Is this a pernicious aspect of the Information Society? Well, how will we know? Who can tell? Who's keeping track? Suppose it were pernicious - how would they stop me? Are the police supposed to unplug and confiscate my modem, tell me to go to the local Rotary Club and stop typing messages to people in Djakarta and Vladivostok? By what right?

There's always something new in cyberspace circles. It's unfailingly entertaining, you've got to give it that. There's a scandal a week, sometimes two. I wrote a nonfiction true-crime book about one of these cyberspace scandals once - it took me a year and a half to do it. I could write a similar book once every week if there were fifty-two of me.

Let's just dip our fingertips into this brimming cornucopia of digital bounty, shall we? Government abuse of confidential files. Software piracy on pirate bulletin boards. Canadian judicial gag rules on cases flouted by people on the Internet. The CIA, the NSA trolling the Internet for anything they might find useful. The French secret service bribing and supplying money to the Chaos Computer Club. Cryptography scandals, just no end to those; crypto has more scandals and screw-ups and bonehead moves than a 24 hour festival of the Three Stooges.

Oceans of money sloshing around. Telephone companies buying cable companies, software companies buying cellphone companies, computer companies buying parts of the radio spectrum. Internet startups offering voice phone software, telephone companies offering Internet hookups. Software patents, algorithm patents. Computer search and seizure practice. Spamming scandals, virus scandals. Poisoned JAVA applets - bad applets - rotten applets.

I've watched this stuff going on for years now. A pattern is emerging. It's amazing how little is ever decided, how little there is to show at the end of the day. Everything is temporary, all band-aids and toothpicks. Every once in a