The FINGER controversy, a debate over privacy on the Net, occurred in early 1979 and involved some of the worst flaming in the MsgGroup’s experience. The fight was over the introduction, at Carnegie-Mellon, of an electronic widget that allowed users to peek into the on-line habits of other users on the Net. The FINGER command had been created in the early 1970s by a computer scientist named Les Earnest at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. “People generally worked long hours there, often with unpredictable
