Too Much Data
Its a digital wonderland out there. The media has taken this thing called the Internet and plastered it everywhere. Not a day goes by without something about it making the news. Popular opinion has it that its destined to be the all encompassing super information passageway that will allow total communication between everyone in the world and make the world so convenient that everything from banking to shopping can be done from the comfort of ones home. This thing called the Internet still has a lot of problems to work out before that day comes.
Before one can understand the problems facing the Internet, it's important to have a good understanding of its history and its nature. Websters seems to have a pretty good definition: "a utopian society having no government and made up of individuals who enjoy complete freedom."[Websters 1] This definition isn't for "Internet" though, it's for "anarchy," and though while it's good up to a point, it is flawed. The Internet is not a utopia. Sure, there's no murder, no taxes, and very few politicians, but misunderstandings are common, theft is rampant, and pornography is available and far easier to acquire than at a store. [Elmer]
The rest of the definition is good though. There is no central control center of the Internet and no one person can turn it off.[Elmer] This is by design. In 1957, shortly after the launch of the satellite Sputnik by the USSR, the United States formed ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency to make the US a leader in military technology. [Quarterman 143] One of the tasks taken on by this agency was to create a way for academic and government researchers to continue to do government work even if part of the communications network were annihilated in a nuclear disaster. The result in 1969 was ARPANet, which linked together a whopping four machines, from UCLA, Stanford, UCSB, and the University of Utah. [H'Obbes] ARPANet was an extremely rough first draft of today's Internet. There was no electronic mail (email), no newsgroups, no world wide web. The network was for the sole purpose of demonstrating how this network could be used to pass messages from one machine to another and even that required that the sender know the full path through all the computers that the message must go through before getting to the final destinations.[Quarterman 251]
That comment deserves more explanation as it is essential to an understanding as to how the Internet is put together. Every computer on the Net has some wire going into the back of it that is its physical connection. It could be a phone line dialed into an Internet Service Provider (ISP), as one at home would get, or it could be Ethernet, the high speed direct connection one would get into their computer at work or school. Either way, corresponding to each wire is a number called a 'subnet', which consists of 4 digits separated by periods.[Eddings 91] When a user attempts to access a computer halfway across the world, the data goes from the wire on the back of his or her computer, through a piece of hardware called a router which sends the data to the next wire, and so on and so forth through satellites, fiber optics, or whatever until it gets to the final destination. The Internet is made of thousands of these things. [Quarterman 6]
None of that is really that interesting except to one who leans towards the insanely technical. The other 99.9% of users are more interested in what kinds of applications the Internet can be used for. There really are several, and more uses are being thought up daily.
In the beginning there was only email and even that was difficult to use. Still, it was quick, efficient, and as reliable as the hard disks on the machines that kept and stored the data. Mail would never get lost or damaged in the transmission, as it could with postal mail (commonly referred to as 'snail mail' on the Net). The concept for email came from a person named Vinton Cerf, one of the originators of ARPANet. [Hobbes]
The next major service to come to the Internet was Usenet in 1979. [Hobbes] The concept is simple, a user writes a message and "posts" it to the appropriate newsgroup. A newsgroup is like a large electronic bulletin board that anybody can put announcements on. The announcement is then distributed machine by machines across the network so that others can read it and, if they so choose, respond with a message of their own.[Eddings 116] At the time of this writing, there was slightly less that 10,000 newsgroups on every topic imaginable.
From its creation, Usenet became an important tool for sharing information. People could post questions, documents, stories, articles, and whatever else they wanted and get a lot of feedback on from all over the world. The glory of Usenet is that anyone can post anything they want and there's nothing anyone else can do to stop them. There are no editors and no censors.[Kehoe 40]
The next major step in Internet technology was gopher, the predecessor to today's world wide web. For the first time, this allowed people to supply their information in a more permanent form and gave it a nice user interface. This early information service had a menu style interface where users could browse through levels of menus to find what they wanted. Because the menu items had the capability of not only accessing files on one computer site but also to send the user to other sites, the levels could become almost infinitely deep, much like voice mail. [Kehoe 82]
Thus far, the Internet was still for the most part ungraphical and still a tool for educational and research facilities. The few people that didn't fall into those categories were either those who wanted to see what the Net was capable of, or those who had discovered Usenet and had started their own message groups to converse with friends. Mainstream use was still several years away.
The service that gave the Internet the potential of becoming great was the World Wide Web (WWW). WWW was similar to gopher in the sense that it was a way to store information for later retrieval by others. The difference was that while gopher used menus to present the information and links to other sites, WWW used hypertext, where the user clicks on a word or words in the document to move on to the next information source. It also allowed graphics to be inserted with the text to make the display of information more pleasing. [Kovacs 44]
Now that that has been covered, the problems that the Internet faces and will face should start to make sense. With a few notable exceptions, all of these problems are caused entirely by the people using the Net and only a few are caused by technical reasons.
Security is a big concern lately for people who are just joining the rush to get connected. People are afraid that devious individuals may enter their computers and alter their data or find out personal things about them. With good reason. The Internet is a horribly insecure place to send data. All data is sent as raw text, meaning that using complex programs that listen in on the wire, people can record passwords, visa card numbers, health information, anything that the user should choose to email to a friend or fill out on a form. Information kept on a home computer that is connected to the Internet can still be considered safe, as practically all of the means people have of obtaining information involves the information first been transmitted over the Net. [Eddings 171]
An answer to this insecurity is the concept of cryptography. Cryptography allows users to encrypt their communications before sending it over the wire. There are tools available today that make this possible and are used widely among software companies and private development organizations though they aren't yet available with a nice user interface such that a typical user could readily understand it.[Kovacs 68]
There's a controversy right now about cryptography rights. The government has tried to push a scheme that allows private communications using a secret key that only the owner of the information and the government knows. This allows the government to readily decode any information that it feels it needs to. The people in the know realize that any scheme in which someone other than the receiver can decode the information is flawed and insecure. They liken it to being forced to give a set of house keys to the local police, or making double prints of pictures for the government. The idea is that terrorists, child pornography rings, and other such bad guys won't be able to evade the law by encrypting all their data but in the process it makes everyone's data insecure.[Kovacs 69]
The next problem that faces us today is the availability of pornography to minors through the Internet. As the Internet grew in popularity, people created message bases in USENet and started up gopher and world wide web sites with pornography on them. Since the Internet has no verification system to block access to certain people, for years this material was available freely to any minors who went through the trouble of learning the complexities of the Net enough to get to those sites. [Elmer]
The most common response to this by Internet users is that parents should sit down with their children and explore together. "The Internet has over two million people, you wouldn't let your kid wander unsupervised in a city of two million, why would you let them on the Internet?"[Moore 174] Many parents find this completely unreasonable. The commercial vector has come up with another response. Instead of always being there, run a software program that monitors every place the child goes and blocks access to sites with certain words in it so they can never see it. Many parents flocked to this alternative and life was good. Unfortunately, before this solution could really get going, the government came along and passed the Communications Decency Act, making it illegal to put any material considered 'indecent' in any forum where it's at all possible that a minor could possibly view it. The law, part of the recently passed telecommunications Bill, has caused the most massive protest the Internet has ever seen. Due in part to these protests, a federal judge has blocked enforcement on behalf of it due to it being 'unconstitutionally vague.'[Eff]
Usenet old-timers dread September. Every year at the same time hundreds of college freshman get their very first Internet account and go forth and make the same mistakes first time users always make such as posting to the wrong newsgroups, writing chain letters, insulting people for spelling errors and other silly things like that. [Jendro] Then America Online (AOL) came along and released three million new users onto Usenet at once. Three million users suddenly appeared doing newbie things. The effect was only made worse by the fact that due to an error in AOL's news software, every message was posted eight times. [Elmer]
The massive amounts of users on the Internet has also caused it to become very slow due to the amount of data being transferred over it. In January of 1996, the estimated amount of traffic was over 1.6 terrabytes.[Merit] That's roughly equivlant to 1500 encyclopedia sets. The time it takes to access and transfer information has increased dramaticallly. Thankfully, the National Science Foundation offers grants to universities wishing to upgrade their connection to a higher speed so that tommorow the Internet may be a faster place.
Growth is going to cause a problem much more serious in the near future. As mentioned earlier, every machine on the Internet has a number that uniquely identifies it on the Net. Due to the numbering system, only about 1.6 billion numbers can be assigned. It may sound like a lot, but in a few years the Internet could literally be filled up unless someone can figure out a way around the numbering scheme.[Jendro]
This has just been a brief rundown of the problems facing the Internet. More will undoubtably arise as the Net becomes even more popular and the government is further pressured to attempt to regulate this international entity. The future will be a very different place than it is today because of this interent in our lives.