If you join the European Union's forum on the information society you will never again have to turn on your machine and confront the depressing fact that no one has sent you any messages. Gone are the days when you had to send yourself e-mails to fool colleagues at neighbouring PCs into believing that you are in demand. In a single month I received 81 e-mails courtesy of Ispo. Ispo is an acronym for the Information Society Project Office, established as "part of the commission's action plan on Europe's way to the information society (cf. IP/94/683 of 16th July 1994). [It] is a concrete measure conceived to support, promote and orient private and public actions in the field of the information society." It's the way they translate 'em that really gets you isn't it? But if you want to see what our Eurofuture has in store go to www.ispo.cec.be.
Forums are not open to the general public, only to "subscribers." This is rather confusing because there is hardly ever any monetary charge. But forums differ from the better known usenet groups where anybody can drop in and pick up a "thread" (a line of discussion on a particular topic), post a contribution, or review the whole history of the discussions which have taken place within the group. Using Yahoo I discovered that there were 879 different categories of usenet groups, containing well over 15,000 individual groups, and some 80m articles which you can search by typing in a key word. I found 82 references to geraniums, 71 references to brass-rubbing and 39,600 to politics: mind you that included a number of articles about the politics of the federation, as in Star Trek, so I am not sure they really count. If you cannot find a usenet group that already caters for your interests I suggest you seek medical help, but you can always inaugurate a group of your own. Thus if anyone wants to speculate about what happens to geraniums that have been kept in brass pots on board space ships travelling at warp speed, drop me a line.
@
i have been pursuing the big on-line service providers about an anomaly which they could all easily put right. If you buy a new car you are not generally told that the safety belts are in the boot along with instructions about how to fix them on. With consumer durables, sales representatives are only too anxious to stress how many safety features come built in. But with the internet, things are different. I know several parents who have held back from buying modems for their computers because of their worries about the pornography, paedophilia and racism which lurk in cyberspace. When I tell them that if they join any of the bigger service providers they would find parental control software is now built in, or could be, they are still not convinced. Many say they are put off by the apparent complexity of initialising the programmes. Would it not be easier for the service providers to build the parental control software into the defaults? From the moment you turned your machine on, you would know that your children were protected from the worst of the internet. No system will ever be 100 per cent safe, but the programmes, available either free or at modest cost, are reliable-breakable only through very bad luck or the application of such cyber intelligence in a child that would frankly defeat anything. Companies that followed this approach could then reasonably advertise their software as being "plug and play and safe," and I am sure this would be a spur for many more parents to go on line.
@
not long ago I received an unsolicited e-mail from an American company, with appropriate testimonials, offering to store a photograph and other details of my children against the possibility that, one day, they might be abducted or run away. In return for an annual subscription of $50, the company would store this data and, in the event of a tragedy, it could be wired to every police department in the country within minutes. This, the company claimed, would substantially improve my chances of getting my children back safely and quickly. Hmm. A million thoughts rushed through my mind as I read this. At first I felt sorry for a society in which it might be necessary for parents to have to contemplate such investments. Surely, however, parents would be failing in their duty in today's America if they did not avail themselves of the service. What if something awful did happen? As non-subscribers they could never forgive themselves for not having acted earlier. Who knows, it might have made the difference. Then I felt revulsion at the thought that someone would be trading for profit in this way.
Mercifully, the firm seems to have gone out of business, but I was surprised and gladdened (if that's the right word here) to see that other, charitable bodies were now getting involved. Take a look at www.pollyklaas.org. Its very matter of fact approach may be a little chilling for us Brits, but the technology now exists to do these things and who would not do them if there was even the remotest chance that it might help their child? n
John Carr
