BE chapter 7 summary

[Joseph Tracy]

Thanks back atya.
This fills in some great tech and culture info. 

So I have a basic question about Deep Archer. Can you give us some idea of the plausibility of  this software and its key features. 
1) can there be, apart from preventive legal measures, a software that erases the tracks of the user as it moves along? Would a good surveillance app be able to simply follow the user in real time?  And... is something like this a) already out there? b) impossible given the basic nature of internet communication protocols? c) plausible but unlikely except in future sci fi, AI world?
2) can avatars move in a shared terrain like DA and interact visually and verbally?
3) Are there actual entertainment/escape worlds with intereractive visual terrain in the real deep web ?


> On Dec 5, 2021, at 3:12 PM, Neal Fultz <nfultz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Lots of tech / hacker references I'll mention:
> 
> * Justin and Lucas both did CS at Stanford
>    * like Larry & Serge (Google)
>    * "Marginal Hacks" is in the new hacker dictionary / jargon file -
> http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/m/MarginalHacks.html
> 
> * Beanie Babies mentioned again, outside of flashbacks
>    * The BB bubble had crashed around 99, so they're not worth
> anything in the books' present. I had an outlaw horror comic book
> called "When Beanies Attack."
> 
> * Anime references - Anime got really big in the 90s, first through
> VHS for older comics / sci fi fans (Akira, Ghost in the Shell) and
> then exploded with younger audiences (sailor moon, dbz, pokemon). In
> 2007, the import market collapsed, mirroring the other market
> collapses that are mentioned (dotcom, beanie baby, financial markets).
> 
> * Dragonball Z - Zarbon is a deep pull, third tier villain to make
> Pynchon's list. He appeared in the Frieza Saga, which was syndicated
> in the US and cancelled mid-season, until it was picked up by Cartoon
> Network for Toonami. The same thing happened with Sailor Moon. The
> online fan petitions were major factors in getting the shows
> restarted.
> 
> * "Came of Age into VRML" - Virtual Reality Markup Language was an
> attempt to embed 3D graphics into web pages, only supported by
> Netscape 2.0 as far as I remember. It was pronounced "vermal."  VR in
> general was pretty much dead when BE was released, but Oculus has
> popularized it again.
> 
> * Sand hill soap box derby was a real thing -
> https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Soapbox-derby-crashes-with-tech-economy-2773043.php
> 
> * Fernet was also a thing in the Bay Area, I always preferred Jaeger
> myself - https://www.thrillist.com/culture/why-san-francisco-drinks-more-fernet-than-anyone-in-america
> - missing a drunkpynchon.com page
> 
> * "Network Effects" - This was popularized by "economics of
> information" profs in the 90s, notably Hal Varian of UC Berkeley, who
> became the Chief Economist of Google. Very popular among VCs of the
> time.
> 
> * Spiritual Malware - see also "Roko's Basilisk"
> 
> * CRC manual - this is "the" handbook for chemistry, used by everyone
> from students to meth cooks.
> 
> * Camel book - the Perl book by Larry Wall, published by Oreilly
>  - Larry Wall is one of the rare outspoken Christians among the 30 or
> so people that have made popular programming languages.
>  - His webpage is great - http://www.wall.org/~larry/
>  - Perl was *the* scripting language of the late 90s, but forked
> itself into two incompatible versions and withered out.
>  - OReilly is another colorful tech character - a book publisher of
> technical manuals, who coined the phrase 'Web 2.0' after the dotcom
> crash and pivoted to be a 'thought leader'
> 
> * Final Fantasy X - first Final Fantasy game on the PlayStation 2 -
> massive leap forward from IX
> 
> * Netscape gray - Netscape's default background color for web pages
> was gray, not white.
> 
> * I Believe You Have My Stapler - Mike Judge's Office Space
> 
> * robots.txt - a specification still used today, which lists which
> pages on your web site may be indexed by search engines. It is
> described correctly, it doesn't block web crawlers, only suggests they
> skip a page.
> 
> * penet.fi - also a real anonymous remailer -
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
> 
> * Markov chain where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.
>    * The Page Rank algorithm (with pseudo-random resets) was
> developed at Google and essentially used this set up to rank web pages
>    * The limit / stationary point of the markov chain is the first
> eigenvector of the transition matrix.
>    * Deep Archer is a reverse PageRank, which hides things instead of
> finding them?
> 
> * Designer linkrot - linkrot is when URLs change and links don't work
> anymore, which is penalized in search rankings. In the old days, if
> you wanted to bury an online story, you could spam the comments
> section with bad links to tank it's position in search results.
> 
> * Invisible pixels - still used to this day to track people across the
> web, due to a bad design in the cookie specification.
> 
> I started my reread in Sep, about 10 chapters ahead of yall, but I'm
> continued to be really impressed by how much of the period tech vibe
> Pynchon was able to capture and how much detail he gets just right -
> probably the only other thing that comes close is Mike Judge's Silicon
> Valley.
> 
> On Sun, Dec 5, 2021 at 9:13 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> 
>> BE Chapter 7 summary
>> 
>> Maxine goes to Justin and Vyrva’s to check out Deep Archer.
>> Otis and Fiona go into her room to play with assorted action figures first buying clothes for Melanie with her gold card and ending in the violent destruction of Melanies Mall and singing ‘It’s cool at the Mall”
>> Lucas arrives late after search for weed,  wearing UTSL t-shirt  ( Use the source Luke)
>> Max says she is not good at these things. Lucas says not a game. Justin says has gaming influences, visuals by Luke, Lucas credits other influences:  “Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he’s known around my crib, God.”
>> “The further in you go, as you get passed along one node to the next, the visuals you think you’re seeing are being contributed by users all over the world. All for free. Hacker ethic. Each one doing their piece of it, then just vanishing uncredited.”
>> Lucas explains she will be represented by 3D image called avatar. crossing into new world
>> It’s code says Justin.
>> We get a back story  of J and L which to summarize, they met in Stanford in computer science working together and soon pitching to VCs until they meet a VC and drink together and he writes big check which they never cash. They see him again at a Soap Box Derby but decide not to ask about check. Later decide they need more discipline and go to NYC Silcon Alley where they get seed money. Continue work on DA. Socializing,getting into trade journals Justin and V put down on house. Lucas lost a lot investing before dot com crash.
>>    They take Maxine up to Justin’s workspace, and
>> “DeepArcher Central,” Lucas with one of those may-I-introduce armwaves. Visual setting synthesis of sunny california ( Justin)and darker rainy windswept dangerous spaces( Lucas).  Maxine opens large screen; Lucas rolls joints.
>> “A tall figure, dressed in black, could be either sex, long hair pulled back with a silver clip, The Archer, has journeyed to the edge of a great abyss. Down the road behind, in forced perspective, recede the sunlit distances of the surface world, wild country, farmland, suburbs, expressways, misted city towers. The rest of the screen is claimed by the abyss—far from an absence, it is a darkness pulsing with whatever light was before light was invented. The Archer is poised at its edge, bow fully drawn, enters a kind of train station, graphics like she has never seen hesitates then  begins exploring then gets on train and is off. After pleasant ride  she comes to darker seedier space, smells pot, exits and
>> They have reconvened downstairs at the kitchen table. The more loaded the partners get and the more smoke in the air, the more comfortable they seem to grow talking about DeepArcher, though it’s hacker stuff Maxine has trouble following. “What’s known as bleeding-edge technology,” sez Lucas. “No proven use, high risk,……
>> 
>> ...“What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.” “Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”
>> “At random.”
>> “At pseudorandom.”...
>> …”vanishing and relocating as soon as it’s clicked on . . . an invisible self-recoding pathway, no chance of retracing it.”
>> “But if the route in is erased behind you, how do you get back out?”
>> “Click your heels three times,” Lucas sez, “and . . . no wait, that’s something else . . .”
>> 
>> So that is it.   Maxine goes to  check out Deep Archer, takes her first ride in deep web and gets an idea of what makes Deep Archer unique, 'bleeding edge' both as code and as experience. Also we learn more about Justin and Lucas.
>> 
>> --
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> --
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