THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 13, 1994 TAG: 9406110027
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940613 LENGTH: Medium
You dial again after an hour, after two, after six. Nothing. No matter whether you call long distance or the house next door, an open line eludes you.
{REST} Later you learn the reason: Two people have pulled a stupid stunt that has gummed up the city's entire phone system. Millions have been inconvenienced, or worse, by these bozos.
That essentially explains what happened when a Phoenix law firm carpet-bombed the Internet recently.
On April 11, the husband-wife firm of Canter & Siegel sent the same message to at least 6,000 different bulletin boards at once. The move prompted a massive pileup on the information highway.
As if that wasn't annoying enough to other net users, the message the couple sent was an advertisement, something that tradition has banned from all but a few corners of the net especially reserved for such activity.
By punching into bulletin boards that had narrow focuses completely unrelated to the subject of their ad, they also breached ``netiquette,'' further enraging the on-line community.
``They just committed the most heinous act you could do,'' said Mike March, president of Internet Direct Inc., the Phoenix outfit that provided the lawyers with Internet access. ``They took the community's wishes and said, `Screw you.' ''
The payback took only an hour to begin. In the first few days after the ``posting,'' Canter & Siegel was deluged with 35,000 pieces of E-mail, almost all of it invective from extremely ticked-off net users.
Critics aimed an additional 2,000 cyberhate letters at Internet Direct, which was so swamped that its system crashed and hung on the brink of repeated crashes for the next two days.
Internet Direct, which March says had warned the lawyers against posting the ad, shut down Canter & Siegel's account, ejecting them from the net.
But the firm hasn't been fazed by all this. Another Internet gateway is renting the lawyers access, and rather than be cowed by the hate their ad generated, they've announced the creation of an Internet advertising agency called Cybersell.
In other words, we may soon see more such advertising on the net.
``If this structure is repeatedly broken so that people have to wade through unrelated advertisements,'' warns Faisal Jawdat, a Pittsburgh netsurfer and ethics student, bulletin boards ``will cease to be enjoyable, cease to be something that people want to support on their machines, cease to be altogether.''
That prospect has sparked a huge debate within Usenet, the portion of the net in which the bulletin boards live, about what can be done to prevent run-amok advertising.
Would user boycotts of any product or company advertised on the net do the trick? Maybe so, Jawdat suspects.
Could ``hosts,'' the companies that provide net access, be persuaded to adopt a code of conduct that would head off unwanted ads? March's partner, Bill Fisher, says he thinks that is the answer.
Devising an answer to the threat will be a challenge of the sort never before faced by the net, which until now has been governed by what Jawdat calls its users' ``cooperative anarchy.''
But unless the net's 20 million-plus users want to be held hostage by a handful of hackers, the answer had better come soon.
{KEYWORDS} INTERNET
by CNB