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Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future.

Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input).

There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot.

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"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

-- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. (In an intentional homage to Neuromancer.)

On another tangent: Gibson wrote, in an afterword in an early-1990s digital edition of Neuromancer, that he had never owned, nor even used, a computer until some years after he wrote the book. He noted that:

> Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer.

>There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot.

Sneakernet isn't an irrelevant concept in any sort of context where data transferred through a computer network can be intercepted.

But carrying a concealed micro-sd card with encrypted data would be a lot more convenient. Heck, you could fit many times as much data as in Johnny Mnemonic (40GB, I think?) inside your head too by shoving a micro-sd card up your nose or into your ear.

Nose, ear, really?

On a more realistic note, what is the maximum microsdxc card capacity of a human rectum?

A metric buttload.

Believe it or not, that's a thing, and it's called 'keistering'! Apparently, pro's can get a cellphone 'keistered'. But I think the flip-phone style, not an iPhone.

As far as microsd cards -- I think you'd be able to 'keister' many many terabytes. They are so tiny and so thin, I'd guess hundreds would fit.

There's a difference between "fit" and "fit without making it impossible to walk normally". And really, you'd want some sort of carrier for the cards, because otherwise they're likely to be lost or damaged. So it becomes a fairly complex question of the optimal balance among total carrier volume, gait effects, and maximizing internal volume of the carrier without thinning the walls so much they're likely to crumple. (Metal walls might serve, but then we're back to gait effects. Not comfortable.) And once the carrier design is in hand, there arises the question of how to maximize its bandwidth, which is itself a rather nontrivial packing problem.

Great, yet ANOTHER USB-C adaptor I'm going to have to pay Apple for.

The point was that the physical volume needed to store far more data is so small that you can fit it even the head without going to the lengths in movie, not that it'd be particularly pleasant. But certainly, smuggling things in body orificies has a long tradition.

More convenient but not as secure.

Given that the entire plot involves someone chasing him to forcibly extract the data, it wouldn't seem it would offer more security than suitable crypto on a micro-sd card.

The person chasing him isn't trying to extract the data, they're trying to delete it.

I might have misremembered though the wikipedia entry for the movie (I've never read the short story, so my comments here are about the movie) specifically says that one of the groups after him wants the data for themselves.

But if they just want to destroy the data, that just makes the security distinction even less relevant, as destroying his head with contents would solve the issue whether it's in his brain or on a foreign object in his head.

HTTPS stops interception.

But, sneakernets are relevant because the internet is slower.

HTTPS stops interception.

Even if you have perfect faith that it's currently impossible to crack TLS (and you probably shouldn't), they might record the stream and crack it in the future, having tools you can't even imagine currently.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. - Andrew S. Tanenbaum

> "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so

when reading that my mind conjures a gray sky, but then again when I was young TVs displayed static if you turned them to a dead channel, not solid blue...

I believe gray sky is the intended image.

I own a 60" television with no TV tuner attached to a smattering of devices that play and stream digital content. I suspect when my 1 year old is an adult she won't even have a solid conception of a "channel" let alone be able to imagine the color of a "dead" one.

The grey of a dead OTA channel and the grey of a missing / removed YouTube video aren't too dissimilar

That's because YouTube mimics the TV static in their player.

> fun stuff about people physically carrying information

This is a thing, though. https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

Or if you have 100PB: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Probably the worst (best) bit of future-past in Neuromancer is that it starts with the main character trying to fence "three megabytes of hot RAM". That seemed like a ludicrously large amount when it was written.

I think we can give Gibson the benefit of the doubt here and say the point was not the size, but the fact that it was hot RAM -- the contents was valuable. The price of 3MB, even as early as in 1984, was not so high as to make it that impressive even by the standards of the day.

Ha, I never considered that. It would fit with the data-smuggling theme of Johnny Mnemonic (the short story, at least), which is set in the same universe.

Hey, 3 megs of RAM is nothing to sneeze at: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP48-2MB-RAM-memory-card-for-HP48GX-...

I always thought it was a prototype of some very, very fast cache RAM.

I think I like your idea of hot RAM containing data better now.

I was born in the last twenty years and understood the sentence just fine when I read it. Interestingly enough, youtube does static when your connection times out. (Though I grew up with CRT televison as a kid and definitely remember TV static. I also played a lot of classic video game consoles because my dad was a thrift store hound.)

Just like we do have an idea about how steam engines look and feel, but the mental image painted by words referring to one will be very different for those who only know steam engines from the Hogwarts Express, compared to those who actually stood close to one fully heated up and regulating pressure by bleed valve, turning half the station into a sauna.

Firmly establishing in those opening lines not only the future setting of Neuromancer but also the era of analog electronics it was written in will be of great benefit to future readers.

I wonder what these people who don't know what a TV tuned to a dead channel looks like make of the HBO intro.

Especially after it's been encoded poorly, as static is a worst case scenario for video codecs.

> although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input

I'm sure you are aware that "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" is not blue - right?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZAMjpjYfQ

Of course. My point was that for a brief period of time, you could give Gibson the benefit of an accidental retcon; "ah, so the sky was a dark shade of blue, that works". As opposed to "uh, NO INPUT?".

Given that he spent the entire paragraph talking about how younger people wouldn't know what that passage refers to, presumably yes, he does.

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