Paul's Tips

What is changing now that’s relevant to this discussion is the communications infrastructure. It may not matter how much capital Cisco, US West and others invest in the next stage of high-speed Internet access. Instead, it will be the smart group of vendors, telcos, ISPs and, yes, military conversions that will drive the next generation of global networks. For example, it is no secret that submarines can already communicate with optical transmission up to 4000 miles, and have been able to do so for some time. Could this mean that optical amplifiers will play a big role in the next-generation Internet? The “magic” will come to the applications that require high-speed access and microbrowser capability.

Too many corporate intranets are already tied to costly, slow portals that get bogged down in messaging traffic, much like AOL can with consumers on a busy e-mail day. However, as this generation of AOL “newbies” gets used to online services and begs to have the Web subsume their growing data appetite (more – for less money!), will these end-users really want to have their telephone, mail, TV, movie rental, virtual meetings and classroom-based education bogged down on one portal?

Taking the free hours included in the basic rates of America Online (AOL), CompuServe, or Prodigy and considering a daily mail exchange of 10 minutes a day, times five days a week, times four weeks, I get an on-line hour count of 3 to 4 hours per month. Now, before the flame mail starts again, this assumes that users are composing and reading messages off-line.

The extra 20 percent I added (taking the total to $12 to $14 per month) for perusing other areas of these services is predicated on the typical usage of a bunch of these nontechie users here at my office. Several of you suggested my math wasn’t based on an apples-to-apples comparison. Well, if you run any of the commercial services for 40 to 50 hours per month, yes, you are likely to get a whopper of a bill. I’ve had my share of $200 CompuServe bills in the past, but in my experience, most folks won’t use the services like this.

Of course, it is possible that they will. Give a user a free (or company paid-for) account and the old who-cares-what-the-charges-are attitudes appear. But this is pretty rare,

“Invasion of Email is more of a threat today just because so many more people are using Email,” says Phoenix attorney Michael Lechter, a specialist in intellectual property law at Meyer Hendricks Victor Osborn & Maledon.

“It used to be that everything was on paper and tucked away in a drawer someplace,” Lechter says. “Someone browsing through such information is much easier in its electronic form. Sure, there are passwords, but passwords can be broken.”

Another local intellectual property law expert in Phoenix is Sherman Parrett of Snell & Wilmer.

Parrett says, “There are very few Email installations that can’t be invaded by a devious computer hacker. If the system is totally internal to the company, it’s relatively easy to protect it with passwords and levels of access. If you want to interface with outside networks, however, it becomes more difficult.”

Various technological mechanisms can be built into one’s software program that tend to prevent their being copied, Lechter says in his “Intellectual Property Handbook,” published by TechPress Inc., an affiliate of the Meyer Hendricks law firm. These mechanisms can include encryption and non-standard formats.

Lechter writes, “Any physical security mechanism must be capable

There is little doubt at all that the Internet is changing the nature of communication. Some of the change is positive, such as (he says, modestly) Datamation’s CeBIT Online effort, which will let you visit the biggest computer show in the world without trekking to Hanover, Germany. I only hope our CeBIT effort adds a bit to the huge cache of valuable information awaiting IS professionals on the Internet.

But there are some disturbing communication issues with the Internet as well, which make me worry about the decline of civilized dialogue and the troublesome condescension of some fanatics-those with e-mail access but no manners.

MINDLESS FLAMES. Our Paradigm Shift columnists Sarna and Febish thought that the truly rude flak they were taking for suggesting that OS/2 might fail even though it’s a technically superior product was caused by OS/2 itself. Perhaps it’s something in the config files (SET ATTITUDE=CHILDISH.DLL). But no, it turned out it had nothing to do with Warp. It has to do with people who spend time on line obsessing in special interest groups.

In this case, a partial quote of what Sarna and Febish actually wrote was posted followed

Anyone in my position gets lots of mail, and since I’ve been publishing my electronic mail addresses for a decade, I get lots of E-mail as well. The ones I dread are not the ones that wonder if my parents were married. They are the ones with something along the lines of G=Joe/S-Bloggs/ O=Clueless/A=slowmail/C= us in the header.

The X.400 markers are a sure sign that it will take longer to write the address correctly than to answer the letter, and that the chances of it getting through are so slim that I might as well not bother.

One of the reasons for Internet E-mail’s popularity is that so many useful addresses are relatively easy to remember. Once you have been told that Barack Obama is [email protected] gov there’s no reason why you should ever forget it.

Well, perhaps that’s not a very useful address, but it is shorter, simpler and more memorable than the X.400 or even the snail-mail equivalent. And because of the Internet’s fast-growing popularity, X.400 addressing is doomed, as Jim Carroll explained in the last EEMA (European Electronic Messaging Association) Briefing.

X.400 networks won’t simply cease to exist, but they

E-mail on the beach. Querying a database from an airplane. Faxing from the Beemer. These concepts, both frightening and alluring, are among the promises of wireless computing.

While a lack of standards, high costs, and technology hurdles are inhibiting universal usage of wireless networks, new solutions are emerging to support wireless access to LAN-based E-mail. Third- party products that support a variety of LAN-E-mail packages are joining the vendor-specific wireless clients that companies such as Microsoft Corp., Lotus Development Corp., and Da Vinci Systems Corp. already offer for their respective E-mail offerings. According to industry analysts and vendors, this horizontal application could be the spark that ignites the wireless data-services market.

Wireless E-mail software that can access LAN-based E-mail is designed for the traveling professional who has LAN-based E-mail but does not want to maintain two mailboxes.

“If you are always wireless, then a product such as [RadioMail Corp.’s] RadioMail gives you a specific wireless mailbox so your point of contact is always wireless,” said Eldon Greenwood, director of product marketing for servers and infrastructures at Novell Inc.’s Groupware division, based in Provo, Utah. For those returning to an office with LAN E-mail,