Subject: Internet Talk Television is coming to a workstation near you!

From: [email-masked] (temp using Dollie LLama acct)
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1993 23:59:59 GMT

The following article is reprinted without permission from ConCoctions.
 ConCoctions is published by the Poretni Company.  More information cannot be
 obtained from the electronic mail address [email-masked].

		Internet Talk Television 
	Karl MyNameIsMud ([email-masked])

	Internet Talk Television attempts to fuse these two trends of
 gossipy newmagazine format shows with a desire to squander network
 bandwidth with abandon just because it is there to form a new type of
 publication: a news and information service about the Internet,
 distributed on the Internet.  Internet Talk Televsion is modeled on
 the Oprah and Geraldo talk shows and has a goal of providing in-depth
 technical information to the Internet community.  The service is made
 initially possible with the support of people unlike you.  Our goal is to
 provide a self-referential parody for the the Internet community
 (please note the Date: header on this posting :-).

Head: Bane of the Internet

 The product of Internet Talk Television is either a Quicktime(tm)
 movie file or 54,000 GIF files per show that require a 50 MIPs or
 greater workstation capable of displaying 30 GIF files per second,
 poorly produced and unfortunately widely available on computer
 networks (and public ftp archives where we have found directories that
 are writable by the anonymous ftp account and have a free Gig or so of
 disk space, we hide the GIF files in '...' directories.  To produce
 these files, we start with the raw data of any journalistic endeavor:
 we make things up.

 This raw information is then illustrated graphically using
 professional-quality equipment : primarily Mario Paint running on a
 Super Nintendo Entertainment System as used by a 5 year old.  The
 information is then brought back to our studio, and edited and mixed
 on a secondhand $179 Emerson 2 head VHS VCR in Super Long Play mode
 (SLP).

 The "look and feel" we strive for is akin to "Inside Edition", "Hard
 Copy", "Now It Can Be Told" or other lowest common denominator
 programs that appeal to the general interest in sensationalistic
 sleaze, scandal and gossip.

 Our goal is cover the stories that don't make it into the grocery
 tabloids for reasons of legal liability for libel, truthfulness and
 just plain good taste.  Instead of discussions of protocols, we want
 to present actual packet traces of protocols on actual networks along
 with captured passwords, SMTP dialogue showing interesting private
 email messages and in-depth interviews with convicted crackers on how
 to break DES, Kerberos, NFS, passwords, how to make a Cisco router
 go into conniption fit mode, how to create cyclic spanning tree graphs
 that loop via routing protocols, etc.

 Instead of COMDEX, we want to cover the underground Legion of Doom
 beer busts, the Phone Phreaks annual telethon, etc.

 Head: Town Adult Video Tape Rental Outlet  to the Global Village

 The result of Internet Talk Television's journalistic activities is a
 series of video image files.  The native format we start with is the
 popular GIF format, then we envision releases in JPEG, MPEG,
 PostScript, Quicktime(tm) and X Window Dump File format.  At 30 frames
 per second times 60 seconds time 30 minutes a half-hour program would
 thus consist of 54,000 GIF files.  If each GIF file is around 50k the
 entire program should use up only about 2,575 megabytes.  [I would
 start buying a bunch of 2 Gigabyte and greater SCSI drives right now]
 (By the way our advertisements will be primarily companies selling
 disk drives and other magnetic storage media devices - "You can
 archive Internet Talk Television onto our 3rd party Exabyte
 EXB-8500cs; holds 25GB compressed!" ).

 GIF files are initially spooled on FTP.FOO.NET, the central machines
 of the Alternative network.  Files are then moved over to various
 regional networks for further distribution.  For example, FOOnet, a
 commercial network provider for the Marianas Islands with service in 2
 countries, will act as the central spooling area for the Pacific
 Islands region.  The Guido Bros. trucking company will provide the
 same service for Brooklyn.

 The goal of uncoordinated distribution is to increase the load on key
 links of the network.  Transferring several megabyte files over 56kb
 and 64 kbps links will help quickly provide VP Al Gore the political
 support he needs to make NREN a reality :-)

 Files thus move from the FTP.FOO.NET central spool area, to regional
 spools, to national and local networks.  We anticipate most of this
 transfer to be done using the X 11 protocol, but some networks are
 discussing the use of Display PostScript(tm) (PostScript level 2),
 Apple Quicktime(tm) and MicroSoft Windows(tm).

 It is important to note that Internet Talk Television is the original
 copyright violator (point of illegal origination in legalese) and does
 not control the distribution.  Please make copies on videotape and
 send them to your friends.  Send a copy to Deng Xiaoping (Free
 Tibet!).  Shock your friends by transmitted frames via
 ObscurePhone(tm) (oops, I mean PicturePhone(tm)).  Make your own
 compressed HDTV 8mm tape - and in 5 years you will be able to view it
 on something.  Bring a VHS tape of the program with you to watch the
 next time you go to a sports bar with large screen projection tv (if
 you want to have several beer bottles cracked over your head.  "Hey!
 Put the game back on!").

 Head: Serial Crimes, Parallels to Television

 Once files have made their way to an individual's desktop (hopefully
 each individual will perform their own ftp to the one central
 overloaded FTP site and will waste network bandwidth as well as disk
 space by storing their own redundant versions of the files) it is up
 to the the individual user to decide how to present data.  We hope to
 see an infinite variety of different ways of having our files played
 and only list a few of the more banal methods.

 The simplest method to view a .gif file on a Sparcstation is to type
 "xv filename." (alternately "xloadimage filename" may work on some
 systems).  If the file is placed on a Network File System (NFS) file
 system some remote site's server somewhere, the user is simply going
 to have to break into that remote machine or hack SUNRPC packets to
 spoof the remote machines NFS daemon to read the remote file system
 via NFS.  Once the user has obtained the file the user copies the file
 into some other poor suckers account (on the local machine ) who left
 the permissions on their home directory wide open so that the rather
 large file doesn't show up as part of the sneaky users disk usage when
 the system administrator does a 'du' to try to find out where all of
 the disk space is rapidly disappearing to.
 
 More adventurous playing of files involves video scan convertors,
 and unlicensed low power VHF TV tranmission (do-it-yourself so-
 called pirate television stations).  This involves connecting the
 output of a SparcStation to a scan convertor (or convert the RGB
 signal from a Mac or convert the VGA from a PC) to produce a NTSC
 composite signal that can be fed into a VCR using the RCA connector
 video input.  Then have the VCR output the AUX signal in out via
 the RF adapter (commonly set to VHF channel 2, 3 or 4) and connect
 the RF output coax to a large and high VHF antenna mounted on a 
 mast high above your house.  Several of your neighbors should be
 able to pick up your signal.  You might even want to try feeding
 the signal INTO your local cable system.  The addition of a RF signal
 amplifier (which you can make using parts from Radical Shlock for just
 a few $$$) can increase your signal strength (and range) considerably.
 Caveat: Kids, don't try this at home, the FCC hasn't a large sense
 of humor.

  Head: How to obtain Internet Talk Television

  The GIF files will be available on FTP.FOO.NET ( Internet numeric
  address 127.0.0.1 ) beginning April 1, 1993 in the anonymous ftp
  subdirectory pub/television/.  Filenames begin with the frame
  number, followed by the date, followed by the extension .gif.
  Please be sure to turn on 'binary' transfer mode inside FTP.
  The GIF files holding the individual frames go from 00000 to 54000:

ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
total 521825218252182
-rw-r--r--  1 foo      bar         50000 Apr  1 03:41 00000.040193.gif
-rw-r--r--  1 foo      bar         50000 Apr  1 03:41 00001.040193.gif
-rw-r--r--  1 foo      bar         50000 Apr  1 03:43 00002.040193.gif
			...
-rw-r--r--  1 foo      bar         50000 Apr  1 03:41 53998.040193.gif
-rw-r--r--  1 foo      bar         50000 Apr  1 03:41 53999.040193.gif
-rw-r--r--  1 foo      bar         50000 Apr  1 03:43 54000.040193.gif
226 Transfer complete.
521825218252182 bytes received in 0.5 seconds (1.9 Kbytes/s)
ftp>