The Internet as an Information Resource David Alan Bozak SUNY College at Oswego Larry Press California State University at Dominguez Hills Oh, do not say. I've seen the tanks with my own eyes. I hope we'll be able to communicate during the next few days. Communists cannot rape the Mother Russia once again! This message was sent from Moscow at 5:01 AM on August 19, 1991. It was written by 26 year-old Vadim Antonov, a senior programmer at the Demos Cooperative in the Soviet Union. Within hours, Vadim's message had been relayed to computers in 70 Soviet cities from Leningrad in the West to Vladivostok in the East. The message had also been sent to a computer in Helsinki, Finland. From Finland, the message was relayed to networks such as the Internet, serving millions of users on all continents. This example illustrates one use of a computer network, to share information widely. Seconds after reaching Finland, Vadim's eye-witness account could be read on computers as far from Moscow as Los Angeles. Vadim had placed his message on a distributed conferencing system called USENET. More information regarding the events in Moscow and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, as well as reaction to the news and encouragement from the West were posted to USENET over the next several days. Copies of all of these postings were collected, and form the core of an archive of material related to the coup, located at SUNY College at Oswego. This paper will begin by defining a computer network, and introduce four different networks. Two common services provided by computer networks will be detailed. The paper will describe the coup attempt by examining the progress of events as detailed eletronically over these networks. Finally, the paper will describe the development of the archive at Oswego, its current status, and future plans. Electronic Networks A computer network is formed by linking two or more computers together. Such a network is built upon two features: (1) the hardware and communications channel that provides the physical link, and (2) the software that handles the communications over the physical link. While the communications channel may be a simple as a phone line, the software controlling how information is shared across that line is the defining feature of a network. The set of conventions underlying the software is called a protocol. There are many network protocols. One example of a protocol designed for use with intermittent connections between machines is uucp. Uucp (UNIX to UNIX Copy, Norwitz, 1979) was originally used over dedicated links between machines and is now widely used over dialup connections. The original use of uucp was for file transfer and remote command execution. Distributed with the UNIX Version 7 operating system, it formed the basis for a dialup network, also called UUCP, which is perhaps the oldest and most decentralized network in the world (Quarterman, 1990). The most common service provided by a computer network is the ability to send and receive electronic mail (e-mail). This form of computer mediated communication allows an individual to send a message to another individual either on the same network, or in many instances on other networks. Messages are delivered to "mailboxes" on target machines associated with the recipient. Speed of transmission, or delivery time, is often very short although reliability of delivery is variable. The uucp protocol provided the foundation for software which would control the sending and receiving of e-mail, essentially by transferring a file (the e-mail message) to a target machine and then executing a command on the target machine to deliver the file to a user's mailbox. The UUCP network provided one central service, electronic mail and the growth of the network was governed by the enhancement of the e-mail software. As more machines were added to UUCP, e-mail delivery relied upon providing a path from the source of the mail to the target machine. Maps were (and are) produced and distributed to facilitate determining a successful path. The UNIX operating system's support of background processing and scheduled job execution facilitated the automation of storage and forwarding of e-mail to successive machines in the specified path of a mail address. Uucp is not restricted to UNIX based computers. An MS-DOS version of uucp exists, and the UUCP network links machines as varied as small personal computers to supercomputers. The only requirement is to find a host (a computer system on a network with resources of its own) already on UUCP to connect to and the need to agree upon which machine will initiate the connection to the other. UUCP is capable of relaying e-mail to almost any known network. A non-profit corporation in Arlington, Virginia provides a subscription network relay service for both UUCP and USENET (described below). The corporation, UUNET, also provides a gateway to the Internet through the machine called uunet. Initially, the major motivation for linking two or more computers together to form a network was to share physical resources such as printers and disk files. The major advantage of a network is now recognized to be sociological, that such a connection links people as well as machines, and forms electronic neighborhoods. Networks have themselves been organized to form metanetworks which allow users to redefine their neighborhoods based on interests and activities rather than physical proximity or shared communications links. Perhaps the oldest cooperative metanetwork is USENET, dating back to 1979 (Spafford, 1991b). Students at the University of North Carolina and Duke University began a message exchange system which has evolved into a many featured distributed conferencing system known as News. USENET is defined as the collection of machines running the News software. After electronic mail, the second most popular computer mediated communication service is computer conferencing, which allows message exchange between large groups of individuals. In a distributed conferencing system, a single copy of a message is kept on each host in the network, where it can be read by many users. The conferencing software will propagate the posted message throughout the network without the sender knowing the names or addresses of the hosts. Messages are organized by topic, and hosts may carry subsets of topics rather than the entire set. The major drawback with such a large system is the storage space required by the volume of message posting. The largest such distributed conferencing network is USENET. USENET generates as much as 20 megabytes of new text per day, about 7.25 gigabytes per year (Rapaport, 1991). The basic message element in News is called an article. It has a format similar to an e-mail message, with additional header information that plays a role in the distribution algorithm used to propagate the article to machines which have not yet received it. Articles are grouped according to topics and are hierarchically organized with top level newsgroups for computer science (both software and hardware), other sciences, social issues, recreational activities, the News software itself, talk (groups focusing upon debates with few resolutions) and other subjects. Alternative (counter-culture) newsgroups also exist. See Table 1 for a sample of newsgroups. USENET does not support e-mail, News is its only service. But there is a close relationship between USENET and UUCP. USENET originally ran on the uucp protocol and essentially is an extension of the e-mail concept. News user interfaces allow readers to send private e-mail to individual posters rather than public postings, but must rely on software other than News to transmit the e-mail. Table 1 Examples of Active Newsgroups (Spafford, 1991a) Newsgroup Description ----------------------------------------------------------------- comp.archives Descriptions of public access archives comp.archives.admin Issues related to archive administration comp.society The impact of technology on society comp.society.development Computers in developing countries comp.sys.sun Sun "workstation" computers misc.fitness Physical fitness, exercise, etc. misc.rural Issues concerning rural living news.announce.newusers Explanatory postings for new users news.newusers.questions Q & A for users new to the Usenet rec.arts.movies Discussions of movies and movie making rec.arts.movies.reviews Reviews of movies rec.gardens Gardening, methods and results rec.pets.cats Discussion about domestic cats rec.sport.soccer Soccer (Association Football) discussion sci.edu The science of education sci.psychology.digest PSYCOLOQUY: Refereed Psychology Journal soc.culture.soviet Discussion of Russian or Soviet culture talk.politics.soviet Domestic & foreign Soviet politics The Internet is another metanetwork, based around the TCP/IP protocol rather than uucp. The TCP/IP protocol supports several basic services, including e-mail, file transfer (using ftp), and remote login (using telnet). Ftp is an interactive file transfer service in TCP/IP, as opposed to the batch file transfer capabilities of uucp, that makes it possible to move files from one machine to another without regard to the type of machines involved. Any type of file may be transferred: plain text or the binary files associated with compiled programs or graphic images. You must have an account on the remote machine. Many machines provide access to guests in order to make information (such as that in the coup archive) publicly available by means of an account owned by the ftp program itself. Guests may log on by using the account name "anonymous", and any character string as a password. Privileges under the anonymous login are few, and restricted to those necessary to transfer files. Telnet is another TCP/IP service which allows a completely interactive remote login. It differs from ftp in one major aspect. Ftp users essentially communicate with the local machine only, with the requests and data being transferred under control of the machines and the ftp program. Telnet allows complete interaction. After connecting to the remote machine, commands are issued directly to the remote machine, they are acted upon directly, and results of those commands are displayed locally. All privileges associated with the account are available to the user. This metanetwork is very large, with estimates of up to 500,000 computers and 400 connected networks (Quarterman, 1990). More importantly, the use of the Internet is steadily increasing. A message to be sent across a network is broken up into a number of smaller units, packets, which are separately transmitted and reassembled at their destination. NSFNET, arguably the backbone of the Internet in the United States, has packet volumes growing at a rate of 600,000 per month. Based on the network statistics maintained on merit.edu, during the month of March (1992) alone, over 15.7 billion packets were carried on NSFNET. News software has been written to operate over TCP/IP, and e-mail is exchanged between UUCP and the Internet. It is the remote login facility which provides Internet users with the capability of a higher level of resource sharing. Users who roam the Internet will find a variety of services provided by different machines. These include access to a number of libraries (including the Library of Congress), various databases and archives, and other applications-based services (weather forecasting on madlab.sprl.umich.edu here in Ann Arbor, an on-line information system for colleges and universities including the latest information on Black and Hispanic colleges and universities on fedix.fie.com in Gaithersburg, MD, and community-based information systems such as the Cleveland FreeNet, freenet-in-a.cwru.edu). A key uucp network providing widespread domestic service in the Soviet Union is RELCOM (RELiable COMmunication). Run by the Demos Cooperative and headquartered in Moscow, it became a commercial enterprise in April, 1989 and has since grown to connect over 1000 organizations in more than 70 cities (Faden, 1992). Unlike national networks in industrially developed countries, RELCOM uses mostly personal computers (more than 90% are 286, 386, and 486-based PC or PC clones) and dial-up telephone connections. All of the nodes use uucp to send e-mail and News. Since August of 1990, RELCOM has had a link with EUnet (the European UNIX network) through Helsinki Finland, enabling them to exchange electronic mail with the rest of the world, as well as to send and receive News. As we will see in the following section, RELCOM, by providing e-mail and News, played an important role during the soviet coup attempt. The Coup During the days of the coup, RELCOM was pressed into service in support of the constitutional government. The junta moved quickly to control mass media. When he learned of the coup, Larry Press immediately sent a worried message to Vadim's wife, Polina Antonova, who also worked at Demos. He did not receive her answer until August 20 at 12:17 AM Moscow time: Dear Larry, Don't worry, we're OK, though frightened and angry. Moscow is full of tanks and military machines -- I hate them. They try to close all mass media, they stopped CNN an hour ago, and Soviet TV transmits opera and old movies. But, thank Heaven, they don't consider RELCOM mass media or they simply forgot about it. Now we transmit information enough to put us in prison for the rest of our life. Greetings from Natasha. Cheers, Polina. The Demos staff had learned of the coup around 6 AM on the 19th, and immediately began sending political information throughout the Soviet Union and to the outside world. By 12:30 PM, Moscow time, and although outlawed by the junta, news from Interfax, the Radio Moscow World Service, the Russian Information Agency, Northwest Information Agency (Leningrad), and Baltfax was disseminated by RELCOM, and would be throughout the coup attempt. RELCOM also distributed news from official sources opposed to the coup. For example, a copy of the letter Boris Yeltsin read from a tank turret in front of the Russian Parliament building was brought to Demos headquarters, entered into a computer, and forwarded across the network. By early evening, several people in the United States had also translated it, and an English-language version was broadcast to the non-Soviet networks. There were also many eye-witness reports. Pay phones were working in Moscow, and people in the streets could phone news in. At one point, Polina was going to go to the Russian Parliament Building with a portable computer so as to report from there, but did not go because the phone service to the building was unreliable. Of course all of the news did not come from Moscow. The network was buzzing with reports and official notices from Leningrad, Kiev, the Baltic capitals, and many other Soviet cities. News also came in from the West. Larry Press wrote regular summaries of the news as broadcast on radio and television in the United States, and a colleague from Denmark, Jonathan Grudin, did the same for BBC news. Regular reports were also posted from Finland, giving both Finnish and Baltic news summaries. These were translated into Russian by Polina and others, and transmitted throughout the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most notable message to the Soviet Union was posted to the talk.politics.soviet Newsgroup by Jie Liang. He sent advice based upon his experience at Tiananmen Square. He called for "a campaign to let people inside the USSR to know the truth and how the world is reacting," and stated that "at this heavy historic moment, Chinese people are standing by the Soviet people." Western news was welcome, but the link to Finland became a bottleneck. Before the coup, 6,000 messages were passed between Finland and RELCOM on a typical day. After the coup began, traffic increased substantially, prompting Vadim to broadcast this message 6:44 PM on the 19th: Please stop flooding the only narrow channel with bogus messages with silly questions. Note that it's neither a toy nor a means to reach your relatives or friends. We need the bandwidth to help organize the resistance. Please, do not (even unintentionally) help these fascists! This plea not withstanding, traffic rose to a high of 13,159 messages on the 21st. While news of tank movements, demonstrations, and official political statements was of practical value, it also provided emotional support. When the coup was finished, and there was time to reset, Polina sent a message to Larry Press that said in part, "You can't even imagine how grateful we are for your help and support in this terrible time! The best thing is to know that we aren't alone." At the beginning of the coup, memories of the Hungarian revolt, Kruschev's ouster, the Prague Spring, and Tiananmen Square did not give one much hope. Had the coup succeeded, the Demos staff and people using their network would have been in great danger. As Vadim noted in a message to Doug Jones, a professor at the University of Iowa: If these dogs win, for certain they'll throw us in prison -- we distributed the proclamation from Yeltsin and the Moscow and Leningrad Soviets throughout the entire Soviet Union, together with the forbidden communiques from Interfax ... Greetings from the underground. Demos headquarters is in a small building near the Kremlin. The KGB knew of RELCOM, and had they decided to, they could have easily shut the network off early in the coup. When a friend asked why they didn't, Polina replied, "Thank Heaven, these cretins don't consider us mass media!" After the coup, she and others speculated that the KGB was generally passive because they were not confident the coup would succeed. Sensing danger, the Demos staff arranged for backup computers to substitute for the vulnerable headquarters machine if necessary. On the 20th at 8:30 PM Moscow time, Vadim sent this message to Doug Jones: Yes we already prepared to shift to underground; you know -- reserve nodes, backup channel, hidden locations. They'll have a hard time catching us! Anyway, our main communication line is still open and it makes us more optomistic. And Polina added: Don't worry; the only danger for us is if they catch and arrest us, as we are sitting at home (Valera is at Demos) and distributing all the information we have. At 3:07 PM on the 21st, Polina e-mailed Larry: Really good news. Right now we're listening to Radio Russia (without any jamming!); they told that the eight left Moscow, no one knows where ... Hard to believe ... Maybe, they've really run away? And on the 22nd at 1:31 PM she wrote: Now Vadim and I have to do our usual work (that's so nice!) and Valera and Mike Korotaev went to sleep. They were on duty the whole night. Now there is celebration in Moscow. We just watched President Gorbachev on TV. The Archive In late August, Larry Press wrote an article describing RELCOM's role as an independent information channel supporting the constitutional government (Press, 1991). This article appeared in RISKS FORUM Digest in early September. RISKS is a moderated mailing list which provides a forum on risks to the public in computers and related systems (RISKS-FORUM Digest is also posted to the comp.risks Newsgroup). After reading the paper, David Bozak contacted Larry by e-mail, asking permission to reproduce and use the article in a course he taught. News articles at Oswego have a limited life, due to the storage requirements, and David and his wife, Esther, were saving as many articles posted to two newsgroups (talk.politics.soviet and soc.culture.soviet) as possible. Larry had what was believed to be a more complete set of postings, due to the efforts of Nick Sandru at Computer Resources International in Denmark. David offered to make the files available to others who expressed an interest. He controlled a machine, moxie, which is available through the Internet. Larry remotely logged on to the machine at Oswego and transferred the files directly. This made access to the material more convenient for many and freed up Larry's personal computer, from which he had been mailing the material. Shortly thereafter, through his friends in Demos, Larry obtained the complete set of postings as recorded by Demos. This included material which was available primarily within the Soviet Union. With these two sets of files, we began the archive as a site which contained electronic material pertaining to the coup. An anonymous ftp account was established on moxie. After creating a small introduction to the archive file, an announcement was posted to both the talk.soviet.politics and soc.culture.soviet Newsgroups announcing the availability of the archive. Since that time, the archive has grown to include several types of material. The collection of material from Demos required transliteration software to make reading it somewhat easier. David modified a simple program by Steve Gaarder from Cornell, and added it to the archive. Other similar programs, including X-based software to display the postings in cyrillic, were later added. Peter Staugaard, of the Rand Corporation, was able to provide the transcripts of Radio Free Liberty and Radio Europe. Doug Jones provided an edited version of the original set of postings from Nick Sandru. This allowed interested people to obtain a reasonably sized file (the equivalent of about 30 pages) capturing the essence of the postings. David also made an electronic request for information, again by posting to News, and began to track down and retrieve first-hand accounts of the coup and papers describing the role of telecommunications in maintaining information flow during the coup. The archive also contains pointers to other sources of information, primarily first person accounts available from the RUSSIA-L listserver. (A list or mail server will automatically handle requests received by e-mail for files on a host.) See Appendix A for a complete description of the archive's contents. In late November, 1991, a shadow archive was established in Finland. The machine nic.funet.fi keeps a mirror of the material on moxie, in order to minimize traffic across the Atlantic. Access to moxie has been fairly continuous since the ftp account was established on October 3, 1991. While no records are available concerning the material retrieved from Finland, there have been over 500 anonymous ftp logins to moxie as of March 31, 1992. In addition, a number of requests for particular information to be e-mailed to individuals lacking the ability to do a remote login have been handled, primarily electronically. One set of material in the archive was downloaded to 3.5 inch disks and mailed through the U.S. Postal Service (sometimes referred to as snail-mail) to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Five projects associated with the coup archive are now underway. Two students at Oswego are beginning the work on the organization of the posting collections in both Personal Librarian and Hypermedia form. This should allow interested users the ability to analyze the contents of the postings, rather than merely access them. A third project just underway will allow remote logins and browsing access to the material in the archive, rather than mere file retrieval, via a menu-driven user interface. The fourth project will allow mail-server access to the archive contents for those unable to remotely connect to moxie. A fifth project, in the planning stages, is the collection of information regarding those accessing the archive and what use was made of the information they have obtained. This archive isn't the only example of the use of the network for cooperative work. Larry Press organized and co-chaired a conference on human-computer interaction in Moscow, just prior to the coup. The organization of the conference was done exclusively over the Internet. His contacts at RELCOM were as a result of a posting to talk.politics.soviet prior to his trip to Moscow. In an effort to provide a segment on computing in the Third World for one of his courses, David Bozak posted requests for references to material, and received numerous replies in the form of bibliographies, single citations, electronic copies of papers and pointers to mailing lists. Mailing lists are distribution lists enabling private extended discussions. They are essentially small, specific conference systems, usually integrated into regular e-mail as far as the ordinary user is concerned. As of March 31, 1992 there are over 2400 mailing lists available to subscribers from almost any network. Cooperative work has been taken to an extreme by the offering of college coursework over computer networks. NKI College, located in Oslo, Norway, developed a concept they called the Electric College. The NKI Electronic College offers a ten course program entirely via computer conferencing (Paulsen, 1992). Finally, this paper is the result of electronic correspondence between the authors, who have never met, nor spoken to one another over the phone. We are not the first to work this way. We are merely part of an extensive electronic neighborhood. Endnotes To minimize confusion, all city and country names in this text are those used prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union into the Commonwealth of Independent States. David Bozak can be reached at dab@moxie.oswego.edu. Larry Press can be reached at lpress@venera.isi.edu. The coup archive is available via anonymous ftp to moxie.oswego.edu (129.3.20.3), in directory COUP. A guide to the Internet and its resources can be found in directory DOCS. References Faden, Michael (1992, January 6). "E-mail Finds Itself In Great Demand". UNIX Today!, p. 10. Norwitz, D. A. (1979). "UUCP Implementation Description". In UNIX Programmer's Manual, Seventh Edition (Vol. 2, pp.577-591). New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Paulsen, Morten Flate (1992, March 27). "The NKI Electronic College: Five Years of Computer Conferencing in Distance Education". In American Journal of Distance Education, DEOSNEWS, Vol. 2(9). Press, Larry (1991, September 7). "A Computer Network for Democracy and Development". In RISKS-FORUM Digest, Vol. 12(27). Quarterman, John S. (1990). "The Matrix", Bedford, MA: Digital Press. Rapaport, Matthew (1991). "Computer Mediated Communications". New York: John Wiley and Sons. Spafford, Gene (1991a, September 2). "List of Active Newsgroups". USENET Newsgroup news.announce.newusers. Spafford, Gene (1991b, September 2). "USENET Software: History and Sources". USENET Newsgroup news.announce.newusers. Appendix A - ReadMe file from the Coup Archive Welcome! This is an archive of materials related to the coup that took place in the Soviet Union during late August of 1991. This material is available via anonymous ftp on moxie.oswego.edu (129.3.20.3). Please use your e-mail address as a password. There are plans to develop software to allow examination of this material from remote sites. When that software is available there will be an announcement. There is currently no mail server available for this material. Please contact dab@moxie.oswego.edu if you wish to retrieve some of this material and you do not have access to anonymous ftp. For our information, and curiousity, please send e-mail to either lpress@isi.com or dab@moxie.oswego.edu and let us know who you are, where you are from, and how you intend to use this information (for personal interest, research, class use, whatever). Thank you in advance. This material is available here complements of several individuals, most notably: Larry Press, (lpress@isi.edu) California State U. at Dominguez Hills Nick Sandru, (ns@csd.cri.dk) CRI A/S, Case Systems Division Doug Jones, (jones@cs.uiowa.edu) University of Iowa Peter Staugaard, (peters%monty@rand.org) Rand Corporation Dave Bozak, (dab@moxie.oswego.edu) SUNY College at Oswego and of course Vadim Anatov and Polina Anatova and their colleagues at Demos (avg@hq.demos.su and polina@hq.demos.su) (avg%hq.demos.su@relay.eu.net and polina%hq.demos.su@relay.eu.net) (both are currently at UUNET Technologies and can be reached at avg@uunet.uu.net and polina@uunet.uu.net) CONTENTS: There are several subdirectories related to different information or different sources of information. They are: DENARC This is a collection of postings to USENET News newsgroups soc.culture.soviet and talk.politics.soviet. These were kept as received by Larry Press from Nick Sandru and each file name indicates a time-stamp of arrival. All files are named in the following manner: coup08dd.hhn where dd - day of receipt hh - hour of receipt n - part number (if multiple files for same day and hour) The selections contain actually most of the postings sent during that period; only non-related subjects and some irrelevant stuff (such as mail addresses sent by many posters) have been excluded. The articles are ordered as they were received on Nick Sandru's PC/AT Minix system. Also within this directory is a file, edited, which collapses all of the other files, removes repeated postings, minimizes header information and replaces Russian text with translations. This was prepared by Doug Jones. MISC A collection of stuff, including uucp maps and e-mail addresses and a tar file of interesting postings taken from an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) window connected to a computer in Moscow (complements of Kurt Jaeger, pi@rus.uni-stuttgart.de). There is also a pointer here to a collection of memoirs available on the Russia Filelist. SOVARC This is one (large!) file which contains the archive of postings maintained by the folks at Demos. PAPERS This directory contains papers or articles concerning the coup or the role of telecommunications in maintaining information flow during the coup. RLA These are the daily reports from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during the period August 19 through September 6, 1991. RLR These are in-depth analysis articles from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during the period August 18 through September 3, 1991. TL Here we have a program to change the transliteration of Russian language postings to make it somewhat more easy to read. This software can be used on the body of various postings contained in the SOVARC file. Credit for the software belongs to Steve Gaarder (gaarder@theory.tc.cornell.edu). There is also a tar file containing KOI-7 and KOI-8 fonts and three utilities to handle the addition and stripping of the 8th bit. The fonts were developed on a Sun SparcStation and may not be valid on other architectures. This material is complements of Ken Hardy (uunet!racerx!ken). There is also X11R4 cyrillic software, complements of Neal Dalton (nrd@redwood.cray.com) and Serge Vakulenko (val k@kiae.su) VAL-L This directory contains one file from the VAL-L list at UCF1VM. This file contains the view of the coup from the perspective of Valentine Michael Smith, based on reading the Demos/RELCOM posts, GlasNet posts, talk.politics.soviet posts, soc.culture.soviet posts, and posts from the list RUSSIA. Valentine is a non-traditional undergraduate student majoring in history with minors in writing and political science. He has been a long-time contributor to such lists as Politics, History, USSR-L and NewsE-L. He has had his own List since 1/91. He can be reached at CDELL@VAX1.UMKC.EDU. Should you have access to other material related to the coup, please contact me at dab@moxie.oswego.edu. I would like to make this collection as complete as possible. Thank-you.