Message no. 1

From:	Chris Siebenmann <cks@********.UTCS.TORONTO.EDU>
Subject:	Cyberspace of the future (was Re: Resource Rush)
Date:	Thu, 25 Nov 1993 04:03:23 -0500

The Internet today is commercialized and mostly free from subsidies
by the federal government; 85% or so of it can be reached by paths not
going over the NSFNet backbone, the only bit the government funds
directly. The government will continue to give money to universities
to connect, because the Internet has become essential.

The Internet remains because it is useful; it remains unrestricted
because it is more trouble to restrict what people do with it than not
to, and ultimately more costly to do so. The same thing will happen to
cause the unrestricted network in Shadowrun; it is more convenient to
have it than not, and generall more work to restrict access than to
leave it open.

Shadowrun netrunning already has a perfectly good concept of gateways
from one network to another: SANs. Don't think of each node as a
single computer; think of it as a network of them, all clustered
together. It's important to think of Shadowrun netrunning in abstract
terms, and not get locked down to assuming that a system map is the
same as the physical hardware.

A good test for this is security equivalence: if breaking one machine
implies breaking a bunch of other ones, they are all security
equivalent, and in Shadowrun terms are one node on a system map.

- cks