Computer underground Digest

» see soci.niu.edu/~cudigest as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In March 1990 American law enforcement was raiding bulletin boards and carrying hardware out of teenagers' bedrooms, and two academics decided somebody ought to be keeping a written record of it. Jim Thomas taught sociology at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Gordon Meyer worked with Thomas on the computer underground as a research subject rather than a hobby. Issue 1.00 of Computer underground Digest went out on 28 March 1990 from [email protected], carrying a disclaimer that the views inside were not the moderators' own and that contributors were on their own for copyright.

What followed was a more-or-less weekly digest, which in 1990 meant a plain text file mailed to a list and reposted onto Usenet, numbered by volume and issue. The subject matter was the legal argument around computer crime. Search warrants and prosecutions in the early years, where the alleged offense was often the copying of a document, and then the Communications Decency Act, whose court decisions CuD carried in full. By the end the masthead listed an archivist and five shadow-archivists mirroring back issues across the network, none of them paid. It also listed a joke editor called Etaion Shrdlu III.

My own first dial-up account dates from 1998, which lands at volume ten of twelve. By then the digest was a decade-old institution about American statute, written for people who might plausibly be served with a warrant and read mostly by academics and by the subjects of their research. The archive is open, so the argument is all still there to follow. Following an argument once it has been settled is not the same as waiting on a mail spool in 1990 for the next installment of it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the format bought ~

A digest is cheap in a way a website is not. There was no server to keep paid up and no design to go out of date. Every issue was a text file, so every issue is still readable, and because the shadow-archivists kept copies on machines in several countries, no single disk failure could take the run out.

That also set the ceiling. CuD reached the people already on BITNET and Usenet in 1990, which was a small and specific population of academics and the computer underground itself. It never had to grow, because it was never trying to.

~ volume twelve, issue one ~

Volume 12, Issue 01 went out on Sunday 12 March 2000, written the day before. Its opening article is titled "CuD hasn't gone away (yet)" and reads like someone clearing a desk: the digest had not appeared for roughly six months, the reason was the editors' obligations away from the keyboard, people had sent in material that was now too stale to run, and the plan from here was to catch up on Rob Slade's book reviews first. Coming issues, it said, would cover online research ethics and distance learning. There was a new sending address.

Ten more book reviews filled out the issue. That was the last one. On 1 December 2000 the FAQ was updated with the real answer, which is better than most shutdown notices because it is honest about being boring: time constraints, and editors whose interests had moved on. "It's fun for a decade, but time to move on."

~ the forgery at the old address ~

The homepage is still up, and on 12 August 2024 Thomas and Meyer added a notice to it. Somebody had copied the CuD front page, uploaded it to a hosting account under the old web address, and pointed it at an online gambling service. The copy publishes content signed with their names, as though the digest had resumed.

Probing it from here confirms the complaint. The old address serves the cloned 1990s page, same marble background tile, same scanned header graphic, with affiliate language toggles spliced into the markup where the original has none. The two editors left their personal email addresses on the real page and asked readers to report any further fakes. A decade of writing about computer crime, and the last administrative act of the thing was filing a report about someone stealing its front door.

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