Hal Berghel

Cyberspace 2000: dealing with information overload

F rancis Bacon is reported to have said that the three things that made his world different from that of the ancient Greeks and Romans were the printing press, the compass and gunpowder. It is instructive to note he didn’t mention the water pump, the rigid horse collar, or lateen sails—all of which were critical to the advancement of agriculture and commerce. One suspects Bacon was not interested in great technological tours de force per se, but in those technological advances that also stretched, or even tore, our social fabric and which irreversibly changed the way we looked at the world and each other. It was not enough to change the way we lived. To make Bacon’s short list, a technology had to change the way we looked at life. Even the abilities to irrigate land and make it fertile, and navigate a ship into the wind as well as away from it, did not qualify. Bacon was looking for things as important to the 16th century as systems of writing were for the ancient peoples and stone tools and controlled fire were for the pre-historic. We are in the midst of a technological revolution that will dramatically set our century apart from Bacon’s—the digital networks and cyberspace. Together with perhaps fossil-fueled transportation, electricity, and television, cyberspace seems to most satisfy Bacon’s requirement that a truly differentiating technology have far-reaching consequences for society. Of these four technologies, cyberspace is the only one that will come to be associated with the 21st century. This installment of “Digital Village” is the first of several columns that will look at the future of cyberspace in the next decade—cyberspace in 2000. We’ll attempt to foresee some of the important social issues, predict technological trends, and investigate promising, new, emerging technologies. We’ll even offer some modest speculation, more than idly if not with perfect insight. We begin with the challenge of information overload on cyberspace.

Protecting ownership rights through digital watermarking

The Internet revolution is now in full swing, and commercial interests abound. As with other maturing media technologies, the focus is moving from technology to content, as commercial vendors and developers try to use network technology to deliver media products for profit. This shift inevitably raises questions about how to protect ownership rights. Digital watermarking has been proposed as a way to identify the source, creator, owner, distributor, or authorized consumer of a document or image. Its objective is to permanently and unalterably mark the image so that the credit or assignment is beyond dispute. In the event of illicit use, the watermark would facilitate the claim of ownership, the receipt of copyright revenues, or successful prosecution. Watermarking has also been proposed for tracing images that have been illicitly redistributed. In the past, the infeasibility of large-scale photocopying and distribution often limited copyright infringement, but modern digital networks make large-scale dissemination simple and inexpensive. Digital watermarking allows each image to be uniquely marked for every buyer. If that buyer makes an illicit copy, the copy itself identifies the buyer as the source.

Watermarking cyberspace

The use of watermarks is almost as old as paper manufacturing. Ancients poured their half-stuff slurry of fiber and water onto mesh molds to collect the fiber, then dispersed the slurry within deckle frames to add shape and uniformity, and finally applied great pressure to expel the water and cohere the fiber. This process hasn’t changed too much in 2,000 years, even with the benefit of automation. One by-product of this process is the watermark—the technique of impressing into the paper a form, image, or text derived from the negative in the mold, as the paper fibers are squeezed and dried. Paper watermarks have been in wide use since the late middle ages. Their earliest use seems to have been to record the manufacturer’s trademark on the product so that the authenticity could be clearly established without degrading the aesthetics and utility of the stock. In more recent times, watermarks have been used to certify the composition of the paper, including the nature of the fibers used. Today, most developed countries also watermark their paper currencies and postage stamps to make forgery more difficult. The digitization of our world has expanded our concept of watermarking to include immaterial, digital impressions for use in authenticating ownership claims and protecting proprietary interests. However, in principle, digital watermarks are not unlike their paper ancestors. They signify something about the token of a document or file in which they inherit. Whether the product of a Fourdrinier paper press or a discrete cosine transformation, watermarks of varying degrees of visibility are added to presentation media as a guarantee of authenticity, quality, ownership, and source.

Identity theft, social security numbers, and the Web

M A R TI N M A YO When one changes employers, as I have recently, the different institutional and cultural attitudes become obvious. For example, consider salary-benefit packages. From my perspective, as an academic for the past 20plus years, employers seem to consistently bear about the same institutional cost for benefits— about 25% to 30% of one’s salary. This is not to say that everything is equal; different employers emphasize different benefits options—a great group health plan may come at the expense of greater pension contributions, and so forth. But in my world, employer commitment to employee benefits appears to be a constant. What does this have to do with identity theft, social security numbers, and the Web? Well, one of the institutional differences I noticed with my current move was the widespread use of SSNs as primary keys within university administration, municipal and state government, and a good percentage of utility and communication companies. In my effort to explain to sundry administrative folks just how dangerous the practice of using SSNs as primary keys and authenticators in their databases is, how it exposes the employees and citizens to unnecessary risk. I composed what became the first draft of this column. The use of SSNs for purposes other than that for which it was intended is an exceedingly bad idea. This point has been made many times. Add the Web, and we have the makings of a disaster that makes the recent Y2K computer problem pale in comparison.

The two sides of ROI: return on investment vs. risk of incarceration

Legislative mandates potentially replace CIOs primary concerns of technology risk management with the possibility of serving jail time.

Email—the good, the bad, and the ugly

Electronic mail has become the unexciting and mundane electronic communication medium we love to hate. It wasn’t always that way. Hate is a fairly recent emotion. Email has been with us in one form or another since the earliest days of computer networks and bulletin board services. From inauspicious beginnings, it became one of the three “killer apps,” along with Telnet and FTP, that gave the Internet its momentum. Since the early 1980s, the popularity of the Internet and email have surged together. Since the 1970s, email has evolved into the communication tool of choice for information technology academics and professionals. By the 1990s, the popularity and ubiquity of email throughout the rest of academia and high-tech industry, established it as a communications standard within those areas as well. It appears likely that the current wave of online service providers will soon extend this standard to the rest of the network-connected world. As email has evolved, we have come to surprisingly limited consensus regarding the best and worst uses of the technology, and whether it can ever overcome its weaknesses. In this column, I try to summarize what seems to me to be some interesting aspects of email, particularly as it relates to the phenomenon of information overload and some thorny privacy issues.

The discipline of Internet forensics

A well-defined field of study and practice has evolved as a result of network hacker activity.

Wireless infidelity I: war driving

Although WiFi technology security vulnerabilities are well known, the extent of these vulnerabilities may be surprising: War driving experiences identify many potential points of entry.

Hiding data, forensics, and anti-forensics

Delving into the digital warrens for concealing data.

The Code Red Worm

Malicious software knows no bounds.