When the internet was a weird, magical thing

In a typical electronic-mail transaction, you might write a letter on the little computer before calling the big computer. Then you sign on; the service costs $6 an hour. It takes, say, two minutes to send the letter. That is 20 cents, not counting the $12 monthly charge for the service, which you probably use for other things anyway. [New York Times]

Loading a clip from a (Beastie Boys) appearance with Fab Five Freddy on MTV takes nearly an hour on a standard high-speed connection. It’s brief, grainy, and tiny enough that it’s obvious why no one at the network would bother crying "copyright" even if they had the time, access, and/or inclination to load it. [Spin]

I search my hotlist of Web addresses and double-click on Internet Underground Music Archive. A few clicks more and a song by The Barking Spiders is streaming onto my hard disk in digital stereo. It’s a 5-megabyte file, and even with my 28.8-kilobits-per-second modem, it'll be awhile before that download is finished. [Popular Mechanics]

Even if we acknowledge the right of parents to protect their children from unwholesomeness, the cyberporn controversy has an air of unreality about it. As anyone who has spent time on the World Wide Web can tell you, it is, if anything, less sexy than what can be found on any corner newsstand. If we extrapolate from (Time Magazine's) own figures, only 0.3 percent of Internet traffic is composed of naughty bits. [New York]

Q: Can I catch a virus by looking at a web page?

A: You can't, but your computer can catch a virus if you download an executable program from an untrustworthy site and then, of your own free will, double-click on it in your file manager. [New Straits Times]