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Tuesday, September 09, 2003

The Metaverse In the early 1990s, Neal Stevenson's Snow Crash was published.  The book was not without critical acclaim and yet it is not until now that I've discovered how good it is.  I was familiar with Stevenson; I'd been through some of his other work but my affair with The Metaverse and Hiro Protagonist began this weekend as an audio title that accompanied me to Sioux City.  I own the book and have been reading it for myself since i got back to Brookings. It's important to understand that there are (generally speaking) two different types of Science Fiction out there: one that comprises of rocket ships and martians (big, big yawn) and another that is futuristic anthropology (eyes widen: that's kind of interesting).  So rather than fantasies about Klingons, writers like Stevenson, Gibson, and Bruce Sterling are concerned with man's relationship to technology - how does it modify us?  How do we modify it? Stevenson is quite the character.  In addition to being maddeningly smart (he thought-bludgeons you from time to time in Snow Crash, though not as much as in Cryptonomicon), he has some nuances - he wrote his most recent novel (which is yet to be released) with a fountain pen! It's far too early to write anything meaningful about Snow Crash (except that it's the best Science Fiction I've read since Greg Egan earlier this year) but I'll chime in.  Soon... posted in [home], [books] 7:06:28 PM    comment [] Fighting Back One nice thing about worldwide problems is that really smart people coalesce to work on them.  Spam ended up annoying the right people and Paul Graham's latest essays document measured success in combating spam.  There is also a spam conference at MIT in January - it will be interesting to see how the war goes as various ideas are implemented. One idea I like is to write programs that hit a website linked in a spam URL hard.  Imagine if your email client, upon receiving "spam", just decided to flood the spammer's URLs with requests?  Say 20 or so threads just making request after request?  Big server doesn't care you say, but imagine a million people whose clients responded similarly? Feeling inspired, here is a rough draft of a similar client in C#.  It is just a draft; it doesn't do things asynchronously and doesn't trap for exceptions but it gets the point across.  I've called it Hobbit::Hit Back and you can get the source here.  Wait.  Why don't you email me if you want the source - I can imagine it being easy to obtain code to do something like this online but I'd still be in a bad spot if someone decided to test this tool against, say, Hobbitwerk itself.  Or their online girlfriend's website after she broke up with them... posted in [home], [technie] 6:42:40 PM    comment []

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