True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier Read Online Free PDF Page A

narrowly specialized in our professions, but we are also becoming more specialized in the activities of our daily lives.
    Increasingly we fragment our activities into pure components. We either work or play, exercise or relax, teach or learn. We divide our art, our science, our politics, and our religion into carefully separated spheres. There was an older kind of human that kept these things together, a kind a person who worked and played and taught and learned all at the same time. That kind of person is becoming obsolete. Integration demands standardization. Just as a single cell in our body is adapted to a specific function and a specific time, we too must focus our roles. An earlier kind of cell could sense, move, digest, and reproduce continuously, but such a self-sufficient unit cannot function as a part of a complex whole.
    I cannot help but feel ambivalent at the prospect of this brave new world, in which I will be a small part of a symbiotic organism that I can barely comprehend. But then, I am a product of another kind of society, one that celebrates the individual. My sense of identity, my very sense of survival, is based on a resistance to becoming something else. Just as one of my hunting-gathering ancestors would surely reject my modern city life, so do I feel myself rebelling at this metamorphosis. This is natural. I imagine that caterpillars are skeptical of butterflies.
    As frightened as I am by the prospect of this change, I am also thrilled by it. I love what we are, yet I cannot help but hope that we are capable of turning into something better. We humans can be selfish, foolish, shortsighted, even cruel. Just as I can imagine these weaknesses as vestiges of our (almost) discarded animal past, I can imagine our best traits—our kindness, our creativity, our capacity to love—as hints of our future. This is the basis for my hope.
    I know I am a relic. I am a presymbiotic kind of person, born during the time of our transition. Yet, I feel lucky to have been given a glimpse of our promise. I am overwhelmed when I think of it … by the sweet sad love of what we were, and by the frightening beauty of what we might become.

True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy
    Timothy C. May
    One of the biggest issues in cyberspace these days, one that will continue to be an issue as long as there is such a venue as the Internet, is the safety of communication from prying eyes. In the detailed and persuasive essay that follows, Tim May, formerly a physicist at Intel and one of the founding members of the Cypherpunks, discusses the big issues involved—invasion of privacy, the specter of government interference in personal affairs, the use of electronically forwarded information by a variety of people, entities, and organizations for purposes other than those intended by the forwarder … these are all issues of tremendous importance to anyone who uses the Internet—and that means just about everyone, in one way or another.
    In a previous age, these issues were not of such great importance, for there was never the possibility that anyone could find and gather enough information to do harm to others in the ways that are now possible with the Internet. Today, however … Read Tim May’s essay and you’ll never feel quite as safe as you did a moment before you read these pages. This article was written in 1996.
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    The Impact of True Names
    â€œTrue Names” came to my attention in 1986, when a friend of mine gave me a dog-eared Xerox copy and said “You need to read this.” But before I even started reading this samizdat edition, the Bluejay Books trade paperback edition appeared and that’s what I read, saving my eyesight and giving Vernor Vinge his proper cut of the action. True Names certainly riveted me, and it fit with other developments swirling around in computer circles at the time. Namely, digital money, anonymous e-mail, and all of the other issues