Volume 4, Number 12 ---CONTENTS--- December 1988


1 Masthead and Index

2 THE 2nd ANNUAL ENA AWARDS - DAVID E. RODALE AWARDS PROGRAM

3 MEMES ................................. by Howard Rheingold

4 BOOK REVIEW: THE MODEM REFERENCE .. By (Ms.) Gail S. Thomas

5 THE ADAPSO FOUNDATION ..................... BY LUANNE JAMES

6 A Look At Computer Viruses .............. by Mike Blaszczak

THE SECOND ANNUAL ENA AWARDS


The Electronic Networking Association recognition awards will be presented at the ENA conference in Allentown PA, May 25-28, 1989. The awards are named for David E. Rodale, ENA's "first member" in honor of his early efforts in this new medium.

DAVID E. RODALE AWARDS PROGRAM

David was the very first "official" ENA member. At the founding meeting in New York City in April 1985, those of us who were present made our commitments to create this new organization in various ways. There came a point when it was necessary to say "I am a member and here is my membership contribution to help get ENA started". If no one was willing to make that type of commitment all of our work over several days would have been without result.

As we milled about the symbolic geodesic globe in the center of the room, David was the first to act and make that commitment. By that act of commitment he created the organization's *sense* of membership. A sense that now literally spans the real globe.

But more importantly, he was early to recognize the importance of this new medium and to lead the way in creating techniques and processes that made it grow. He lead the way at ENA's first conference in Washington DC several years ago with his creative combination of information harvested online linked with what was then new desktop publishing techniques. A peaceful combination of the new electronic world with the old paper one.

TWO CATEGORIES -- CREATIVITY AND BUILDING GLOBAL COMMUNITIES

The awards reflect ENA's statement of purpose:

** The first award recognizes creativity in "electronic
networking in ways that enriched individuals and/or enhanced
organizations".

** The second award recognizes international online efforts
"to build global communities".

NOMINATIONS

The process for nominations is as follows:

1. At least three people are needed to make a nomination.

2. Individuals or groups of people who have worked together can be nominated.
If a group is nominated all the people involved must be individually named. (You can't nominate yourself or your work group.)

3. Nominations will be solicited in as many ways as possible among members of the online community.

4. Awards will be presented at the conference on Sunday morning, May 28th.

THE DAVID E. RODALE AWARDS PROGRAM
NOMINATION FORM

Nominee Name:

Nominee Address:

Nominee Phone Number:

Do you have the permission of the person or group to place
his/her/their name into the nomination process? _____

Does nominee plan to attend the Allentown conference? _____

Award Category: (Put "x" next to award category)

Creativity _____ Building global communities _____

The reasons for your nomination (give detailed explanation, feel
free to use other paper):

Your Name:
Address:

Phone Number:

Two people supporting your nomination:

1) Name:
Address:

Phone Number:

2) Name:
Address:

Phone Number:

3. Send the completed form online to an ENA member involved in
planning the conference (such as Lisa Kimball, Stan Pokras, Nan
Hanahue, Ed Yarrish or others you may know) or send via paper
mail to --

Electronic Networking Association
2744 Washington St.
Allentown PA 18104-4225
215-821-7777

MEMES
by Howard Rheingold

[note: This piece from _BRAINSTORMS: Ideas, Opinions, and
Speculations from the Mind of Howard Rheingold_ was identified by
Howard as a "free flow" piece meaning that readers are encouraged
to copy it and pass it along ... with attribution of course.]

Memes are units of meaning that leap from mind to mind - little semantic passengers that ride words and music and symbols and make themselves at home in your thoughts. They can travel via any communication medium from anthems to prayer books. This newsletter is a means of delivering memes from my mind to yours. The definition of memes is itself a meme, known as "the meme about memes." It has just colonized your cortex.

My monthly meme salvos are intended to be the friendliest kind of mental invasion. I think about each person on my mailing list when I label, stuff, and stamp each envelope, and smile when I fantasize about the ways each package of memes might affect your perspective. When I send a batch of BRAINSTORMS off in the mail, in my mind's eye I see a couple hundred minds across the country who will soon be enriched by a meme or two, and I fancy that I can feel your attentional energy flowing directly back to me for a few days after each mailing. And better yet, I know that key memes are flying beyond my reader's minds, to affect the people you encounter in your life and work.

Spreading memes effectively is one of the things I aim to do in my professional life. I also believe that meme-sharing is an important mission on this planet at this time. If anything is going to help steer us through the scary complexities of the near future, it is going to be the right memes, moving through the most efficient channels, to the right people at the right time. Technologies - from alphabets to printing presses to computer conferencing systems - have boosted the efficiency with which memes can circulate through populations and propagate from generation to generation. But the potency of the memes themselves derives from human thought, not the technology we use to spread them around.

I seem to be a vector for the meme about memes. My next book (published in March '88), _They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases has a chapter on "Strange Memes." And the editor of my other
forthcoming book, _Excursions To The Far Side of the Mind_, decided to subtitle it: _A Book of Memes_.

The term was invented by Richard Dawkins, a sociobiologist, and "the meme about memes" is beginning to spread through the culture. Memes have two kinds of power. They can influence people to act - like religious or patriotic memes. And they can have some quality that makes people remember and repeat them. In the Winter, 1987 issue of WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, along with assorted Rheingoldiana, is an article by Keith Henson on "Memetics: The Science of Information Viruses." Henson calls his proposed science of memetics "germ theory applied to ideas," and points out that memes can be negative or positive. (Both the golden rule and racism are memes.) Henson claims that "most memes, like most microorganisms are either helpful or at least harmless."

We all need to spread the word about memes, and spread the meme that psychologists, semanticists, poets, sociologists ought to work together to build a science of memetics. Henson contends, and I agree, that understanding memes and the peculiar power they have over human behavior is a key task for social scientists during the rest of this century. (For a glimpse of important and fascinating research into the mystery and dynamics of cooperative behavior see the book _The Evolution of Cooperation_ by Robert Axelrod.) The continuing survival of our civilization probably depends on how well the memes for toleration, cooperation, and awareness of interdependence compete with all the other memes floating around the noosphere. Do your part. Copy this newsletter and pass it around. [transcribers note: I'm doing *my* part, Howard! ]

******************************************************

from Richard Dawkins, _The Selfish Gene_

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases,
clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches. Jest as genes propagate themselves in the
gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or
eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool
by leaping from brain to brain via a process which,
in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a
scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he
passes it on to his colleagues and students. He
mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the
idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself,
spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K.
Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this
chapter: "...memes should be regarded as living
structures, not just metaphorically but technically.
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you
literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a
vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way
that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of
a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -
the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is
actually realized physically, millions of times over,
as a structure in the nervous systems of individual
men the world over."

*******************************************************

New Meme Vectors Emerge:

Desktop publishing and computer conferencing have shifted memeform evolution into high gear. But the transmission of memes was already deeply embedded in our culture. For example, the advertising industry and demographers are trying to transport specific memes to certain hosts. Today's demographers talk about the fragmentation of mass-markets and the emergence of "hypersegmented" markets. What that means is that knowing *who* to communicate with , and *how* to catch their attention is becoming more valuable.

Newsletters are a form of hypersegmented communication - the audience for BRAINSTORMS consists of those minds Howard Rheingold selects for meme-colonization. And it is a one-to-many form of communication - I don't receive a couple hundred newsletters in return.

There are other ways of spreading memes - some of them new, and some of them downright historical.

How about a newsletter that instructs readers to duplicate the newsletter, including the duplication instruction, and pass along copies? It's called a FREE-FLOW. I'm declaring this issue a BRAINSTORMS FREE-FLOW.

Better yet, how about a group newsletter that is composed and distributed among a small number of individuals who are interested in discussing some subject or another? This use of the mail to create a kind of paper conferencing system goes back to the Committees of Correspondence who debated issues among themselves before the American Revolution. This form of many-to-many communication is making a comeback. I just read a fascinating handbook on _Letter Groups_ by Ann Weiser, who describes how to start a many-to-many group communication system for less than a dollar a month per member. You and your friends agree to send one page per month (or whatever you decide among you) to the "organizing editor," who photocopies the pages and mails them out. Everybody puts a few bucks in the kitty to get it started and the organizing editor keeps track of funds. _Letter Groups_ is available from The Public Interest Media Project, P.O. Box 14066, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19123.

Let a thousand memeforms bloom!

------
editor's note: _BRAINSTORMS: Ideas, Opinions, and Speculations from the Mind of Howard Rheingold_ is something special. He desktop publishes it and sends it to friends, colleagues, and people in his network. (He'll probably send you a copy if you ask him. His address is 306 Poplar, Mill Valley, CA 94941) Howard is the author of a whole bunch of neat books: TOOLS FOR THOUGHT (Prentice-Hall, 1986), COGNITIVE CONNECTION (Prentice-Hall, 1987), HIGHER CREATIVITY (Tarcher, 1984), THEY HAVE A WORD FOR IT: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases, and EXCURSIONS TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE MIND: A Book of Memes. He can be found online on The Well.

BOOK REVIEW: THE MODEM REFERENCE
By (Ms.) Gail S. Thomas

Michael A. Banks, THE MODEM REFERENCE, COMPLETE GUIDE TO SELECTION, INSTALLATION AND APPLICATIONS. Foreword by Jerry Pournelle. New York: Brady/Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1988. ISBN 0-13-586646-4, paperback. 530 pages. Simon & Schuster, Inc., Gulf and Western Building, One Gulf and Western Plaza, New York, NY 10023.

THE MODEM REFERENCE represents an ambitious effort. In some respects the work comprises two books in one, dealing with not only the technical side of modems, but also the communications uses of modems. Michael A. Banks attempts to cover all the bases of modem use in 530 pages, divided into four parts, Getting Started, Making Connections, Using Online Systems, and Applications and More. The book facilitates reference not only through the detailed table of contents, utilizing headings and subheadings, but also an index, efficiently arranged to provide the modem user with information from A (accounts, online service) to Z (Z-modems). A glossary offers brief definitions of terms used in the main text. A two-page bibliography provides selected references to books and periodicals. Following a biographical sketch and a photograph of the bearded, smiling author, the book contains an unusual feature, a Shopper's Guide with advertisements for various online services, modems, software and publications, some with response coupons.

Despite the attempts to cover all the bases of modem use, the book remains stronger in some areas than in others. A note on the page containing the Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication data suggests the inevitable difficulties of trying to produce up-to-date information in areas where technology changes rapidly: "Every effort has been made to make this handbook as complete and factual as possible. However, the information contained herein is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by the author, the service providers, publishers, and manufacturers...." In any rapidly evolving field, information on procedures and equipment alike tends to be outdated as soon as it is printed.

As an example of rapidly superseded information, consider the situation of obtaining college credits via online study. On pages 433 and 434 of THE MODEM REFERENCE, Mr. Banks mentions that college credit courses are available online through the Media Studies Program of the New School for Social Research as well as the Electronic University Network, including an online Masters of Business Administration degree program. Since the time that the book was prepared and published, the Media Studies Program now offers the degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies with a Technology and Society option, designed for completion totally through online study, using the facilities of the Connected Education, Inc., virtual campus. The Master of Business Administration degree program is no longer offered through the Electronic University Network by John F. Kennedy University, which has terminated the institution's Access to Learning embryonic online bulletin board-cum-campus.

These examples are not in any way meant to disparage the attempts at thoroughness that produced this book. Rather, they are merely meant to suggest the lightning speed with which changes affect the fluid world of electronic technology. THE MODEM REFERENCE should be construed as a reference and overview, not an up-to-the-second guide to the quick-changing milieu of the modem community.

Considering the rapid expansion of the modem community, the most enduring sections of Mr. Banks's book probably constitute the first half of the volume, dealing with telecommunications theory and practice, including modems and hardware. The author starts from the beginning, literally "Getting Started," beginning with "What is Telecomputing?" and proceeding from electronic mail to online transfer of information. He presents information from modems and phone jacks, through how telecomputing works, to hardware and software selection considerations.

The author organized his book logically, from the simple to the complex, using a clear style of writing and enticing page layout, with large margins, attractive contrast of typefaces and clearly reproduced diagrams and photographs. The perfect binding makes it rather difficult to open the book flat and use
it as a reference at a personal computer equipped with a modem. Thus the reader should consult the book before going online, not during the telecomputing process. While some of the information dates rapidly in a fast-growing industry, THE MODEM REFERENCE remains an otherwise ambitious survey book.

--------
author's note: (Ms.) Gail S. Thomas earned the first Masters of Arts in Media Studies degree from the New School for Social Research entirely through the Connected Education online program. She now serves on the administrative staff of Connected Education, Inc.

THE ADAPSO FOUNDATION
BY LUANNE JAMES

The ADAPSO Foundation was formed in 1986 by ADAPSO, a national trade asociation representing computer software and service companies, to bring the technology of its members to aid the disabled and disadvantaged.

"We want to make the foundation much more than a funding source," explains Luanne James, the ADAPSO Foundation's director. "We want to leverage the financial grants we make with donations of talent and technology so that we can make a contribution that reflects the unique capacities of our industry."

An example of this approach is the Foundation's assistance to the Electronic Networks for Interaction (ENFI) program at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. It began in June, 1987. Employees of Boeing Computer Services designed a sophisticated network architecture to allow teaching from a remote site and to develop synchronous and asynchronous transmission facilities to include local and long distance communications. They developed a graphics overlay with a cartoon character that communicates in sign language to make the system usable by students in grades K-12. Boeing also donated equipment. Several other ADAPSO member companies contributed services and equipment too.

The Federation of the Handicapped in New York City is another site where ADAPSO members are donating expertise. In December, 1987, the Foundation agreed to assist in redesigning the system that supports their transcription typing service. The service enables home-based workers to transcribe dictation for a variety of businesses and government agencies.

The technology supporting the service was obsolete when it was installed, and the costs fo continuous phone transmission required by the system have become prohibitive.

Experts provided by the Foundation will design a new system that will use most of the equipment the Federation and its workers already have. Their objective is to both increase efficiency and cut operating costs.

The ADAPSO Foundation's newest venture is to convert the job readiness training program operated by Operation Job Match in Washington, D.C. to computer assisted instruction. This will allow them to reach many more clients without greatly increasing their staff. They will also help develop a computer based cognitive rehabilitation program. Operation Job Match is pursuing this in partnership with Georgetown University.

The Foundation also has provided donations and a placement program assisting the disabled. In February, 1987, it gave $25,000 to the Adaptive Devices Applied Methods Laboratory oD the Wayne County Intermediate School District in Michigan. The grant was used to distribute a handheld,Jdirect-select communication aid with a vocabulary of 500 to 900 words to 80 users. This year the Foundation will provide funds to distribute a like number of the aids.

Employment for the disabled is another ADAPSO Foundation area of activity. Working in cooperation with the Electronic Industries Founcation, an arm of the Electronic Industries Association, ADAPSO members are helping define training curricula and training the disabled in job placement skills.

The ADAPSO Foundation's address is 2111 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20007

A Look At Computer Viruses
by Mike Blaszczak

Over the last year, writers for regular columns in magazines have devoted a great deal of attention, and column space, to "computer viruses".

A great sub-culture has emerged in America ... and that is the online community. Daily, billions of kilobytes of data, programs, and text change hands over local-area, wide-area, and pulblic data networks. Some people talk about religion, and some people use the systems for business -- as the hub of their interdepartmental communication efforts. Other folks are here for the fun of it; to talk to other people, make some telefriends, and swap a program or two.

We all know this.

But the authors of these columns write for the average member of the computing public; and many of them don't spend all that much time online. So the hype they spread about this small problem falls on the ears of people who are ready to believe what they hear -- after all, if this guy writes a column, he *must* be an expert.

Then, a "bored but brilliant" undergraduate student released a virus just to see how far it would get. It was real, but it was very benevolent. Perhaps it would best be called a "parasite", instead of a "virus". It just hung around on the system until it could go someplace else. It moved through "the wires"; attatching itself to another computer whenever the first computer made a move to do some communications.

Managers of any public-access system know the problems associated with keeping system security at a workable level. Legitimate users should not be inconvenienced with the problem of verification, but the resources of the system should be comprimised under no cirucmstances. Systems that are regularly installed in public-contact applications are given great system protection utilities, and volumous tomes of information are written for the system manager to control system access.

But individual PC's are subject to much more abuse because they don't have these tools. They are often run by people who don't have much computer literacy, and wouldn't know a virus as it did its work.

This is one of the most important parts of virus protection for the PC user. When a user does work with a mainframe, the computer is almost always at a different physical location than the terminal. The user can't tell when the disk drive is running, or when the modem has switched on. Even if the user could see this happening, they might not know when it was doing *their* work. But the PC user can tell. From experience, and from common sense, the user should be able to tell that something is not normal.

One of the first virus programs installed itself in the COMMAND.COM program that interprets MS-DOS commands. When the user used any system command to look at another disk, the program would copy itself to that disk, and then execute the command as if nothing happened. After the program made four or five copies of itself, it would reformat all the active disk drives on the system.

Now, it would seem that the user should have noticed that the system was taking a little bit too long to get a directory, or that there was a lot of disk activity when they used the TYPE command.

Many programs provide different levels of protection against viruses. A very simple check is to watch the file date and time stamp of important system files. It is equally effective to watch the size of the file in the directory.

While very well-written programs can alter the system files without changing their date or time, it is likely that the programs will be too big to fit into the normal size of the command file that it is hosting it.

Write-protect stickers can often trip up viruses. Lengthy and unreliable low-level disk calls can be made to trick the system into writing to the drive, even with the write protect notch covered, but they are difficult to write and likely beyond the realm of reality for the typical at-home computer crook.

Programs that compute checksums, file patterns, or cyclic-redundancy checks, can also be applied. The beauty of these is that they may be done each and every time the computer is powered up, automatically, as well as when the user "just wants to check".

To cirumvent this, the devious programmer would also have to be a mathemetician -- changing the numbers without changing the checksum or cyclic-redunancy check value would be quite a feat.

Using utilities to write protect, reset, or monitor the system calls made to disk drives is also a good idea. In many operating systems, files can be "write protected", and any calls to access the file through the operating system will not be successful. Many utilities are available to snag "format" calls to the disk, and to watch for "write" operations on disk information that is not normally changed -- namely, the operating system's own storage area.

But even without these tools, by far the most useful protection against a virus is common sense. If your run a program that should draw a pretty picture, you should not stand by idly as the program reads from your disk drive. Why would it manipulate disk information, if all it were doing is working on the screen? Stop the program, and report the problem to the bulletin board where you got it!

Viruses that change and "mutate" to protect themselves from the smart user are a long way off. Once the virus is gone, it is no longer something to worry about.

The virus that infiltrated parts of academic computers around the country is not a threat to personal comptuer systems. And you can not get a virus by just reading text or mail on electronic mail systems or computer conferencing systems.

But if you use software, keep an eye on the operation of the program. If it does something that it seemingly shouldn't, you should suspect that there's a problem.

Some Common Questions Networkers Have About Viruses
===================================================

Can you "catch" of virus by:

1. Downloading a comment in an online conference? NO.
Absolutely not.

2) Having someone post a note on your conferencing or BBS
system? If it's just a note? Absolutely not. If there's a
program there, and that program is infected and you run it, yes,
there is a chance.

3) Reading things anywhere (without downloading)? No chance.

As you know, computers interchange information by using ASCII codes. There are some extensions to the ASCII codes that allow computers to send special instructions to each other. For example, 2J moves the cursor to the top left (or "home") position on a VT-100 or ANSI terminal.

Using these special codes, it is possible, on some terminals, to redefine keyboard keys. Now, a devious user might send you codes to redefine one of your keys as "ERASE EVERYTHING". If you press that key, you could erase everything in sight.

It's possible to do this online. And you'd hardly notice it, if you weren't paying attention to everything that was happening, and it would probably be too late to do something about it.

ProComm, Crosstalk Mark IV, and Smartcomm, which are the three most popular terminal programs for IBM's, do not allow this to be done. But it can be done on "dumb terminals", like DEC's VT series terminals, and any look-alikes that are out there.

The odds of it happening are unlikely.

But, while using a BBS or online service, and not downloading programs, you're completely safe. There are very very few things that can go wrong.