Footnotes

{1} - In US legal parlance, 'obscene' material is not protected by the law whereas merely 'indecent' material is.

{2} - Interestingly, the German translation for the title of this book is Virtuelle Gemeinschaft.

{3} - Multi-User Domain or Dungeon, Multi-User Shared Hallucination, MUD Object-Oriented, and Multi-User Simulation or Simulated Environment. However nobody seems to know what MUCK stands for, if anything.

{4} - MUSHes, MUCKs and MOOs tend to be oriented towards online social relations; MUDs tend to be oriented towards traditional gaming - fighting fearsome software monsters and the like.

{5} - Eg.: it is not uncommon to see something like "Grocible says 'oops gotta go - my player is late for work!'" on a MU*, as though the character were an independent entity controlled remotely by the player.

{6} - One exception is Powell River's Community Network which, perhaps because of its BBS origins, has a few online games.

{7} - Actual terminals are becoming less and less common, except occasionally in institutions with a large installed base of the older technology, such as libraries. Most home users use personal computers rather than terminals.

{8} - In some circumstances a user may establish a direct network connection to the host computer rather than using a modem. An example of such a circumstance might be a public access terminal at a public library. The library in this example is wired permanently to the Internet and thus modems are not necessary.

{9} - The Internet is traditionally depicted as a cloud. This is because the Internet is a vast network of networks with no defined boundaries or borders.

{10} - America Online seems to reinforce consciously this fact, for example, by naming its Canadian and European subsidiaries AOL Canada and AOL Europe respectively.

{11} - As a humorous aside, the RISKS Digest notes that a user from the small English town of Scunthorpe was puzzled to find that AOL Europe's system kept rejecting the name of his town whenever he tried typing it in. It turned out that AOL's filtering software was rejecting the word 'scunthorpe' on the basis of a certain substring of text contained within it. The user was indignantly forced to spell his town's name 'Sconthorpe' before AOL's software would accept it. (Neumann, 1996.)

{12} - AOL won.

{13} - Not to be confused with the Internet service based on HTTP standards known generally as the World Wide Web. Toronto's 'The Web' was created some years before the World Wide Web was widely deployed. The similarity of the two names is a coincidence.

{14} - One key difference was that state-owned France Télécom gave terminals away to the public for free. In large part this was because they saw Télétel as replacing traditional print telephone books.

{15} - There is a great deal of inconsistency concerning the hyphenation of this name. Many FreeNets hyphenate the name, including the Cleveland Free-Net. Others do not. In this thesis "FreeNet" is used as the generic term. Hyphens are only used in connection with those specific FreeNets that hyphenate their name.

{16} - The online service is known as the Vancouver CommunityNet (VCN); the non-profit society that runs it is known as the Vancouver Community Network Association. (VCNA).

{17} - US workstation manufacturer and UNIX software provider Sun Microsystems was very much involved in the seeding early community networks by donating reconditioned second-hand machines to startup operations. Several Canadian community networks were beneficiaries of this early support. Sun had ceased donating to community networks by 1994, however.

{18} - Centrex switches are not designed to handle the amount of traffic that constant modem use generates. BCTel informed the VCN of this fact some time after they recommended that the VCN switch to a Centrex-based system.

{19} - The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is the federal government agency that regulates broadcast media and telephony in Canada.

{20} - Canadian charity legislation is still based, to a large degree, on archaic English law dating back to the time of Queen Elizabeth I. The Charitable Uses Act of 1601 considers, for example, "marriages of poor maids" a legitimate charitable activity, but makes little mention of community-operated computer networks.

{21} - WCEL maintains a Web page on the CommunityNet, and supports increased access to open public communications for the purposes of distributing, for example, environmental information.

{22} - This is somewhat unusual because many BC community nets report great frustration with their dealings with BCTel, the provincial telephone company. The company does not appear to be actively hostile towards community networks, but does seem largely indifferent. It holds a monopoly over local telephone service in British Columbia, and is owned and controlled by US telecommunications giant GTE of Connecticut. It is one of two provincial phone companies in Canada controlled by a foreign firm. Québec-Téléphone, also controlled by GTE, is the other, but is a minor player in the Quebec market.

{23} - Usenet is a distributed system and messages take time to travel, or propagate, from one site to another. Therefore the given set of messages available on one system at any given time will not necessarily be identical to a set on another system. The differences are attributable to propagation delay.

{24} - Domain names are the short hierarchical and usually mnemonic names by which individual machines on the Internet can be identified. For example, the Vancouver CommunityNet's Internet domain name is 'vcn.bc.ca'. The hierarchy reads from left to right, from 'Vancouver CommunityNet' to 'British Columbia' to 'Canada.'

Domain names in Canada are thus geographical in nature. However in the US domain names are usually organized by functional grouping, not by geography. Commercial sites end in '.com', US government sites end in '.gov', educational institutions such as universities end in '.edu', and so on. Confusingly, many Canadian sites choose to register their Internet names with the US rather than the Canadian naming authorities, so a functional Internet name is no guarantee that the site is American.

{25} - rm -rf /