But, will the public stay interested in the Internet? In my brief conversation with Professor Spafford, he says that it depends. If the Internet offers quality services people want, and at the right price, sure they will. If they find it to be a valuable service, it will stay popular. I guess the answer to this query is that only time can tell. It depends on the balance between the Internet providers and their users.

The Internet seems to be the next logical step in America’s information hungry rampage. It started with the pony express and has since escalated to integrated cellular phone/faxes/beepers (a la Apple’s “Newton” and AT&T “6300”). The Internet is not limited to words written on a piece of paper, as faxes are, it is not limited to voice conversations, as cellular phones are, and it is not limited to a phone number and a 5 line message, as some beepers are. The Internet can transmit any series of ones and zeros between any computers to which it is connected. The Internet doesn’t care if it’s a fax, a digitized voice, a porno-graphic picture or a live UNIX “talk” session, the TCP/IP protocol suite handles it all seamlessly. It’s the epitome of connectivity! Whatever you want, whenever you want it, and whatever format you want it in. You don’t have to worry about getting the latest version of a software package before the shop closes because FTP/WWW/Gopher sites are open all day, everyday. The Internet never sleeps. It’s kind of like New York, but a little bit cleaner, and the high crime rate isn’t so obvious.

Of course, with the influx of new users onto the eighth wonder of the world, there is bound to be some friction. Computer crime will probably increase. The Internet is a wonderful place, when all of its users are educated individuals who do not mean harm to anyone. They just want to access data, compare notes with colleagues, and play solitaire once in a while. It is a system based on trust. But when fiendishly minded people see the Internet as an untapped resource, ripe for the plucking, we have a problem. The Internet was not designed with dishonest users in mind. Its protocols are quite old, and their dissemination is publicly available to any and all who care to read about it. Over the years, hackers have examined protocol implementations in search of security bugs, while honest people have contributed patches and improvements. But software vendors have been slow to release patches and system adminstrators have been slow to install them. As a result, hackers have been able to share their discoveries with their friends and take advantage of holes for quite some time before they are patched. Another major problem with the influx of diverse individuals onto a homogeneous network, is what the users bring with them, their views, attitudes, virtues and vices.

While talking with Professor Spafford, he recounted a tale of a math professor here on campus who was outraged by some of the more risqué images that a student was accessing via a WWW site in the Netherlands. He wanted to know how we could stop this kind of pornography from invading our pillar of education that is Purdue. Well, that’s a tough one. Purdue University Computing Center (or PUCC, “puck,” for short) has had numerous complaints of students wasting network bandwidth “MUDding,” or engaging in pseudo-Dungeons & Dragons style games accessed via telnet, and was forced to do something about it. Purdue employs Cisco brand routers which can be programmed not to accept certain types of packets from certain machines. The problems with this were: a lot of the code that runs these games is so user-configurable that it can change the game’s address on-the-fly and there are so many routers on the campus, it is possible, using traceroute and other such utilities, to direct your packets to routers that

are off the beaten path. In effect, the Internet is so open, that anything is possible. Trying to block access to one Internet site is analogous to trying to dam the Mississippi River. If you do not build the dam correctly, the water will just flow around the sides, and continue it’s course.

The Internet is so huge, that you cannot possibly block out one WWW site absolutely, and to try takes more system programmer energy and clock cycles than it is worth. And who is to decide which users have the privilege of accessing more mature material? On the Internet nobody knows if you’re a fourteen year-old, pre-pubescent eighth grader, or are a fifty year-old woman. The problem with such subjective, moralistic legislation is the same on the Internet as in real life: who decides the standards? Should there be an Internet “ratings committee?” This clearly violates the basic premise of the Internet, the free exchange of information. I have been an advocate of the “think for yourself” movement. It states that each individual should make up his or her own mind about how they feel about certain morally questionable items. In talking with Professor Spafford about this subject, he suggested that to help combat this problem, maybe the Internet should be broken down into several subnets. This way, whoever does not wish to be accosted by certain items that they find offensive, such as digitized picture archives or dirty joke servers, will not be forced to share a domain name with such services.

I had hoped to summarize in a few pages just what the Internet is and where it’s going. But, as it turns out, the Internet is so incalculably massive, it is whatever each user sees it as. It is possibly the only international service, besides garbage collection and government, that serves the needs of people from system programmers to people who cannot program their VCR. People from all walks of life talk with each other, in the purest form of communication. By this I mean people talking to people. Human beings communicating without regard to their physical appearance, spoken accent or speech impediment. You only hear what they say - not how they say it or how they act when they say it. It is almost as if the problems of society, race, color, and creed, to name a few, have been left at the doorstep. However, as the Internet continues to grow and more people use it, it will slowly start to take on the characteristics of the culture and people that created it, much like the relationship between parents and children. Some of the social issues of today may be waiting in the wings to be tackled online tomorrow.

The next time you see someone’s insipid post and are just seconds away from filling that person’s mailbox with molten mail, sit back, take deep breaths, and contemplate your navel. You never know to whom you are writing, because, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Woof.

 

Biography

Craig Pfeifer ( [e-mail]) is pursuing his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Purdue University. Outside of the classroom, Craig is involved with his local ACM chapter, and the Purdue Science Student Council, where he edits their newsletter. He was also recently accepted as a residence hall counselor.

This article originally appeared in Crossroads 1. 1 (September 1994), “Internet.”