Matthew.
Subject: Intro to Internet Document for UTS
Newsgroups: uts.ee.ug,uts.general
Organization: University of Technology, Sydney
Summary:
Keywords:
For those of interest.
I've produced a 12 page document titled "Using the Internet and
its resources for Academic Purposes -- A Guide for Electrical
and Computer Systems Engineering students at the University of
Technology, Sydney".
It gives an overview of what the Internet is, what resources
(libraries, gopher, www, anonymous ftp, etc) are out there, and
a basic introduction to client software on acacia that can be
used to access these resources. Some pointers to specific
EE/CSE data banks are also given.
It's aimed towards individuals who have a basic knowledge of
how to connect to and do some basic navigating on the academic
platforms here at UTS and includes screen dumps of various
software to show functionality. It's by no way complete, and
probably erroneous in some respects, but satisfies a good niche
IMHO.
Although it was written as a partial requirement for one of my
electives "Technical and Professional Communication", it is
also something I did to satisfy my own private agenda.
I see the Internet and distributed connected information
resources as the true death to the totalitarian control exerted
over information in the pre electronic era. This includes
facets such as the ability for individuals and disempowered
organisations to produce and disseminate information that was
not previously possible due to cost and geographic
limitations. By the same token the costs of access to this
information are dramatically reduced.
At least in the USA, and other european countries are following
suit, the Government is threatened by this new connectivity and
the ultimate protection afforded by unbreakable
(computationally!) cryptographic systems. The FBI digital
telephony bill, and the NIST/NSA backed "key escrow" Clipper
standard -- observed by many to be the forerunner to
legislation that will ban other forms of cryptography, can you
say 1984 ?
Now this is a plug, Rosie Cross and I have been working to
produce a documentary called "Tales from the Crypt" that delves
into this subject. It'll goto air on Sunday Night, June 12th
8:30pm on ABC Radio National's "Radio Eye -- Feature
Documentaries". Press releases and associated propaganda will
be disseminated to the populace soon.
Ohh, back to the Internet document, it can be ftp'd from, [it's
not political either, purely technical :-)]:
iris.bio.uts.edu.au:/pub/incoming
-rw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 1039889 May 9 11:56 internet-doc.ps
and should be in the pub directory by the time you read this.
Matthew.
-- Matthew Gream Consent Technologies Sydney, (02) 821-2043 M.Gream@nospam.uts.edu.au