HoloSpam

Yup. It's finally happened. I woke up this morning with a few comments on my blog from “Viagra” and “Adult Toyz”. While I might normally feel flattered (not really), I found this a little disturbing. My fear is that I just need to suck-it-up and accept it. Especially with how rampant email spam has become, is it really that much of a leap to think that Blog spam is one of the next steps?

Every night, I awake in a crazy sweat fearing of the crazy sinful future that is bound to be forced upon us. I rue the day that I am walking with my wife in a mall and an advertisement hologram asks me “Do you have problems with your teenie-weenie pee-pee, oh Small One?” (although, in all reality, it will probably be something even more idiotic like “Do you find yourself having Erectile Dysfunction?”). And what about the oh-so sinful holographic pornographic spam? If you don't believe me, Wake Up Already! It will happen!

Any geek in his right mind here will admit how cool it would be to have a Holodeck. And while I would normally agree, there is one thing that would lead me to highly disagree. I'm no crazy two-dollar palm-reader, but I would think it is safe to say that the future of the Internet continues to exist in “Inter-Connectivity“. As technology grows, we find ourselves having better ways to stay in touch with the people around us. The more technology grows, the smaller the world essentially becomes. What is one of the things missing from the Star Trek Holodeck? Inter-Connectivity! If I recall correctly, you NEVER see two people, each person on a different ship, engaging in the same program. Why? Well, I have no clue! If I had access to that technology, I would want to invite my friend on the Excelsior to join me in a “wicked crazy-cool game of HoloDoom” (albeit in slightly less Urban language of course).

(And don't even get me started on transporters. I mean, if they have found a way to essentially “serialize“ a person, why even have “transport ships“? I should be able to “transport“ myself all the way from the Beta quadrant to planet Earth. Yeah, I suppose you could disagree using the “decaying signal“ argument, but come on, that's what signal relays are for, isn't it? It wouldn't be a point-to-point transport. It would be a point-to-point-to-point-to-point-etc-point transport. If you think about it, it is just the exact same concept as the Internet, just applied on a Universal Scale rather than a Global one. Granted, I will concede that there would be drastic security concerns regarding this method, but I'm sure with the advances in technology by that century that we would be able to implement a security mechanism to prevent “Body-Hacking“.)

Well, if the true holodecks would now be so interconnected, what is preventing them from being spammed, you know, HoloSpam (you KNOW it's going to happen!!!!). Imagine some of the pornographic spam you get today in a 3d, realistic form. The last thing I need is to be having a nice dinner with my Earth family from the Enterprise and have a nice pornographic love-fest kick in just 10 feet away from the table that my family is ingesting the latest advancements in consumable animal matter at.

</EvidenceForHolographicPornographicSpam>

This is kind of a lengthy rant, so you might ask yourself if I actually have a point here. Well, the answer would be a strong, resounding “NO”. I JUST HATE SPAM!!!!!

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posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 11:16 AM

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# re: HoloSpam 2/25/2004 12:20 PM Carlos

Don't make the Star Trek nerds start. Too late...look what you started! What would stop, say, the Romulans from replacing a Federation signal repeater with their own, one that transmits to Romulus. Imagine how many people they could hold hostage just by doing this. Not to mention if one of them breaks just because it is a piece of mechanical equipment. "The Captain was supposed to be here by now, but somehow his signal mysteriously vanished between Io and Mars." Oh the security concerns make my head spin! Darn paranoia.

# re: HoloSpam 2/25/2004 12:55 PM Jason Olson

There would be security measurements put in place to prevent the Romulans from replacing a Federation signal repeater. What prevents Al Qaeda from replacing part of the Internet backbone with a backbone of their own (allowing them to "eavesdrop" on any internet communication).

Also, just like the Internet, there would be reduncies put in place to make sure that terrorism, mechanical failure, etc., didn't result in a loss of life. Of course, that brings up the question of what it means to "exist" or "be alive". If your signal was reconstitued at two different points, would that mean that there are two of you now? Or is one of them fake? If so, which one? That's only assuming though that a person was broadcast like a stream. This problem would go away if we transmitted a person in smaller bites, lets call them "packets". Of course there would be the OTP protocol. The OTP protocol, or "Organism Transfer Protocol", would ensure things like packet delivery, packet security, and so. Basically exactly like the HTTPS protocol, except for human transport. Of course the OTP protocol most likely would not be viable over the TCP/IP protocol so a new protocol would have to be invented to replace the TCP/IP protocol.

Basically, it's just like the current Internet, just on a different scale with a different application. Come on, it's not so "far-fetched" ;~).

# re: HoloSpam 2/25/2004 1:05 PM Carlos

I must have spent too much time GM'ing a Sci-Fi game to actually think of this stuff or perhaps it's the crack pipe in my mouth, regardless, what stops Al Qaeda is physical security. Placing repeaters in open space is like putting all of your routers on the outside of your buildings and not have anyone watch them. Unless you want to have a crew of security guards at each repeater station or you have the repeater station wrapped into something that could defend itself against starship class attacks, but then the feasibility of such a device begins to drop and the starship thing starts looking good again. About the signal being reconstructed at two different points; that was covered in an episode of The Next Generation, it was the one where there were two Will Rikers.

# re: HoloSpam 2/25/2004 1:13 PM Jason Olson

I never said that the Federation signal repeaters had to be in open space. There are two solutions that I see. First, the Federation signal repeaters could be part of the "communications" architecture at every Starbase. In essence, every Federation stronghold becomes a signal repeater. Second, what if each ship had a signal repeater? Essentially, you would have a dynamic transporter web. There are some security concerns with this approach too but those can be ironed out more in when this is actually invented. And Of course, there would have to be heuristic algorithms that are put in place in order to ensure that the dynamic transport web (or DynaWeb) would continue to work within operational standards.

As for the two Will Rikers, I was talking about the implication on the DynaWeb, not with just normal transporter functionality, silly :~).

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