Moore - The Emperors Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth About Internet Culture

My deepest gratitude to the many individuals who so willingly shared their experiences, both on and off the Net. Without them, there would be no book. I would also like to thank Kjell Meling and Pennsylvania State University for their support, Bruce Weigl for his encouragement, George Romasco for lending me my first computer, and Robert Rubin for his trust in my ability to enter the electronic woods and not get hopelessly lost.

Appendix

If you want to use the Internet, and you dont have free access at work or at school, you will need to pay someoneeither a company such as America Online, Prodigy, or CompuServe, or one of the smaller, local access providersto give you an account. Then you can access the Net through their big machines.

This is what you get from an access provider. In the case of commercial providers, it allows them to keep track of how many hours you spend logged on. It also allows an access provider to keep track of who you are.

In order to receive E-mail, you need an electronic address, something along the lines of yourname@accessprovider.com or president@whitehouse.gov.

A funny-looking redheaded guy in a comic book, but also a sophisticated search tool that will allow you to find files anywhere on the Internet by entering a key word. Once you locate the file, you will probably use ftp (see below) to retrieve it.

The Internets grandfather, started in 1969, and named for ARPA, the Department of Defenses Advanced Research Project Agency.

A form of bot, or robot computer program. If you send electronic mail to certain addresses, whitehouse.gov for instance, your message is automatically answered by a computer. The answer is just an electronic form letter, and your mail may or may not eventually reach human eyes.

Short for bulletin board system, a computer-based mechanism that allows people to read other peoples messages on their computers, and then post responses. No thumbtacks needed.

A file that contains information other than just text. It is usually a program or a picture of some sort. Watch your kids closely.

Depending on your access providers software, it might be possible to adjust your settings so that incoming E-mail from certain outside addresses simply bounces off your mailbox. If someone has been repeatedly trying to sell you Herbal Weight Loss Remedies, for instance, this can be very helpful.

Computer storage capacitythe amount of space your computer has to hold informationis measured in bytes. In the Net world, the more bytes you can handle, the bigger the dog you are.

In response to spamming (see below), sophisticated programs called cancel-bots have been developed to robotically cancel certain messages from Usenet newsgroups. Since no one is officially in charge of Usenet, cancel-bot operators tend to be self-appointed, and many people object to their tactics. Others, having been offered an Herbal Weight Loss Remedy for the nineteenth time in two weeks, just say, Thank you very kindly, cancel-bot.

If you enter a Chat program, you will need to choose a channel. You can then chat with the other people who have also chosen that channel, assuming you have something to say to a total stranger.

The Internet and many of the larger commercial access providers offer Chat areas, also called forums, where people can converse on-line in real time. This means that your typed messages appear on the screens of other users only moments after you type them in.

Another term for programmingthe act of writing logical instructions coded into computer language.

When you turn on your computer or dial into your Internet access provider, a command-line interface is what you see on your screen. It will often look like this:

>

or this:

=====>

And you will need to type in a command (such as Menu). The alternative to a command-line interface is the friendlier Graphic User Interface (see below).

On Usenet, crossposting is the act of sending your article or message to two or more of the ten thousand different subject discussion newsgroups. Crossposting to more than one or two topic areas, especially if the relevance of your message is not clear, is considered rude. Crossposting to fifty or more groups tends to fire up the cancel-botters.

Sex without touching, sex without seeing, sex with very little sensory input other than the clicking of hard plastic keys. Some people love it.

A term coined by author William Gibson in his sci-fi novel Neuromancer. People on the Internet argue all the time about what it means, or whether it means anything at all, but generally it refers to the geographically nonexistent space where computer-aided communication takes place.

Retrieving a file by yanking it from another computer down to your computer (see upload).

Messages sent from one individual across the Internet to another specific individual or group of individuals.

Typed messages can be cold and sterile, so people have begun to attach little sideways smiley faces, like this :-) to indicate that they are being good humored, or winking faces ;-) to indicate that they are just joshing, or maybe this face #:*( to indicate a bad haircut and nasal congestion.

A type of software that will automatically transform electronic messages into coded messages, so other people cant read them. The intended recipient needs to use a software key to decode the message.

Short for frequently asked questions. You will find a FAQ file posted on many of the more active Usenet newsgroups, and before broadcasting your beginning questions across the group, you should probably read this first to see if your question has already been answered.

A worldwide network of bulletin board systems.

Nasty, often obscene, messages traded by E-mail or Usenet posting. Some people flame others when they disagree with them, while others do it for fun. It is hard, though, for even the best of flames, aimed in your direction, to hurt much more than your feelings.

Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. Occurs when some people on Usenet just get childish and flame back and forth until everyone gets bored and begs them to stop.

Certain localities, Cleveland for instance, offer free on-line access for residents. Usually, though, you cant do as much on these services as you can on those for which you have to pay a monthly fee.

This means file transfer protocol, the way in which files are transferred from one computer to another. If you need information on some subject, and relevant articles are housed on a computer in Finland, you can ftp to that computer and retrieve them.

Short for Graphics Interchange Format, it is exactly that, a format by which to exchange graphic (i.e., picture) files.

Lots and lots of bytes (1,073,741,824, to be exact).