Jamais Cascio

This has become increasingly common. For reasons of efficiency, entire offices — from receptionists to graphic designers to engineers — are moved to a “standard” platform. Everyone in the company uses the same system, regardless of whether it’s the right tool for the job; no platform or software diversity is allowed.

In biology, a local environment where only a single organism propagates is called a “monoculture.” Usually found in agri-business, particularly forestry, monocultures are very efficient and profitable. An entire stand of trees in a “managed forest” will be of consistent size, wood type, even color, minimizing the waste and maximizing the profit from that acreage. Sometimes the plants are cloned from a standard model. Trees that aren’t the right “crop” for the area are eliminated, as they take up space and sap resources that would otherwise go to the desired species.

Natural monocultures are less common, but are not unknown. Extremely aggressive species, introduced into a region where their natural predators are unknown, can quickly overwhelm the ecological niches, driving the native competitors to the margins, or to extinction.

The problem with monocultures is that they are extremely sensitive to attack. Monoculture stands are identical plants with identical defenses. Unlike a diverse stand of trees, a disease or infestation can rip right through a monoculture, leaving the entire forest worthless and dying. In a heterogenous stand, diseases and infestations can be stopped when they don’t have an immediate host to jump to; in a monoculture, every adjacent tree is a new host, waiting and vulnerable.

The same can be said for computing environments.

Melissa took advantage of the fact that an increasing number of computers run the same set of Microsoft programs. From the virus’ perspective, all of these computers had the same “biology” — they were the same species. As long as the virus got passed from compatible host to compatible host, it could continue to propagate and thrive. The only way it would stop would be if it found itself on a host that wasn’t compatible, that didn’t have the right set of Microsoft programs. A Mac, for example, or a network using Lotus Notes, or a user with Word 5 instead of Word 97.

Heterogenous environments can be safer from infectious attacks because they don’t provide a wealth of identical hosts through which a virus can replicate and spread. In a diverse ecology, each of the different species will have a different set of defenses and different kinds of vulnerabilities. This is not a new revelation; for years, it was standard procedure in the aeronautics industry to have redundant pieces of flight software, in many cases written by entirely different teams, so that they wouldn’t fail in the same way.

Admittedly, there are compelling reasons to standardize on a particular platform or a particular set of applications. It’s a more efficient use of tech support time, especially as popular systems become increasingly complex and difficult to support. Standardizing on a given set of programs means not having to worry about incompatible file types. The deals Microsoft offers computer manufacturers also come into play: Why spend money for competing applications if consumers can get this software for “free”?

Then there are the increasingly complex inter-application connections in Microsoft programs. In many situations, the intimate coupling of programming interfaces and dynamic libraries means that applications can work together tightly. But problems arise when this increasing software integration (reportedly, Windows 2000 will include Outlook as part of the operating system) comes with little or no security. A successful attack on one part of the computer opens up the entire machine, and then the entire network.

The appalling aspect of the Melissa macro-virus is not that it got loose, but that it was possible at all. Why is it that a word processing document can grab a copy of your address book and send out copies of itself under your name without you even knowing about it? Who decided that swoopy new features and powerful inter-application commands should be added to a system without any thought of security? We should be grateful that the Melissa author chose only to be annoying, and not truly malicious.

Lest I be accused of gratuitous Microsoft-bashing, let me quickly acknowledge that an all-Macintosh or all-Unix environment would be nearly as vulnerable to monoculture attacks as an all-Windows office, if there were the same sort of aggressive development of Mac or Unix viruses.

The reality of the world, however, is that Microsoft has come to dominate a growing set of digital environmental niches. The relentless spread of a single platform, steadily incorporating more and more interrelated “features,” marginalizes, pushes out and finally kills its ecological competition — in turn creating the very monocultures that leave the software vulnerable to subversion.

Melissa’s spread should not surprise us. Instead, we should take it as a friendly warning.

Playing along with a handful of other animated shorts at a theater on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Calif., last week, “Diablo: The Calling” seemed only slightly out of place. It wasn’t the sole computer-generated film in the collection, nor was it the only one with a truncated plot. But it was the only film participating in this screening — all fulfilling the “public exhibition” requirement for Academy Award consideration — that had been originally produced as the intro animation for a computer game. (The short is eligible for the Oscar because it was shown on a screen before it appeared as part of the game.)

Of course, “Diablo: The Calling” is an outtake from Diablo II — the highly anticipated new game from Blizzard Studios. (Its launch was recently delayed from Christmas to early 2000.) Coming in the wake of Blizzard’s original Diablo and StarCraft — some of the most cinematic of computer games — it’s hardly surprising to see the gorgeous graphics of Diablo II vying for an Academy Award on the silver screen.

Blizzard has gone Hollywood. For a company that excels in what could be considered traditional hack-and-slash computer entertainment, Blizzard has a lot in common with a cutting-edge movie studio. Certainly, its games are produced like movies.

Over two years in the making, Diablo II has a multimillion-dollar budget and deals for spin-offs such as action figures and books. The game itself will fill at least four CD-ROMs, and will contain nearly 30 minutes of “cinematic elements” — the high-resolution animations used to move the story forward. Though work on the game is still in progress, I got a sneak preview and found a game that, while still a bit rough around the edges, is already a visual wonder.

The environment of Diablo II is alive with motion, from the birds and small animals scampering through the underbrush to the whirling animations of spells such as the Shield of Hammers. Magic items and spells have unique visual representations. The character images — the Barbarian, the Necromancer, the Amazon, the Sorceress and the Paladin — have individual appearances and skills, each more compelling than the last. When I saw the Sorceress cast a “Rain of Meteors” spell, inundating the ground around her with a firestorm of flaming stones from above, I was amazed; when the Necromancer, in turn, cast a “Wall of Bones” that grew from the slain bodies of his enemies, I simply had to laugh. Even incomplete, Diablo II has some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen.

Within the Blizzard ranks, there is a sense of anticipation about the new possibilities. “With every [cinematic sequence] we do we’re getting more and more to the level of a full motion feature,” sound designer Tracy Bush confided after the screening of “Diablo: The Calling.” “We’ve definitely kicked around the idea of a full-length picture — as long as we’re working with the right company.”

Blizzard’s public relations director Susan Wooley echoed the sentiment. “We have volumes of backstory, stuff that our designers come up with that never gets into the games. We have a lot to work with. [Movies] would be a natural extension of what we do, but we’d want it to be really good.”

But not everyone at Blizzard sees a trajectory from games to movies. Matt Samia, the producer in charge of Blizzard’s cinematics department, takes a more conservative view. As a programmer with a background in film, he saw the direction the game industry was headed early on. But when it comes to a feature-length production from Blizzard, he says, “There are no concrete plans for that.” He wants his team to stay focused on creating the most outrageous cinematics possible for the games. “It’s a challenge to see how far we can push it every time.”

The first Diablo was one of the surprise hits of 1997, with more than 3 million copies in play. Moreover, Diablo reignited a gaming genre; role playing games (RPG) had become moribund, far less interesting than the various Quake-style action shooters or the real-time strategy games that were then coming into vogue. Diablo’s success helped pave the way for the success role-playing games enjoy in 1999, when even Microsoft has gotten into the business with Asheron’s Call.

Earlier computer RPGs had tried, with greater or lesser degrees of success, to replicate the experience of paper-and-dice role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Some, like the Infocom text adventures, became minor classics; most, including even the official D&D adaptations, were best forgotten. Diablo took the elements from RPGs that seemed to grab players the most — the control over character skills and “stats” (strength, willpower, etc), the ability to become more powerful as you move up “levels,” the sense that each character could be individualized — and combined them with a rapidly moving slash-and-blast format that left wrists sore and keyboards broken. Like many a rabid Diablo player, I more than once found myself unable to pull away from the game until I was too bleary-eyed to go on.

From the Diablo II preview I was given, I should stock up now on coffee, seat cushions and extra keyboards.

“The goal with Diablo II is to create a ‘definitive title,’” says Bill Roper, Diablo II’s producer. “We want to make it so that people can’t think of this genre without thinking of this game.”

Blizzard certainly seems to be putting in the effort to achieve this goal. Although clearly related to the original Diablo, Diablo II shows a clear progression not just in the technology, but in the gameplay. Diablo II seems to contain every element the Blizzard team wishes it could have put into the original. It could easily become the definitive computer role-playing game.

Or it could become the greatest victory of yesterday’s war. While the Diablo series allows people to play together over the Internet, games are relatively brief, and only a limited number of people can play together — Diablo II makes room for eight players, a step up from the original’s four. Contrast this to EverQuest from Sony or Asheron’s Call from Microsoft: in these “massively multiplayer” games, thousands of people can be online at the same time, in the same virtual world. The games themselves are “persistent,” meaning that the game world continues to exist and grow even after individual players shut off their machines. Although games played over the Internet one-on-one or in small groups remain popular, gamer — and industry — attention has clearly shifted to the massively multiplayer systems.

A bigger problem may be meeting the expectations of fans. Daniel Lee, who works at the fan site DiabloII.com, says, “People have been waiting for this for two years. The anticipation is huge. The die-hard fans want it now.” Mirroring the buzz about “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” or the upcoming “Lord of the Rings” film, Diablo II fan sites pore over every preliminary design shot, dissect every producer comment and occasionally make flat demands about what must and must not appear in the game.

If the hype surrounding Diablo II is reminiscent of the science-fiction movie business, the production environment is moreso. My visit to Blizzard South, the new production headquarters in Irvine, Calif., was almost a sucker-punch; I’d driven from West Hollywood for an hour, deep into Orange County, only to find myself — figuratively speaking — right back in Hollywood. Blizzard Studios felt far more like a television or film production house than a software firm.

Storyboards filled the walls, showing the arc of the game’s plot and key scenes from the game. Some offices were set up as mini-recording studios, where composers worked out the score on electronic keyboards. Full-size cardboard characters advertising earlier productions stood in corners, alongside posters and boxes of toys.

Despite death-march time lines on the whiteboards, most of the production staff looked calm. This, too, was right out of the Hollywood experience. People don’t seem anxious — they’re immersed in creating an incredible experience that some people will even call a work of art.

If there’s one significant difference between the game industry and Hollywood, however, its in the presence of women. While female producers and directors may still be a scarce commodity in film, women make up a significant percentage of the production designers.

“We’d love to have more women work here,” says Roper. “But most game designers are gamers and men play a lot more computer games than women.” This is the case even in the cinematics department, which relies heavily on common filmmaking tasks such as editing and sound design. “People go from gamer to employee. We don’t get people applying out of film school,” says Matt Samia.

Samia notes a different problem with people coming from mainstream computer graphic effects companies. “Most CG houses are very big and specialized, and the programmers there tend to be specialized, too. They’ll have one person who only does textures or something. For games, they need to be more generalized.” Blizzard’s cinematics team, a tightly knit family of programmers, consists of seven regular artists plus three sound designers. (“There’s been almost no turnover within the cinematics group since I started with Blizzard,” Samia laughs.) If computer effects companies like Pixar are the equivalent of the big film studios, the Blizzard cinematics group is the indie film company.

Few people think of game companies as the equivalent of independent filmmakers, however, and most of the Blizzard cinematics team are programmers and gamers learning the ropes at making movies. “It’s hard to find talented [non-gamers] when people don’t know what you’re doing,” Samia says. It’s entirely possible that moves such as putting the Diablo II intro up for Academy Award consideration may bring in that new talent.

As Blizzard takes its first steps into non-game media, the biggest concern for everyone I spoke with is quality. The big-screen disaster “Wing Commander” — based on a popular computer game series — was brought up by several Blizzard staffers as an example of what they would not want to have happen.

“If we can do it without losing focus, there are things Blizzard will explore,” says Wooley, the P.R. coordinator. “But we’re not going to do it just for the sake of doing it.”

Industry analyst Ron Hayden suggests that the best way to ensure quality is to avoid attempting to make game plots and movie plots identical. “I can’t think of a single case of a movie plot making a successful game or of a game becoming a successful movie,” he notes. The track record of games based on movies and TV shows supports that assertion. The recent Interplay release Starfleet Command is the first “Star Trek” game that has had a measure of critical and commercial success — but Starfleet Command is itself based on an old paper-and-dice war game, Star Fleet Battles.

The key for success may be to let the games and movies play off of each other, to explore different aspects of a fictional universe. Hayden goes on to say, “LucasArts is a good example of this — the games that work are the ones that let you explore this great universe they’ve created, not the ones that follow the strict plot line of an individual movie.”

With Diablo II — as with other role playing games — the plot is as much
a method of giving structure to the game’s world as it is a tale of a
particular character. The player provides the character’s real story. When
my Barbarian leaps into the fray with battle axes in each hand, when my
Amazon drops a target from across the room with a well-placed arrow, when
my Necromancer animates the bones of his dead enemies to fight at his side
… this is how I tell my part of the story.

As I play the game, watching the cinematic scenes and immersing myself in this virtual world, I am reminded of the moment that I turned the corner in the Blizzard hallway and saw the storyboards. I had wondered, Was this to be a movie or a game? With the theatrical release of the short Diablo film, it turned out to be both. Soon, perhaps, the distinction will be irrelevant.

This micro-Web server, called the IPic, can currently be found here, but — since it gets moved around a fair bit — has its contents mirrored here.

This initial IPic server, which resides on a PIC 12C509A microprocessor, is tiny. Really tiny. No, really, really tiny — in terms of both physical size and software. In just 1K of memory, Shri has managed to build a standards-compliant TCP/IP stack, a telnet server and an HTTP (Web) daemon capable of serving up dynamic content and even (very small) Java applets. The IPic server is currently delivering up to 7,000 hits a day, serving up postscript files, small audio clips and even a brief history of the universe — all from a system whose total size, including data storage, power management and wires to connect it to the network, is less than that of a U.S. quarter.

Shri sees a day when every action that needs to be controlled, from running a bath to setting up a printer, will be managed via a Web interface. With data traveling over electrical wires or wirelessly through the air, every device and system can chatter with the others, making the whole home or office “smart.” Such a vision is conventional wisdom among the digerati, who variously see Sun’s Jini or Microsoft’s “Digital Nervous System” as the means to that end, with a corresponding investment in large servers and system upgrades.
What makes IPic different is that it’s simple, and it works. With a chip that costs about a buck and code so tight it could be handwritten on a 3-by-5 index card, IPic really could be built into everything from light sockets to doorknobs.

But the concept doesn’t stop at urban infrastructure. Cheap, reliable micro-Web servers would be a boon for everyone from environmentalists to United Nations inspectors to worried parents. Add a micropower radio transmitter and a tiny Charged-Coupled Display camera to the IPic, and you have a remote monitor the size of a pack of chewing gum (including battery) and accessible from anywhere over the Internet. Stick them to endangered species, to missiles, to wayward kids … and really have something to worry about when the message comes back “404 Not Found.”

The Jar-Jargonizer works best with large, diverse content, such as that from a Web site devoted to discussion. Slashdot and Salon.com’s Table Talk work particularly well. “Don-nuh read it if you-sa’re pure of heart,” is the translation from the Slashdot excerpt: “Don’t read it if you’re pure of heart.”

In the grand Internet tradition of sites with a five-minute amusement value, the Jar-Jargonizer has enough surprises in its output to keep a visitor playing for a while.

“I try to keep the translator up to date on current events so that national and especially world news stories make for fun reading,” says Murdock. The Jar-Jargonizer includes Star Wars-appropriate translations for various vehicles, places, and names. Many visitors particularly enjoy the replacement of any reference to “Microsoft” with “The Sith.”

Dialect translation programs predate the Web, and include the marginally amusing “jive” translator and the cockney translator, which does rhyming slang. Among the most beloved is the “borker”, which translates text to sound like the “Muppet Show’s” Swedish Chef. Originally posted to Usenet in 1993 by John Hagerman, the chef translator has become a common programming exercise.

For Murdock, the Jar-Jargonizer is a labor of love, and he is continually updating the content and tweaking the translations. “Basically we’re adding new translations to the thing almost every day, so there will be new stuff to look for all the time.”

Some examples:

 ./drivers/block/cmd640.c:16: *  These chips are basically fucked by
design
./fs/ufs/ufs_super.c:184:     printk("ufs_read_super: fucking Sun blows me\n");
./lib/vsprintf.c:9: * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up 
 

The last is particularly amusing — “Torvalds” is, of course, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish computer scientist who started Linux in the first place.

The problem is, while adult engineers might find commentary such as this humorous, the sort of people who want to censor the Internet are more
likely to find it offensive. Which leads us back to the simple question: How will the Linux source code fare if the the Australian censorship law
passes?

Second-hand commentary on Australia’s Net censorship law abounds, but I decided to go straight to the source. Like most laws, it makes for stultifying reading, but in essence the measure
says that the government can prohibit Australian Web servers from hosting X-rated material. R-rated material would be prohibited if it’s not
behind a guard page or adult check of some sort.
I figured, therefore, Linux source code would have to be shielded from young eyes, lest they get the impression that “fuck” is a valid engineering term. But then I realized something: This assumes that an R rating in Australia means pretty much the same thing that it means in the United States.

I decided to check with the law. It says that material that doesn’t already have an Australian rating — that is, anything other than an
already-rated movie or computer game — will be rated as if it were a film. The Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 is the source for the current Australian
ratings code, so off I go to read through it.

As in the United States, X ratings are for good old-fashioned smut, but in Australia there is also RC (for Restricted Content), which makes it illegal to depict sex, violence or “other abhorrent
phenomenon in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults.” There’s also an MA rating, which is for films dealing with “sex, violence or coarse language in such a manner as to be unsuitable for viewing by
persons under 15,” and an R rating, for material that is simply “unsuitable for viewing by minors.”

While this more or less answers my question about restricting Linux — which will probably be the first operating system to be rated MA for
coarse language — it raises a larger, darker question. What is the R rating for, and how will it be applied online?

A filtering system supported by the backers of the Australian law
may give us some clues. Among the words the software blocks are the terms “anarchy,” “gothic,” “pierced” and “tattoo,” along with the usual run of sexual terms and names such as Pamela. So, it seems that what is “unsuitable for a minor to see” may well be anything unusual or outside of
the mainstream — possibly including, but far from limited to, Linux.

A similar CD was carried on last year’s Mars 98 Polar Lander — but only school-age kids could participate. Over 932,000 kids’ names were collected, and Lee says that quite a few adults wanted in on it, too. Now they’re getting their chance. Within a day of announcing the new CD on a NASA mailing list, nearly 9,000 people signed up to have their names rocketed into space in April 2001. Lee says adults are as excited as kids about the names CD, if not more so. In fact, he’s been hearing from kids who don’t want their names sent to Mars, but who have been added to the CD by “overzealous uncles.” Some kids are afraid that the CD will be used by Martians to compile an invasion hit list.

The kids have little to worry about: Because of the high radiation levels on Mars — the planet has no atmospheric shield like Earth’s ozone layer — the data on the CD will be damaged beyond recognition within a few days of landing. NASA could construct a radiation-proof case for the CD, but “the added cost to the mission would be considerable.” Instead, the agency will let the CD destruct and will leave its remains on Mars.

The Mars 2001 Lander is part of NASA’s new philosophy of “Faster, Better, Cheaper,” which attempts to generate maximum scientific returns at a minimum of cost. The mission will carry a number of experiments specifically designed to aid a future human visit to Mars. Most notable is a system devised to create rocket fuel out of materials readily available in the Martian environment, a procedure suggested in the 1996 Robert Zubrin book, “The Case for Mars.”

But until the day when tourists can head off to the Red Planet, the name CDs will give everyday people a chance to send a bit of themselves to Mars. Lee expects that the name lists could become a regular part of NASA missions, at least those with an element of public interest.

“We’d like to do this on the Europa mission,” Lee says. (Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, will be the target of an upcoming mission to look for extraterrestrial life.) “Humans have a natural inclination to be explorers,” he says. By adding one’s name to the 2001 Lander CD, Lee purports, “you can be a part of the exploration.”

At least for a few days after landing.