A Netly Thanksgiving (guess I should have posted this earlier)

[Declan McCullagh]

===========

http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1602,00.html

The Netly News (http://netlynews.com/)
November 28, 1997

A Netly News Thanksgiving
by Declan McCullagh (declan at well.com)

        Here at the Netly News, we have a feast of things for which
	we're thankful during this holiday season: Ricochet radio
	modems. MacOS 8. A Supreme Court that supports free
	speech online. DVD. Cable companies offering 400 Kbit/sec
	Net-connections.

        But we're also grateful to the personalities who made
	this year an unforgettable one:

        Heaven's Gate: A special Netly thanks to these suicide
	cultists for providing us with seemingly unlimited
	article fodder. From the blinking red alert headline of
	their celestial home page to the computer-generated
	painting of a resident of the kingdom of heaven, their
	web site was a treasure trove for journalists. Buried
	in the invisible space at the bottom of the home page
	were hundreds of hidden words: UFO, space alien,
	extraterrestrial, misinformation, second coming, end
	times, alien abductions, Yoda, Yoga. Wonderful stuff.

        Louis Freeh: The butt of a thousand jokes on the Net
	("Freedom isn't Freeh"), the FBI director emerged this
	year as the arch-enemy of strong encryption. We had
	worried that Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick's
	departure might mean fewer good stories from the Justice
	Department. But Freeh came to the rescue, saying publicly
	that Americans should not be allowed to buy encryption
	products without a backdoor for law enforcement.

[...]