Updata
The Year After Technology
Measured against a human life, 10 years is a long time. Measured against the half-life of a radioactive isotope, it's barely a blink. And so 1996, the year marking the 10th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, was a year of forgetting, and remembering.
Choosing to forget the lethal legacy gripping Chernobyl's surrounding areas, Belarus, the country worst hit by the April 1986 accident, has been encouraging people to move back into the Zone - the evacuated area most contaminated by the disaster. Old people who could not get used to life elsewhere have trickled back home; refugees, drifters, and civilization's outcasts have followed. At first they claimed abandoned houses far from one another, but a new phenomenon - crime - testifies to their lessening isolation. In early 1996, Arkady Nabokin, an 85-year-old farmer aiming for the world record in single-handed cattle farming, was murdered when he attempted to stop youthful thieves from stealing one of his 30 cows.
Yet the scientists remember. One of a handful of local scholars protesting the Zone's reemployment, renowned Belarussian chemist Ivan Nikitchenko calls such moves "irresponsible" and "harebrained." According to Nikitchenko, what was passed off as "deactivation" - the supposed removal of the top layer of contaminated soil - in fact amounted to merely turning over millions of cubic meters of dirt, which sent radioactive dust flying for hundreds of kilometers. In addition, the scientist maintains, contaminated cattle feed and milk products have been distributed throughout Belarus. As a result of these and other actions, the contaminated area has grown consistently over the last 10 years; Nikitchenko estimates it has increased by 68,000 hectares.
Chernobyl's anniversary year offered up a number of other striking disclosures. One study, conducted by doctors at the Gomel Medical Institute, found that children in the contaminated area were less healthy than average in every imaginable way, from their hearts and stomachs to their eyesight. The Institute of Radiation Medicine, home to proponents of repopulating the Zone, argued that most of these illnesses stem from stress and alcohol abuse rather than radiation exposure. To repudiate this claim, Gomel scholars added alcohol to the diet of rats in an ongoing experiment measuring the effects of food containing the maximum amounts of radioactive elements allowed by Belarussian law. Preliminary results show the rodents do better with alcohol, presumably because it inhibits the body's absorption of radiation.
Stationed in Ukraine, US scientists from the University of Georgia have discovered profound genetic mutations in the fish of the area. Animals that received the worst genetic injuries from the accident probably didn't survive to reproduce, yet carp in the region suffer from rearranged DNA and aneuploidy, extra DNA that does not belong in their genetic makeup. Surprisingly, these fish appear physically normal.
In the wake of Chernobyl, neither the milk, the fish, nor the children look any different. There are no eight-legged cows or two-headed babies. This helps people forget. Meanwhile, scientists in Ukraine are warning that all is not well at the reactor: the sarcophagus is leaking, and may explode again at any time.
Masha Gessen
[Original story in Wired 4.03, page 136.]
Cashing Out
While Visa USA Inc. broke new ground at the Atlanta Games as the first institution to implement a large-scale stateside rollout of smartcards, few would call it a success. Undeterred and claiming the Olympic smartcards were only a test - and could therefore neither succeed nor fail - Visa will undertake its next domestic trial in Manhattan early this year with Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and MasterCard. The reloadable cards may well set the standard for smartcards, which will ultimately supersede any of their magnetic-strip cousins. Visa plans to add credit and debit services as well as tracking capability for merchant-sponsored frequent-shopper programs. Mondex and Europay MasterCard Visa standards are being examined, but the issue of how to provide anonymity is yet unresolved.[Original story in Wired 2.12, page 174.]
Level Up
In August, Reuters reported that Sega Enterprises of Japan would be banning the use of software that depicts excessively violent and sexually explicit scenes. According to Sega spokesperson Munehiro Umemura, that report was in error.
Though Sega's own ratings system has been in place since 1994, the company has decided to up the ante. As of October, Sega has imposed even stricter ratings and tighter control over games produced for the Saturn system.
No national ratings guidelines currently exist in Japan, and a consortium of top game manufacturers has yet to decide on an industry standard. Instead, Sega has responded to cries from within its own ranks: subcontractors who help produce many Sega games have demanded that the company set itself further apart from the violent and sexually explicit gaming pack.
Sales appear to be holding strong.
C Is for Crypto
Should computer language be protected under the First Amendment? The answer to this question could be the death knell for many cryptographic wars raging across the US - and may well predict the extent to which the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of privacy will be upheld in cyberspace.
As Daniel Bernstein's suit against the US government languishes in court, the young UC Berkeley professor has moved for a preliminary injunction to challenge the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) that now threaten to keep him from teaching a cryptography class, due to the "dangers" represented by non-US students.
In a parallel case (Junger v. Christopher), Peter Junger faces a fine as high as US$1 million and imprisonment for 10 years if he chooses to discuss cryptographic software with foreign students in his "Computers and the Law" class at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio, without prior government permission. Junger sees this as a "paradigmatic example of a violation of the First Amendment." A decision in Junger's case is expected by early January.
