divine angst

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Mr. Angst recommended this to me last week when I was casting about for something new to read, of the fiction variety. Then he warned me that Gibson uses a lot of his own made-up terminology, and that might frustrate me. I actually like that sort of thing in books, though, so I wasn’t frustrated. I enjoyed it. I’m generally a big fan of near-future sci-fi, anyway, so it’s not too surprising that I enjoyed this book, the first cyberpunk novel.

I can’t really divulge too much about the plot because, if you haven’t read it, the first thing I’d want to tell you would sort of ruin the first 80 or so pages. So, just an intro, then: Our main character is Case, a “cowboy”—a professional hacker. Except he can’t access the matrix anymore because someone got pissed at him and made it impossible for him to jack in. Until he’s hired to perform a task, and thus the plot unfolds.

The thing about this book that really impressed me was its prescience. Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984. Yet he writes details that are remarkably familiar, something that requires a really good understanding of human nature. Technology, in his world, has not made things different—it’s just made the same things possible in different ways. Plastic surgery has evolved into genetic manipulation; tanning beds are replaced by tweaking the amount of melanin in one’s skin. A latter-day Vegas is now in orbit, attracting the same crowd as today’s Strip.

The book isn’t long and isn’t a hard read, though, as Mr. Angst mentioned, you do have to read closely and carefully or you’ll get sort of lost. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in technology, cyberpunk, human-machine interaction, and to anyone who read Cryptonomicon. (Although I might be the only person who read that book before Neuromancer.)

Everybody seems to be podcasting lately.

I kind of like it. It’s like audio voyeurism. But I’m not sure I’m ready to podcast myself, yet.

Over at Volokh, Orin Kerr muses about the Harvard B-School hack, eventually concluding that what these students did wasn’t worth the punishment they received (rescinded offers of admission).

He bases his opinions on this post by Phillip Greenspun, which compares what the the B-students did to going up a level in the directory hierarchy and, voila!, finding their information. Now, I’ve seen a few other suggestions that indicate it wasn’t quite so simple as that—but it was certainly not beyond anyone familiar with using a browser, and certainly not a true hack. Some manipulation of some values might have been required to get to the desired location, but nothing more complex than that.

So, OK, it was a fairly easy backdoor that these people took advantage of, and they were punished for it.

Now, last night on NPR, the dean of admissions at MIT, which also had some students derailed by this mess, stated that they felt this act was ethically equivalent to breaking into the physical admissions office and finding their paperwork. Well, that’s called breaking and entering, and is a crime. According to Prof. Kerr, what these kids did would not be considered a crime—they essentially just visited a live-but-unpublished webpage.

So I’d say a better analogy is that this was more like wandering down a hall where you know admissions offices are and randomly trying for unlocked doors. And when you find one, you go in and start scrounging around on desks for the file folder with your name on it. Still ethically questionable—after all, you have to know you’re not really supposed to be in there—but certainly not illegal. The door was open! You just happened to come upon it! And look—my admissions decision is sitting on that desk right there!*

I don’t know the full extend of Harvard’s punishment for their 100-something admittees, but MIT apparently will let their group of 30-something reapply next year. That actually seems quite fair to me. They made a bad decision and got caught. That’s not to say the institutions themselves aren’t overreacting just a bit, but we should consider that, just like Heidi did, the finder of the original weakness could always have alerted the company first. Instead, that person spread the word.

*I’ve heard some rumors that Georgetown law school is considering similar punishments for students who access the admitted students’ site before receiving their actual letters of admission. I think this is hooey because how can they know how long it takes to get the letter in US Mail? If you have information to the contrary, I’d love to hear it; otherwise, if you’ve seen it on the boards, I think you can discount it.