William Gibson's AGRIPPA Recovered and Revealed 98
Bud Cook writes "While the text of William Gibson's elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem's initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete 'run,' as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA's public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There's also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself."
Harold AI? (Score:5, Insightful)
We finally found the Epitaph of the Twilight?!
Could this be.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Could this be.. (Score:5, Funny)
It's much more draconian than the 3 activations and buy a new game from EA.
And apparently just as ineffective.
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Considering it took 16 years for it to become widely available in its original form, I'm not sure I'd exactly call that ineffective.
Re:Could this be.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering it took 16 years for it to become widely available in its original form, I'm not sure I'd exactly call that ineffective.
Maybe it's just no one cared too much about it...
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Considering it took 16 years for it to become widely available in its original form, I'm not sure I'd exactly call that ineffective.
But considering the better-than-original no-obnoxious-copy-protection-whatsoever edition was published in no time flat and everyone was happy with it all these years, I would guess that people who want the "original form" are in minority... =)
As it often happens, life imitates art, huh?
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Wait, it's here in my garage SOMEwhere!
Ahhh, the heady days of the 80s...
In a world of art that's mostly disposable... (Score:5, Insightful)
...it's quite heartbreaking to see a work that intentionally removed itself from your grasp. It's quite the change from people who expect immortality simply for having cameras pointed at them or semi-literate fiction aimed at people who think MTV is the height of culture.
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Worse it was stored very poorly:
>>>UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette
This is why you should always print your source code to PAPER for backup. Diskettes lose their magnetism, and CDs fade, but paper can last 3000 years even if buried underground (Dead Sea Scrolls). Retyping everything from the paper is a chore, but still preferable to permanent loss.
Re:In a world of art that's mostly disposable... (Score:5, Informative)
Except the dead sea scrolls is hide from animals, not paper from your printer. Normal printing paper has a very short life span (comparatively).
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Hmmm. So how long is a paper's lifespan?
I have Bibles from my family that are over a hundred years old. They are still in very good shape. I wouldn't be surprised if they were still readable at age 1000. Replace "Bible" with "source code" and I could easily imagine someone trying one of my ancient programs in the year 2900..... by which point the original disks would have long been erased.
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I have a few books from the seventies that are as new, and a few pockets that are at most five years old that are yellow and crumbly.
Quality paper lasts longer than cheap paper. Well, colour me surprised.
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As for AGRiPPA itself, I get the point, but it always struck me as Gibson's shark jumping moment. An extremely unegalitarian artwork that only a few people can see in its intended form is certainly the artist's rig
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Those sound like thermal jets. They don't use actual ink, but just apply heat to a thermal-sensitive paper. Lay a hot pizza on that paper and it will turn black!
A true inkjet "squirts" ink on a page which then absorbs the ink like a sponge. That type of printing will last very long..... perhaps not as long as the old impact printers, but still longer than any of us will survive. I recently found my old 8th grade science notes which were printed over 20 years ago and are still the original white color (e
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Replace "Bible" with "source code" and I could easily imagine someone trying one of my ancient programs in the year 2900..... by which point the original disks would have long been erased.
I hope they use MLX [wikipedia.org] to aid in typing them in, mistake free.
Quality paper (Score:2)
Most printer paper these days is essentially throwaway stuff, like much of the rest of our society.
Archival paper is special. Not only is it acid-free, but it is made with a base reserve of alkaline to resist later exposure to acid in the environment. It also has a different composition, most notably low amounts of lignin (from wood pulp). Basic stuff should last 100 years, good stuff maybe 500 years, the best maybe 1,000.
I bet your Bible is yellowed and the paper is slightly brittle. I have one like that.
Re:In a world of art that's mostly disposable... (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole point of this was to show you it disappearing. End of. No more. Done.
Putting into a medium designed for longevity would be precisely against the intention of the work. How do you demonstrate the effect of a highly mobile medium on literature if you protect against that effect ? Do you (can you) see DRM in action through the medium of paper ? It is impossible because you can always go back a page - not so with this. This is ice sculpture for the modern age.
Blasphemers! (Score:2)
How dare you preserve something That Must Die!
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Well, perhaps not missing the point.
How do you demonstrate the effect of a highly mobile medium on literature if you protect against that effect ?
Well, perhaps there is less of an effect to be demonstrated since this clearly rebuts your premise.
Certainly it may be against the intent of the artist but perhaps the point to be made is that the work is much more resilient than you think.
Do you (can you) see DRM in action through the medium of paper ? It is impossible because you can always go back a page - not so with this. This is ice sculpture for the modern age.
Yes, we can do so even with this. period. We now know experientially that the "ice sculpture for the modern age" can be placed in a "modern age refrigerator" and be kept indefinitely, DRM or no.
The true issue of DRM is the legal ramifi
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The Sumerians [ancientscripts.com] had a pretty decent system, as far as longevity goes. I think I'm going to have my autobiography printed up on clay tablets and stored in a salt cave in southern NM. Should get some longevity out of that.
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Yawn (Score:1, Insightful)
I know this is art, but what's the big deal. So a poem scrolls up a screen and dies. Talk about read once approach to processing.
Is this a big deal because it got marketed well, it had big names associated with it? I feel like I did when I walked through the Delaware Arts museum, stopped to look at a canvas with colored straight lines and thought...huh? I love art, I love the idea of creativity (which is why I love programming), but Agrippa? it is a 5th grade programming project or a hackers toss off.
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Funny)
it is a 5th grade programming project
So, let me get this straight. You were writing programs that RSA encrypt data embedded within its own executable in the 5th grade?
Wow. And here I was just writing programs in LOGO that made a turtle move around the screeen. :(
You were a gifted child, weren't you?
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Actually, interestingly enough, RSA is about as simple a cryptosystem as they come (next to OTP, that is). Really. The complexity is actually in the key generation (and even that is pretty simple once you've got a couple large primes). But once you have them, the actual encryption algorithm is dead simple.
'course, that's not to say it ain't still an impressive accomplishment. But it's no DES implementation. :)
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RSA encryption: c = m^e mod n.
It really is something a 5th grader could write. The security is in the selection of e and n (and d, for decryption).
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RSA encryption: c = m^e mod n.
It really is something a 5th grader could write. The security is in the selection of e and n (and d, for decryption).
Assuming of course you wanted to decrypt it. That doesn't seem to be part of the design in this case.
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I think I can get it down to 1st grader level:
include rsa;
rsa_encrypt(stuffToEncrypt);
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Uhh, you only have to do that to decrypt, which is precisely what he *didn't* implement.
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Man. You guys keep focusing on the simplicity of the alorithm, completely ignoring key generation and the fact that the data is embedded in the executable. That's a lot harder than it sounds.
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Wait, this poem was 1992? What makes it special?
When I programmed Rando's Poetic License (premiered at the Washington Project for the Arts in 1978), there was deliberately no storage. The poem was not recoverable at all, and needed not algorithmic protection. That's it? Protection? Rando would scroll poems on the screen and be gone. Each time the program was re-run, a new poem was created -- sometimes a few lines, sometimes dozens or hundreds of lines. The only way to catch it was to run it to the printer,
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Or am I missing some geeky thing that Gibson did?
problem is you're some old guy from the internet that back in his day walked uphill both ways, while this is Gibson.
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In other news... (Score:1, Offtopic)
I found some CDs with old DOS games that I thought were lost.
A friend of mine that has been collecting them since the late 80's once burned me a copy. CD Writer it was burned on was a powerful 2X Traxdata SCSI drive.
And I have kept them safe all these years, but one of them still got lost. Probably borrowed to someone who forgot to return it.
BUT...
Since he has recently decided to make another backup on a DVD, he gave me his original CDs. Didn't have the heart to throw them away.
And what do you know - his co
Gibson Channeling Kovacs (Score:3, Insightful)
I love art
Thanks for clarifying that.
Lookit, I'm no expert on the topic, but as I recall the whole thing from when it debuted in '92, the use of the self-scrolling, self-encrypting gimmick was Gibson's toe-dip into a whole new creative medium.
The poem was about his mother, memories for whom were very dim, ephemeral even. Gibson selected this new "self-destructing" medium as a metaphor, to facilitate the poetry: Once you had read the poem, you could not go back and re-visit it, you had to rely upon your me
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RobotRunAmok: as I recall the whole thing from when it debuted in '92, the use of the self-scrolling, self-encrypting gimmick was Gibson's toe-dip into a whole new creative medium.
If the encryption algorithm was the whole deal, then you may be right. Otherwise, this process of poetic generation went back 20 years or more earlier -- several technology generations, with multiple approaches to the poetic algorithms. I first encountered it on a Teletype-based machine connected via a phoneline from New York to
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A woman who had never read Shakespeare went to a performance of Hamlet and complained, "I don't know what anybody sees in that play. It's just a bunch of cliches strung together."
The 2008 /. version of the poem ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Obviously, it is a substitution code.
You read 'Error establishing a database connection'.
I read 'about the love of life, the lovely woman, and the angst of making a choice'.
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Mine reads:
Connection Interrupted
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.
Fascinating stuff.
Re:The 2008 /. version of the poem ... (Score:4, Funny)
"The 2008 incarnation of the poem consists of custom-built software that, when /. readers try to read the poem, it is encrypted in a weird Web-based algorithm that transforms the text into a message saying 'Error establishing a database connection'.
Sorry, that was my fault. I was the first one to visit the website, and it consequently encrypted itself. I should have mirrored it.
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Network Timeout
The server at agrippa.english.ucsb.edu is taking too long to respond.
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Que? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to say the book is beautifully put together - a real work of art.
But I have read the poem (a copy of it is on Gibson's website) isn't it a bit pretentious?
However as a piece of art it is an interesting idea (minus the poem).
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Old enough to get it, are you? Hrm. haven't gone far enough in your thinking though. The text is not destroyed after reading. It is encrypted. It's the digital equivalent of locking something away and then throwing the key into the sea.
It was probably Gibson's way of saying he's trying to forget whatever made him make Agrippa in the first place. I also think he did it knowing full well that the text will be recovered. Dunno what this means in the context of the work (it's not a poem, although it contains a
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To this day I am still amazed at how prescient he was in Neuromancer. The details -- all wrong, killing each other over a few megs of RAM, the virtual reality helmet, yadda yadda. The real interesting part is the atmosphere, e.g., at one point they go to a site that where people have been scrawling passwords for various high profile computers eve
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So what you're saying is that even if he doesn't have perfect clairvoyance as far as events are concerned, William Gibson really gets people, better than most people even understand themselves? I'd agree with that.
pay attention (Score:5, Insightful)
This poem, for all intents and purposes self destructs after the first reading. Therefore, you should pay attention the first time--you won't get another chance.
That was, I think, the intent. Whether he could have written a program that would have enforced that intent better is beside the point (apparently it was "broken"). For the average reader, you'd get one shot.
It's still a compelling thought.
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+1 on actually getting it. This is exactly what he was attempting to convey, the ephemeral existence we all share. I think he acknowledged that folks with the griefer-gene would recover it, but he wasn't targeting them anyway, was he?
-BA
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From this I would have to conclude that Gibson wasn't involved in the whole "one chance" aspect of the w
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And I had the chance to meet him when I was in grad school, and he said that Agrippa was a dedication to his father (Gibson lost his parents at a fairly young age).
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But I have read the poem (a copy of it is on Gibson's website) isn't it a bit pretentious?
It *is* a poem, so yes.
Good art (Score:5, Interesting)
I would see Gibsons work as deliberately demonstrating the sadness of work being published, read, then being removed from view and denying future readings. Very nice work considering the date it was first published, and our current problems with DRM and copyright.
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Re:Good art (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the real trick is to display a work of art, while concealing said art, while also not allowing the act of concealing to turn into art itself. It seems to me that many would consider the "performance" of concealing the poem a work of art in itself.
I also have a hard time stating that "bad art" is "not art".
And I struggle over whether "not art" can be "accidental art".
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Buhddist sand art (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a major factor in Buhddist/Nepalese sand art (proper name escapes me): a great deal of effort goes into making an intricate work of art, only to have it brushed away a few days later.
From the Japanese samurai classic text Hagakure: "In the Kamigata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things."
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(proper name escapes me)
sand mandala
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Though creating something and destroying is rather a cliche. How many artists have painted a picture, then dowsed it in gasoline and destroyed it forever immediately after? Or, like Duchamp, made intentionally made installations of materials that decay to add the aspect of time and temporariness to them.
This isn't to rain on anyones parade, or say the idea isn't valid. Being that it is a common theme among modern arts, it surely represents something in society, some important concept.
I was tempted to wri
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Good art requires the viewer to think.
I call BS. Michelangelo's David does not require you to think.
Thinking as part of art is a XX century affectation. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with a piece of art that makes you go hmmm, but it should not in anyway be a requirement.
What is worse, there is a lot of really bad modern art out there that tries to cover this fact by making you think a lot. A good piece of art moves you aesthetically. Some pieces of art have no underlying message beyond that, others d
I've studied Agrippa (Score:4, Funny)
Why the bigotry? (Score:1, Troll)
I don't understand why there are so many bigoted articles on this web site. You guys are a bunch of racist. Why the hell are you all throwing around racist slurs like "black holes?" Good grief. Why can't we simply refer to them as "luminescence-challenged singularities" or something else which isn't so racist? You've offended my hyper-sensitive politically-correct psyche!
Now excuse me while I go emo and sulk for a bit.
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Troll? Have you no sense of humor?
In case you missed it, I was alluding to the BS you will see here:
http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/07/dallas-county-meeting-turns-ra.html [dallasnews.com]
It's so pathetic it's hilarious. Apparently some think that "black hole" is a racist term. If you modded me troll for this either you are oblivious to the news, or are like that politically correct moron Judge Thomas Jones.
Fun project (Score:2)
I remember working on this for a bit. One reason it was a bit more difficult than normal to crack open is we replaced all the appropriate 68k exception vectors with RTEs, so you couldn't hop into Macsbug or do an NMI and disassemble anything.
Once multifinder came out that method died, because the exception vectors were on a per-process basis. You could just break into another app and dump the RAM.
I vaguely remember that it was a fun and interesting idea back in the day. Plus, it was william gibson, and his
Slashdotted (Score:2)
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