Londinium

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

So a few days in Londinium for the Internet Show at the Aggie (now the
Business Design Centre) in the People's Republic of Islington.

While I was in town, Tony Blair's voicemail was hacked (it wasn't me) and
we discovered that he is a politician trying to fool the voters.

Also, a public domain game called "Schoolyard Slaughter" written for an
obsolete computer system and awarding points for head shots to children was
attacked in the press.  It was distributed on shareware disks and CDs and
not on the dreaded Net but they talked about the net in any case.

The interesting thing about "Schoolyard Slaughter" is that similar games
involving adult males and aliens ("Doom" par example) have been around for
a long time.  The lesser controversy surrounding games like Doom suggests
that the commentators (and perhaps the public) are guilty of speciesism,
ageism, and gender bias.  After all, the fictional slaughter of adult males
and aliens should be just as bad as the fictional slaughter of children. 

None of the ISPs represented at the Internet Show would comment on whether
or not they were going to ban customers who refused to rate their sites or
news posts.  But they were just sales types.  

I did teach a young lady working at the UUNET/Pipex booth how to telnet.
She'd never done so before.

DCF