly (1955 - 1979) Sperry Rand Corporation, American corporation that merged with the Burroughs Corporation in 1986 to form Unisys Corporation, a large computer manufacturer.

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Invention According to the WIPO an invention is a "... novel idea which permits in practice the solution of a specific problem in the field of technology." Concerning its protection by law the idea "... must be new in the sense that is has not already been published or publicly used; it must be non-obvious in the sense that it would not have occurred to any specialist in the particular industrial field, had such a specialist been asked to find a solution to the particular problem; and it must be capable of industrial application in the sense that it can be industrially manufactured or used." Protection can be obtained through a patent (granted by a government office) and typically is limited to 20 years.

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Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz b. July 1, 1646, Leipzig d. November 14, 1716, Hannover, Hanover German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, important both as a metaphysician and as a logician and distinguished also for his independent invention of the differential and integral calculus. 1661, he entered the University of Leipzig as a law student; there he came into contact with the thought of men who had revolutionized science and philosophy--men such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. In 1666 he wrote De Arte Combinatoria ("On the Art of Combination"), in which he formulated a model that is the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers.

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International Standardization Organization ISO (International Organization for Standardization), founded in 1946, is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 100 countries, one from each country. Among the standards it fosters is Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), a universal reference model for communication protocols. Many countries have national standards organizations that participate in and contribute to ISO standards making. http://www.iso.ch Source: Whatis.com http://www.iso.ch/

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International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) The ICPC aims at reducing the number of incidents of damages to submarine telecommunications cables by hazards. The Committee also serves as a forum for the exchange of technical and legal information pertaining to submarine cable protection methods and programs and funds projects and programs, which are beneficial for the protection of submarine cables. Membership is restricted to authorities (governmental administrations or commercial companies) owning or operating submarine telecommunications cables. As of May 1999, 67 members representing 38 nations were members. http://www.iscpc.org

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First Amendment Handbook The First Amendment to the US Constitution, though short, lists a number of rights. Only a handful of words refer to freedoms of speech and the press, but those words are of incalculable significance. To understand the current subtleties and controversies surrounding this right, check out this First Amendment site. This detailed handbook of legal information, mostly intended for journalists, should be of interest to anyone who reads or writes. For example, the chapter Invasion of Privacy shows the limits of First Amendment rights, and the balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the public - or, more crudely, the balance of Tabloid vs. Celebrity. Each section is carefully emended with relevant legal decisions. http://www.rcfp.org/handbook/viewpage.cgi

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Total copyright industries The total copyright industries encompass the "core copyright industries" and portions of many other industries that either create, distribute, or depend upon copyrighted works. Examples include retail trade (a portion of which is sales of video, audio, software, and books, for example), the doll and toy industry, and computer manufacturing.

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The Spot http://www.thespot.com/ http://www.thespot.com/

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Moral rights Authors of copyrighted works (besides economic rights) enjoy moral rights on the basis of which they have the right to claim their authorship and require that their names be indicated on the copies of the work and in connection with other uses thereof. Moral rights are generally inalienable and remain with the creator even after he has transferred his economic rights, although the author may waive their exercise.

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ciphers the word "cipher" comes from the Hebrew word "saphar", meaning "to number". Ciphers are mere substitutions. Each letter of the alphabet gets substituted; maybe by one letter or two or more. an example: PLAINTEXT a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z CIPHERTEXT D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C

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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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National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation (NASDAQ) Incepted in 1971, The NASDAQ Stock Market was the world's first electronic stock market and has since attracted many technology companies from countries all over the world, some of them as legendary as Apple, Inc. and Microsoft, Inc., e.g., to go public. NASDAQ is the largest stock market in the world. http://www.nasdaq.com http://www.nasdaq.com/

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Boris Yeltsin Boris Yeltsin was Russian President until the end of 1999. After many years of work for the Communist Party, he joined the Politburo in 1986. His sharp critique on Mikhail Gorbachev forced that one to resign. Yeltsin won the 1990 election into Russian presidency and quit the Communist Party. Quarrels with the Parliament could not destroy his popularity until the secession war with Chechnya. When the Russian economy collapsed in 1998, he dismissed his entire government. In the end the sick old man of Russian politics had lost all his popularity as a president and resigned for the benefit of his political son Vladimir Putin.

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VISA Visa International's over 21,000 member financial institutions have made VISA one of the world's leading full-service payment network. Visa's products and services include Visa Classic card, Visa Gold card, Visa debit cards, Visa commercial cards and the Visa Global ATM Network. VISA operates in 300 countries and territories and also provides a large consumer payments processing system.

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Industrial design Industrial design refers to the ornamental aspect of a useful article which may constitute of two or three-dimensional elements. To be qualified for intellectual property protection the design must be novel or original. Protection can be obtained through registration in a government office and usually is given for 10 to 15 years.

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Liability of ISPs ISPs (Internet Service Provider), BBSs (Bulletin Board Service Operators), systems operators and other service providers (in the U.S.) can usually be hold liable for infringing activities that take place through their facilities under three theories: 1) direct liability: to establish direct infringement liability there must be some kind of a direct volitional act, 2) contributory liability: a party may be liable for contributory infringement where "... with knowledge of the infringing activity, [it] induces, causes or materially contributes to the infringing activity of another." Therefore a person must know or have reason to know that the subject matter is copyrighted and that particular uses violated copyright law. There must be a direct infringement of which the contributory infringer has knowledge, and encourages or facilitates for contributory infringement to attach, and 3) vicarious liability: a party may be vicariously liable for the infringing acts of another if it a) has the right and ability to control the infringer's acts and b) receives a direct financial benefit from the infringement. Unlike contributory infringement, knowledge is not an element of vicarious liability.

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Robot Robot relates to any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner. The term is derived from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." Modern use of the term stems from the play R.U.R., written in 1920 by the Czech author Karel Capek, which depicts society as having become dependent on mechanical workers called robots that are capable of doing any kind of mental or physical work. Modern robot devices descend through two distinct lines of development--the early automation, essentially mechanical toys, and the successive innovations and refinements introduced in the development of industrial machinery.

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Fuzzy logic A superset of Boolean logic (George Boole) introduced by Lotfi Zadeh in the 1960s as a means to model the uncertainty of natural language. Fuzzy logic is a type of logic that recognizes more than simple true and false values. It represents a departure from classical two-valued sets and logic, that use "soft" linguistic (e.g. large, small, hot, cold, warm) system variables and a continuous range of truth values in the interval [0,1], rather than strict binary (true or false) decisions and assignments.

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Ron Rivest Ronald L. Rivest is Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's EECS Department. He was one of three persons in a team to invent the RSA public-key cryptosystem. The co-authors were Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman.

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