On Sat, 24 Aug 1996, Sean Sutherland wrote:

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Does anybody know what I can get for generating the credit card numbers?

And they say there's hope for the youth of America. It would seem that the hope of the "youth of America" lies in convincing all others they do not exist. After all, if behaviour is the only standard by which to determine age, one only exists as a "youth" when one exhibits the negative qualities of childhood. This is then used as an excuse to segregate, control, censor, and reject one's input on the grounds of age.

The offense is not being a youth. The offense is getting caught. Clueless remarks (as the above), are a form of "getting caught". Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to see "the youth of America" emerge as one of the biggest users of nymservers and anon remailers. With the push toward hard identities we're likely to see, I think more and more "youth" will come to realize how limiting the stigma of 'child' or 'teenager' can be, and will work to trandescend it. Besides, there's always the need to hide from parents. An entire generation of people disappearing into the woodwork, so to speak(*). Expect to see a lot of ranting about how the Internet is "stealing away childhood" when people finally catch on to what's happening. You could say that the current child porn hysteria is just the opening shot. I wonder what kinds of laws we will see. Perhaps it will become illegal to operate a computer without a license. :-) -David Molnar * Yes, yes, "an entire generation" is overreaching future-speak. It ignores the millions of people who can't or won't have access to the Net, it assumes everyone will want freedom (after all, people stay in AOL's monitored chat rooms and speak Beavis and Butthead to each other all day long), it assumes enough things to make it a piece of empty rhetoric. However, it's a nice-sounding piece of empty rhetoric.