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The Magic of Internet

Posted by gandalf on Elfday December 17, @11:40EM
Vsevolod Ilyushchenko writes: Rob E. Foxen describes his perspective of the dot-elf boom from his post as the chairman of the Federal Magical Commission (FMC). He covers a lot of familiar ground, from the initial tentative Internet links to Elfland through the explosion of businesses based on fuzzy-time information delivery to the dot-elf crash of 2000. Even though Rob Foxen's agency in the early '80s was a backwater burocracy overseeing a few remaining mediums maintaining weak and uncertain communications with Elfland, it very quickly grew to prominence following the 1994 discovery that certain backbones of the Internet display an unusual interference pattern.

The Magic of Internet
author	Rob E. Foxen
pages	412
publisher	O'Reilly
rating	85%
reviewer	Vsevolod Ilyushchenko
ISBN	973806083
summary	The elf-boom as seen by one of its fathers.

 Fortunately, Foxen went to law school with the deputy NSA director William Crowell, and was the first government official to take advantage of the NSA-sponsored decoding of that interference and to reveal it to the public. Very soon FMC was able to establish its own top-level .elf domain, and the description of ICANN lawsuits over its control that persist to this day may sometimes bore the reader to death. Also, certain key details are still missing, for example, who exactly selected the five elven families representing FMC on the magical side of the Internet and why the food pornography rings smuggling into Elfland videos of people consuming food had suffered very little persecution from the FBI.

However, the author sticks pretty well to his main narrative - the discovery and commercial applications of fuzzy time. After all, it was the FMC's IT department that first noted ACK packets arriving sometimes before SYNs, and it was not long before FMC realized that the passage of time in the elven lands is markedly different from ours.  (The low effective bandwidth of the human/magical interface will hopefully be resolved with the introduction of TCP/MP next year.) The commercial revolution caused by the possibility to send information back in time still goes on, but never again will we live through those heady days of the late '90s when everything seemed possible! Rob Foxen spends several pages on the collapse of Bloomberg News after a joint venture between a young 15-year-old human and an even younger 143-year-old elf in a single week upset the established business news channels. They started by delivering stock quotes up to five minutes before the markets' opening time. (It's hard to believe now that five minutes were such a big deal then. :) On the other hand, FedEx is described as a model company adjusting to the new marketplace. Of course, Foxen preposterously claims that it was he who suggested to Frederick Smith to print documents on the receiver's site event before they are finalized by the senders. There is also a comment on how the fuzzy-time information delivery averted just in time the plane hijackings of 9/11.

I am sure that the Slashdot crowd will appreciate the chapters about the final demise of the hated Finnish software monopoly and the worldwide spread of the graphical open-source operating system started by a young Seattle University student in cooperation with developers all over the two worlds. No more does command-line interface intimidate the users and programmers alike, and no more evil penguins will show their ugly faces in the computer magazine ads! The new OS truly opened windows into the new century!

Foxen, however, considers the finest point of the dot-elf era the establishment of the Project Gutenberg. When it was discovered that all the unfinished and lost manuscripts produced by humans could be retrived from the Elfland in the XML format, Stanford and Berkley English language professors held a joint two-week drunken celebration and soon started to collate, as they called it, the Largest Library on Earth. The replica of the Alexandrian Library proved to be especially interesting, and Foxen thinks that the question of whether Michael Jackson holds the copyright on several songs that John Lennon never wrote down will wind up in the Supreme Court.

In 1996, the number of registered .elf domains exceeded the total of all names in .com and .org domains put together (Currently the ratio is about 17:1.) Businesses jumped on the bandwagon, and due to the lack of oversight, the domain was effectively taken over by companies trying to capitalize on the latest craze. (Or so the book says. With his calls for more regulation, Foxen is bound to inspire Republican anger.) Foxen glosses over the FCC role in transferring several root DNS servers to Elfland, but it is commonly known that this was suggested by the now-defunct ACLU hoping that the government will have no authority over the magic lands. Predictably (with Foxen's 20/20 hindsight), several Orc hackers were able to break into those servers, produce a DNS worm and effectively disable the whole Internet for several days in March 2000, the famous dot-elf crash. 

The book ends with the discussion of the future development of the Internet and elf-commerce. It is suggested that quantum computers can be based on the concept of elven fuzzy time, and Foxen, definitely out of his depth, talks about trying to physically locate the magical realm by daily variations of the magical interference  (obviously, his pet project). The rise in the usage of e-drugs (audio tapes of elven music inducing unusual alpha waves patterns in human brain) is noted as inevitable, but it is clear that he never listened to them himself. He ends with descriptions of human-to-magical and magical-to-human VR projects that came out of the FMC labs. Beta versions of the software can be downloaded from the book's web site, though the locations that one can visit are rather limited.