What if there were a flaw so fundamental to the Internet, that one person could hack into anything and everything? Imagine that one person could gain access to every single piece of email, every single bank account login ID and password. If it were possible, that person would have unimaginable power over the entire world's web commerce. There would be no security. There would be no stability, and markets would come crashing down all over the world, causing economic ruin to dwarf what's happening in today's markets. A person with this power would be able to hold the world hostage in a way no Bond villain ever could.

The crazy thing is that this is no hypothetical exercise, this is no Tom Clancy story line. This flaw in the Internet actually existed, and it was discovered by a lone computer consultant working out of his apartment. The events that transpired tell the tale of how this man found the flaw and decided to engage the help of the DNS community to work in secret to find a way to fix the flaw. It was a race against time to find a fix and patch the Internet before it was too late.

In an article titled "Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends the World Wide Web," Wired Magazine online tells the story of how this disaster scenario nearly came true. It's a fascinating read that sounds like the stuff great suspense movies are made of. Only it came that close to actually happening.

- Hap

Back in 1945, a gentleman by the name of Vannevar Bush (an MIT faculty member and a science advisor to Franklin Roosevelt during World War II) pondered the nature of his research: he observed that he spent much of his time just looking up what other people were doing in his field before he even got to the point where he could start making meaningful contributions to the field.  As a solution to this problem, Bush proposed a device which he called "memex" (for memory extender) that would be able to store the sum total of human knowledge, and if one had a question on any subject, one only needed to consult this device.  Look at his description of the memex, and keep in mind that he came up with this idea in 1945, before computers with keyboards and display screens where even on anyone's drawing board:

"A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

"It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

"In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely"

There's more to the description; in fact, he published his thoughts in an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think" in July, 1945.  A very interesting read.

A footnote to all this is that Vannevar Bush is widely credited as being the conceptual inventor of the Internet--that's what the memex really is, after all.  The irony is that when there was talk in the 2000 presidential election that Gore "invented" the Internet, Bush could very truthfully claimed that it was a Bush that really started it all.  :)

- Hap Aziz

Before there was an understanding of the vacuum of space (that is, the almost complete emptiness between astronomical bodies), there was a theory that a substance known as "ether," filled the void, and that substance was necessary for the transmission of light (all of that having to do with the thought that light was a wave, and waves need to travel through some medium--but that's a topic for a different post).  It is from that definition of ether that Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center came up with the name for his idea to connect computers and other resources together: Ethernet.

It was on May 22, 1973, that he wrote his memo on how to connect the new Xerox "personal computers" to the printers at their facility.  The original diagram Bob sketched out depicts the use of "cable ether," "telephone ether," and even "radio ether" as the connection infrastructure, and we can see where that has brought us today.  In fact, I'm using "radio ether" right now to access this blog software from my laptop computer.

Wired Magazine has an interesting article about Bob Metcalfe online titled "The Legend of Bob Metcalfe."  It's well worth the read--especially how he predicted the Internet would collapse in 1996... and then how he quite literally ate his words when that didn't come to pass.

- Hap Aziz

There’s an interesting buzz among the publishers of primarily newspaper and magazine print media: Print is dead. Yes, that’s a bit of a sensationalist exaggeration, but surprisingly, it isn’t far off from the truth of the situation with which the publishers must cope.

Indicator #1 – The Washington Post
For the past several years prior to 2004, circulation of the newspaper was holding reasonably steady at roughly 770,000 subscriptions per year. However, by June of 2004, the number of subscribers dropped by nearly 50,000, and today the paper is continuing to lose several thousand readers every month.

In September of 2004, the Post ran six focus groups with the objective to determine the cause of its loss of readership, identified to be in the economically important 18-34 year old demographic range. The results were startling, and they may be categorized as follows:

• There should be deeper coverage of the proffered subject matter
• The navigation was too confusing and should make more sense
• The idea of old newspapers piling up in a corner is extremely unappealing

The publishers of other dailies are noticing similar sentiments among their readers, and the decline in subscribers is so distressing that newspapers such as Newsday and the Chicago Sun-Times admitted to falsely inflating their readership numbers.

Indicator #2 – Examining the Media
At about the same time that the Post was running its focus groups, the Online Publishers Association conducted a Generational Media Study (http://www.online-publishers.org/pdf/opa_generational_study_sep04.pdf). This study of 18-54 year olds (subdivided into 18-24, 25-34, and 35-54 year age brackets) gives some insight into the results of the Post focus groups:

• 46.5% of all respondents rate the Internet as their top media choice category. Newspapers was rated the top media choice category for only 3.2% of the respondents.
• 73% of respondents rated the Internet as “an important part of my day” while 27% of respondents felt the same for newspapers (11% said so for magazines).
• The Internet is the only medium in which respondents perceived growth in usage—that is, users reported using the Internet more now than they did one year ago.

The Medium is the Message, with Apologies to Marshall McLuhan
In examining the results of the Post focus groups, it might be reasonable to conclude—incorrectly—that young people are becoming more and more disinterested in reading to acquire information. By considering the Post results in the context of the OPA study, a different picture emerges: one in which reading is a hypertextual activity connected with freely available information content presented in a digital rather than analog environment.

The “MTV Generation” we heard about several years ago characterized by short attention spans and a predilection for simultaneous multi-sensory inputs is the Internet generation of today, absorbing information in a gestalt of sights, sounds, and symbolic abstractions. It is not coincidental that the MTV Generation matches up so well with the 18-34 year old age group… and this same group makes up a majority of students in most higher education institutions.

The question of newspaper relevancy gives way to a more fundamental information management question in the higher education landscape. How might our institutions parse and package information so that, first, students will find it accessible and wish to access it, and, second, students will retain their connection to the information if not retaining actual possession of the information itself. Reviewing the Post focus group results should provide guidance.

Deeper subject matter coverage
In a 1945 article entitled “As We May Think” published in the Atlantic Dr. Vannevar Bush (Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II) wrote of the “memex,” a fictional machine that would hold the sum total of all human knowledge.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior

Dr. Bush was the first to describe hypermedia, and his memex concept could be considered the conceptual parent of the World Wide Web. His whole point in presenting memex and its operation was to describe what he considered to be a more natural methodology to search for and acquire information. The hypermedia relationship of information on the Web facilitates Bush’s methodology while providing deeper subject matter coverage than newspapers or other print media can offer.

Clearer navigational architecture
In the Post focus groups, the target demographic made repeated reference to the fact that the organizational structure for navigating through the newspaper made little sense. The idea of placing more important information “above the fold” or creating a “center of visual impact” are becoming increasingly less effective in directing the attentions of readers in the younger (18-34 year old) age bracket. Adding to user confusion in the digital world, Web designers sometimes mistakenly apply print navigational structures to Web pages.

As Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen observes, the Web is “different from television, it's different from printed newspapers, and it's different from glossy brochures, so you cannot create a good website out of content optimized for any of these older media.”

True information portability
The last point regarding the desire not to have accumulations of newspapers to deal with seems somewhat humorous, but it is important to consider the implications of information portability in designing effective Web presences. The value of data to the student-age end user is almost in direct proportion to the end user’s ability to “own” the data by transporting it from environment to environment regardless of the data type. MP3 and WMV audio files, Flash animations, text and PDF files, JPG picture files; all may be burned to CD or DVD and stored on easily accessible über-email systems, or copied to shirt-pocket jump drive devices. What is clear is that the user wishes to carry hundreds of megabytes of information personally, but the information must be stored in digital format to facilitate portability and convenience. Consider that users have access to information via the Web, WAP enabled cell phones, and handheld PDAs—how might we design across the board to meet a truly diverse end user population?

The bottom line is that our student population demographic is strongly similar to the demographic of the declining newspaper and magazine readers in both information needs and expectations regarding the presentation of that information. Building effective websites for this end user will likely require considerable rethinking of the communication metaphor. The administrators that plan and manage communications to student populations need to take notice: their intended audience is no more impressed with paper course catalogs and printed class schedules than they are with newspapers and magazines. These new-media savvy students are coming into institutions with some firm expectations of what they should be able to access electronically, and if we cannot meet these service expectations, they will search for satisfaction elsewhere—the irony being that their searches will take place from the comfort and familiarity of their own desktops.

It should come as no surprise that even though readers are abandoning paper newspapers and magazines in increasing numbers, these same readers are still obtaining the content of those publications online and in most cases at no cost. This easily-accessible free content model cannot be left to a hit-or-miss process of Web design in higher education that simply transfers the frustrations of the paper world to the online world. We must explore how the application of Information Architecture analysis techniques can help us create a Web map that end users will understand and appreciate if we are to anticipate the needs and desires of our web end users.

- Hap Aziz

Many of us have an innate sense of "justice and fair play."  That is, I know a lot of people that can't stand to see someone get away with something, especially if it is unethical or illegal.  Sometimes there's nothing we can do as we see someone getting away without any penalty for their actions, and that really stinks!

So it's nice to see some computer hackers getting hacked themselves....  Here's an article on Wired.com that tells the tale of Joel Eriksson, a computer security expert who finds security holes in hacking software.  He finds vulnerabilities and exploites the holes to upload his own "malicious" code into the hackers' computers.

Is the best defense truly a good offense?  As the article points out, there might be some legal gray area here, but it sure does feel good to know hackers now need to watch their backs.

- Hap Aziz

Technology continues to infuse every aspect and element of our lives.  Privacy issues mean something different today than they meant 10 or 20 years ago, and certainly individuals from 100 and more years in the past would have a difficult time even comprehending what privacy means to us--this instant messaging, always cell-phone connected, email obsessed culture.

Consider the new GPS technology that is likely to make its way into cars in the very near future.  This is not merely an information source for the driver and passengers of the car.  Rather, it is a two-way device that is always sending trip information back to a central machine server somewhere in the world.  What is the impact on consumers?  For one, we're told that there will be a variety of beneifts to make the inclusion of this feature a "must have" for automobile shoppers.  For example, suppose your car has been stolen.  With a simple call to the "Car Security Office" for your vehicle, you can have the car both disabled and immediately located.  Why, that's a lovely feature, to be sure... but it begs the quesiton as to what else can be done.

Here is a darker example.  With the two-way GPS capability, those helpful folks at the "Car Security Office" can track the time and location information of any car in their charge.  In other words, someone will know exactly where you've been and when you've been there.  So if you pass a certain "checkpoint" at a particular time, then you cross another checkpoint, a simple math calculation can determine whether or not you've been speeding.  Be prepared to receive that ticket in the mail ( or email, as the case may be).  Those red light cameras don't seem so sinister when you think of where technology can take us.

The truth is, all that technology that gives us so much information customized to our personal preferences (I love that Amazon.com can recommend books to me that I would like to read) does so by observing us and our desires and behaviors.  What went unnoticed in years past, giving each of us a societal "clock of invisibility" of sorts, is now a part of the information infrastructure system consisting of numerous databases, all tied together through the Internet.  We can no longer hide in the shadows, because the shadow spaces are disappearing at an ever increasing pace.  We've all heard the argument "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide."  While there is a certain logic to it, does that account for depth of the human spirit's need for privacy--not to hide malicious deeds--but simply for privacy's sake?

- Hap Aziz

When we think of computer network security, the most common picture that comes to mind is that of the information technology professional working with a rack of servers and routers in a network "closet" somewhere, often in some large office building, with people rushing between offices and cubicles, purposefully about their business.  But that's not the only picture we should have.  Take a look at the linked article here, for example.

Computer networks, along with the associated network security challenges, are part of the fabric of our civilization--and as such, the networks are found everywhere, even in the sky.  Of course, this means that the work of computer network security specialists has direct impact on the physical safety of all sorts of people in all sorts of circumstances.  If you are interested in a career in computer network security, this is certainly an important point to consider.  Are you willing to take on the responsibility?

- Hap Aziz