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A L S O__T O D A Y [ 2 1 S T__F E A T U R E S ] Royal treatment for game reviewers By Mark Glaser From boot camp to Versailles, gaming industry junkets send critics to the strangest places - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is the Net doomed to be a white village? Weigh in on race and the Web in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Gun mad By Andrew Leonard While the oldest, nastiest debate online remains deadlocked, gun rights activists on the Net get organized (04/20/98) Black and white and Web all over By Janelle Brown African-Americans aren't flocking online -- a new study puts the numbers together (04/17/98) 21st Challenge No. 8 By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Phony Microsoft support letters (04/16/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg For Microsoft's PR machine, "innovate or die" becomes "innovate or buy" (04/15/98) Let my software go! By Andrew Leonard Netscape was desperate for a new strategy against Microsoft. Eric Raymond had one (04/14/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST BOOKS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - _______

THIS IS JUST BETWEEN US, RIGHT? | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The only value the EFF wishes to flout is the sanctity of child rearing. Where questions of unregulated content intersect with the increasing availability of pornography, "Protecting Yourself Online" effectively ditches the "Yourself" part of its title and adopts "Your Children" as an emblem of its authors' responsible intentions. They offer this as a counterweight to their frequently restated loathing for the 1973 Supreme Court case Miller vs. California, a decision that established the current U.S. obscenity standard. They would like to see the court take the radical step of updating its obscenity test, but they would also like to decide for themselves, within their own online communities, what their children can and can't view. It's a typical piece of narcissistic EFF logic: Overturn the "community standards" segment of Miller, but do so according to the priorities of our community, one that -- as Barlow has maintained -- is not beholden to the law of the land, anyway. In "Net.wars," Wendy Grossman, a freelance journalist who has worked the technological waterfront since 1992, manages to avoid, for the most part, the EFF's restyled definitions of privacy rights -- but that's only because her mind seems to be too incoherent to latch onto a political chimera in the same way that Dyson would. "I hate being edited," she claims in her acknowledgments, and it shows. Most journalists have been trained to rig their investigations around a narrative spine, but not Grossman, whose ramblings lope from Barlow hagiography to deconstructions of Barlow's free-range notion (expressed in his "Cyberspace Independence Declaration") of cyberspace as a transnational frontier that cannot be compelled to submit to earthbound law. Grossman made her reputation with a 1996 piece in Wired about the Church of Scientology's efforts to harass people who had infringed its copyright online, and a version of that saga has been included here. Drowned in arcane detail, however, it's impossible to imagine how a reader unfamiliar with the debate, with Scientology's litigious appetites and bizarre philosophy, or with the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup on Usenet will be able to make sense of this important instance of the Net outpacing conventional copyright law's ability to keep up. Grossman fares somewhat better with her discussions of pornography, bringing a needed dose of skeptical realism into the controversy, and her accounts of the federal government's botched efforts to control exports of encryption software and to sustain the ill-fated Communications Decency Act of 1996 are chock-full of information. Unfortunately, none of it is distinguished by much of an angle, beyond her feeling that government regulation in cyberspace is hamstrung by ignorance among the regulators. It is perhaps a lot to ask of a reporter, but "Net.wars" could have used at least a smidgen of theory to characterize the stakes of the combat that Grossman believes will only intensify in the next century, as the Net expands and fewer people have the luxury of blissful ignorance. On balance, Grossman's undisciplined dispatch from what she perceives as the frontier is altogether less galling than the EFF's attempt to colonize that frontier and enlist its new inhabitants in a state-slaying entrepreneurial army. Information may want to be free, but the vast majority of the world's citizens may not want to let it out of its cage. SALON | April 21, 1998 Matthew DeBord is a contributing editor at the online magazine Feed.