FWEE!: kiosks

[internaut@aol.com]

Yo Dewds,

I guess it's time for me to throw in my two bits on the Public WB Kiosk
idea...

I guess I appreciate the intent of implementing such a system, but there are
some BIG strikes against it:

[1] Strike One: Installation and maintenance costs (economics again). Can you
IMAGINE what it would cost to build and maintain a network (and it would have
to be a big one!) of public kiosks? Better to piggyback on existing
infrastructure for purely practical reasons. I have an account on the
aforementioned SF Net (little tables in coffeehouses all over the San
Francisco Bay Area) and I have come to the conclusion that it would be
prohibitive to just maintain such a system. Wayne Gregori would back me up on
this. If you think it's a pain to keep your baby-powdered PC at home in
decent working order, imagine one with beer spilt on it daily, bozos who type
like Paul Bunyan on Steroids and the occasional
chairleg-yanking-the-plug-out-of-the-wall incident. Most of the time, I log
in to SF Net from home anyway.

[2] Strike Two: Lack of Privacy while using the kiosks. I think Eric Hughes'
argument (with due respects to Eric) about the expensive economics of
monitoring the kiosks falls down just a tad when you consider that these
would not even be _moving targets_! (In both the literal and figurative
senses.) Sure, it's expensive to "tail" someone and find out where they go
and who they meet, but it's less than trivial to set up a discreet camera
that just watches a stationary kiosk all day long or maybe photographically
or electromagnetically (with a moderately sophisticated bug) monitor the
keystrokes. Maybe you _could_ make them portable and move them around; maybe
you _could_ come up with a clever physical design that would preclude
keystroke photography (but bugs?), but any such defenses would pale in
comparison with the Privacy inherent in the WB input from a single user's
personal system.

"Public Privacy:" now _there's_ an oxymoron for the 90's! All jocularity
aside, it would be pretty difficult to convince anyone with serious
information on Govt abuses to stroll into a Mall and spill their guts on a PC
Junior in a plywood box - I sure as hell wouldn't, would you? Hell, you could
put touchscreens on it and I STILL wouldn't take the chance. Anyone ever seen
the "Human Jukebox" in SF? A guy dresses up in a huge cardboard refrigerator
shipping box and when you drop a quarter in, he plays (on trumpet) some
selection from a list on the outside. Very funny stuff: I suggest you ask for
"Strangers in the Night."

[3] Strike Three (yer OUT!): those ugly little plastic-encased keyboards get
all that icky finger dirt on 'em. Sure you laugh NOW, but just IMAGINE where
people put their fingers before typing on them little keyboards. Yuck! Think
of the diseases! The nose pickings! The leftover popcorn-butter residue! The
Jeri-Curl! Yeesh... makes me wanna HURL.

But Serially, Folks:
If a group COULD surmount these difficulties, it would then have to begin to
focus on the TYPE of whistleblowing that would take place on such systems. I
have the feeling that they would be a PRIMARY contributor to the overall
bullshit noise that would clutter up a decent WB systems and exponentially
increase the difficulty of filtering out the "good" stuff for proper use.
Sure, you could rely on OTP's to provide relatively secure transmissions, but
the big question is: do we really want a bunch of Valley Girls at the local
Mall logging in and complaining that they "can't get the proper shade of
eyeliner and, like, why doesn't the Federal Govurnmint toe-tully reform the
Health In-fersure-ance System" so they could, like, get the bunyons burned
off their right foot in time for the Prom. I think you get my point.

We have a ot more to work on before I consider this to be a desirable, much
less viable, idea.

  dave

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