1993 Fools: Internet Talk Television is coming to a workstation near you!
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From: Deng_Xiaopingpingping.BEIJING@Tibet.UUCP (temp using Dollie LLama acct)
Subject: Internet Talk Television is coming to a workstation near you!
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Organization: The 501st Channel, All Flames - All The Time - Television
Followup-To: my kremvax posting of 4/1/1986
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1993 23:59:59 GMT
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The following article is reprinted without permission from ConCoctions.
ConCoctions is published by the Poretni Company. More information cannot be
obtained from the electronic mail address elo@porenti.com.
Internet Talk Television
Karl MyNameIsMud (karl@television.com)
Internet Talk Television attempts to fuse these two trends of
gossipy newmagazine format shows with a desire to squander network
bandwidth with abandon just because it is there to form a new type of
publication: a news and information service about the Internet,
distributed on the Internet. Internet Talk Televsion is modeled on
the Oprah and Geraldo talk shows and has a goal of providing in-depth
technical information to the Internet community. The service is made
initially possible with the support of people unlike you. Our goal is to
provide a self-referential parody for the the Internet community
(please note the Date: header on this posting :-).
Head: Bane of the Internet
The product of Internet Talk Television is either a Quicktime(tm)
movie file or 54,000 GIF files per show that require a 50 MIPs or
greater workstation capable of displaying 30 GIF files per second,
poorly produced and unfortunately widely available on computer
networks (and public ftp archives where we have found directories that
are writable by the anonymous ftp account and have a free Gig or so of
disk space, we hide the GIF files in '...' directories. To produce
these files, we start with the raw data of any journalistic endeavor:
we make things up.
This raw information is then illustrated graphically using
professional-quality equipment : primarily Mario Paint running on a
Super Nintendo Entertainment System as used by a 5 year old. The
information is then brought back to our studio, and edited and mixed
on a secondhand $179 Emerson 2 head VHS VCR in Super Long Play mode
(SLP).
The "look and feel" we strive for is akin to "Inside Edition", "Hard
Copy", "Now It Can Be Told" or other lowest common denominator
programs that appeal to the general interest in sensationalistic
sleaze, scandal and gossip.
Our goal is cover the stories that don't make it into the grocery
tabloids for reasons of legal liability for libel, truthfulness and
just plain good taste. Instead of discussions of protocols, we want
to present actual packet traces of protocols on actual networks along
with captured passwords, SMTP dialogue showing interesting private
email messages and in-depth interviews with convicted crackers on how
to break DES, Kerberos, NFS, passwords, how to make a Cisco router
go into conniption fit mode, how to create cyclic spanning tree graphs
that loop via routing protocols, etc.
Instead of COMDEX, we want to cover the underground Legion of Doom
beer busts, the Phone Phreaks annual telethon, etc.
Head: Town Adult Video Tape Rental Outlet to the Global Village
The result of Internet Talk Television's journalistic activities is a
series of video image files. The native format we start with is the
popular GIF format, then we envision releases in JPEG, MPEG,
PostScript, Quicktime(tm) and X Window Dump File format. At 30 frames
per second times 60 seconds time 30 minutes a half-hour program would
thus consist of 54,000 GIF files. If each GIF file is around 50k the
entire program should use up only about 2,575 megabytes. [I would
start buying a bunch of 2 Gigabyte and greater SCSI drives right now]
(By the way our advertisements will be primarily companies selling
disk drives and other magnetic storage media devices - "You can
archive Internet Talk Television onto our 3rd party Exabyte
EXB-8500cs; holds 25GB compressed!" ).
GIF files are initially spooled on FTP.FOO.NET, the central machines
of the Alternative network. Files are then moved over to various
regional networks for further distribution. For example, FOOnet, a
commercial network provider for the Marianas Islands with service in 2
countries, will act as the central spooling area for the Pacific
Islands region. The Guido Bros. trucking company will provide the
same service for Brooklyn.
The goal of uncoordinated distribution is to increase the load on key
links of the network. Transferring several megabyte files over 56kb
and 64 kbps links will help quickly provide VP Al Gore the political
support he needs to make NREN a reality :-)
Files thus move from the FTP.FOO.NET central spool area, to regional
spools, to national and local networks. We anticipate most of this
transfer to be done using the X 11 protocol, but some networks are
discussing the use of Display PostScript(tm) (PostScript level 2),
Apple Quicktime(tm) and MicroSoft Windows(tm).
It is important to note that Internet Talk Television is the original
copyright violator (point of illegal origination in legalese) and does
not control the distribution. Please make copies on videotape and
send them to your friends. Send a copy to Deng Xiaoping (Free
Tibet!). Shock your friends by transmitted frames via
ObscurePhone(tm) (oops, I mean PicturePhone(tm)). Make your own
compressed HDTV 8mm tape - and in 5 years you will be able to view it
on something. Bring a VHS tape of the program with you to watch the
next time you go to a sports bar with large screen projection tv (if
you want to have several beer bottles cracked over your head. "Hey!
Put the game back on!").
Head: Serial Crimes, Parallels to Television
Once files have made their way to an individual's desktop (hopefully
each individual will perform their own ftp to the one central
overloaded FTP site and will waste network bandwidth as well as disk
space by storing their own redundant versions of the files) it is up
to the the individual user to decide how to present data. We hope to
see an infinite variety of different ways of having our files played
and only list a few of the more banal methods.
The simplest method to view a .gif file on a Sparcstation is to type
"xv filename." (alternately "xloadimage filename" may work on some
systems). If the file is placed on a Network File System (NFS) file
system some remote site's server somewhere, the user is simply going
to have to break into that remote machine or hack SUNRPC packets to
spoof the remote machines NFS daemon to read the remote file system
via NFS. Once the user has obtained the file the user copies the file
into some other poor suckers account (on the local machine ) who left
the permissions on their home directory wide open so that the rather
large file doesn't show up as part of the sneaky users disk usage when
the system administrator does a 'du' to try to find out where all of
the disk space is rapidly disappearing to.
More adventurous playing of files involves video scan convertors,
and unlicensed low power VHF TV tranmission (do-it-yourself so-
called pirate television stations). This involves connecting the
output of a SparcStation to a scan convertor (or convert the RGB
signal from a Mac or convert the VGA from a PC) to produce a NTSC
composite signal that can be fed into a VCR using the RCA connector
video input. Then have the VCR output the AUX signal in out via
the RF adapter (commonly set to VHF channel 2, 3 or 4) and connect
the RF output coax to a large and high VHF antenna mounted on a
mast high above your house. Several of your neighbors should be
able to pick up your signal. You might even want to try feeding
the signal INTO your local cable system. The addition of a RF signal
amplifier (which you can make using parts from Radical Shlock for just
a few $$$) can increase your signal strength (and range) considerably.
Caveat: Kids, don't try this at home, the FCC hasn't a large sense
of humor.
Head: How to obtain Internet Talk Television
The GIF files will be available on FTP.FOO.NET ( Internet numeric
address 127.0.0.1 ) beginning April 1, 1993 in the anonymous ftp
subdirectory pub/television/. Filenames begin with the frame
number, followed by the date, followed by the extension .gif.
Please be sure to turn on 'binary' transfer mode inside FTP.
The GIF files holding the individual frames go from 00000 to 54000:
ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
total 521825218252182
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:41 00000.040193.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:41 00001.040193.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:43 00002.040193.gif
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:41 53998.040193.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:41 53999.040193.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:43 54000.040193.gif
226 Transfer complete.
521825218252182 bytes received in 0.5 seconds (1.9 Kbytes/s)
ftp>
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