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 <mailto: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 <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 <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 <https://www.thrillist.com/culture/why-san-francisco-drinks-more-fernet-than-anyone-in-america>
> - missing a drunkpynchon.com <http://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/ <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 <http://penet.fi/> - also a real anonymous remailer -
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_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.