Tim,
No way. This is my personal information and it's obvious that the so-called ISPs cannot secure my information.
Lot's of utility companies already have personal information
on you which may include SS#, checking account#, and/or
credit card info. It's stored on THEIR fat servers, and,
if you have gas/electric/water/telephone coming into your
home, you clearly trust their security, right????
I don't see ISP security on the net as any different. Your
use of electricity is a thin client application. It
means you don't need a personal nuclear-power plant in your
own back yard. Your telephone exchange is relatively
secure (not the phone calls), and you don't have to think
about it. The phone company has the capital base and
the expertise to secure their own exchanges and divide
the cost among its subscriber base.
Your point about PRIVACY, however, is well-taken. You
know that your spending habits are already passed around
when you get mail-order ads etal. The internet will just
accelerate that entire process and, in the meantime,
start a much-needed debate about the nature of privacy
in our society and what we need to do to protect it. I
see privacy & security as two separate issues.
Oh, so you're saying that all of those credit card #s and other various personal information
The problem really is that most home PC's run Windows and
Windows itself is not secure. When an end-user downloads
a piece of mail (such as last week's worm from Manila),
it resides in the local memory of an unsecured box that
contains lots of secure information.
It's not too difficult to write something that becomes
resident on a Windows box, then searches the file system
for the Quicken directory then begins sniffing around
in the database for credit card #'s, right??? I could
see a port of rshd to windows that would monitor your
PC in your home on a continuous basis and capture everything
you typed in the keystroke buffer, parse it and save it.
Maybe a password to your brokerage account????
With a thin client, all that information is stored in a
secure environment. It could even be the same account
you already have with your phone company. You don't hear
about much hacking into IBM mainframes or Sun Servers.
There's a reason for that.
That doesn't mean that there will never be security
problems with the internet, but they will be more manageable, and, more importantly, the LIABILITY will
be with the ISP. They will have to take action to correct
the problem, just like the phone & electric companies do
today. Consumers like that. It's a good selling point
for secure e-commerce.
Remember all the phone scams with telephone credit cards???
If your bill show a bunch of calls you didn't make, you
just call the phone company & complain & they started a
trace. Meanwhile, you didn't have to pay. Just who is
it you are going to call when your 13g drive with all your
binaries, mp3, mpeg, and sensitive data files gets trashed
and, what's worse, a worm gets installed on the drive with
a pointer in your boot record?????
M$FT would have everyone believe that it's THEIR problem.
Then everyone has to learn the drill: buy a backup system,
buy backup software, install all of it or pay to have
someone do so, keep buying & installing anti-virus software,
remain constantly vigilant for every new virus, keep updating your O/S w/new security-hole patches, buy the new
O/S (when it is available) that will "fix everything" that
is screwed up in the current release, and finally buy some
more hardware that is required with this "fixit" O/S.
So, just how long do you think the consumer is going to
put up with this b.s. when they can buy a Nokia cell phone
with internet access, carry it with them, and order drugs,
groceries, dinner, household items etal. from their car while stuck in traffic and not worry about security. If
some crimial outfit breaks into an ISP, it's the ISP's
problem. I think that most people will be ok with that.
Really? PC sales are slowing?
This is going to really put a ceiling on Gates' "Windows-
centric" computing world. The PC started out as a hobbyist
toy. It's more sophisticated than that now, but it will
best be used for fun & entertainment, a whizzy TV/stereo,
not for e-commerce. That and the price/margins will cause
sales to be anemic, and the need for PC software to lessen.
The real problem is that we're using credit cards in a way
they were not intended. You are supposed to verify a signature for each credit card transaction. A different technology needs to be
used for secure remote transactions. This is independent of thin/fat clients.
You won't get an argument from me on this point. The
more secure each transaction, the better. |
