Title: Thinking Aloud

The ancient Chinese curse 'May you live in interesting times' seems to have been the motto this last year - at all levels.

Internationally the dot com gravy train ran into the buffers and vast quantities of investors' money disappeared into a black hole, never to be seen again. Sadder, and hopefully wiser, investors are now starting to ask for evidence of at least potential profitability before ploughing their money into new ventures.

Most interestingly, a friend who works for a major Internet backbone provider tells me of a change in the personnel for the surviving dot coms. She is a project manager in charge of scheduling the installation of customers' equipment. She used to have to deal with arrogant teenagers and twenty somethings who left college early without any qualifications in order to become millionaires. Now though, she deals with people in their fifties and sixties who know how to organise critical work for their company.

It seems that whiz kid programmers and network 'hackers' are out and people with experience of finishing projects are in. Sharpen up your CVs folks!

It will be interesting, though probably painful, to see what happens in the Internet in the near future. For the last five years its usage has been largely funded by venture capitalists. This has deluded many users into thinking that because they were not paying for their usage the whole thing was for free. Soon, they will have to pay for their use. The writing is already on the wall as advertising revenues decline and some of the free ISPs start struggling. The question is: 'do people get enough out of surfing to make it worth paying for?' Only time will tell.

This year also saw an interesting experiment in internet democracy as ICANN - the body which supposedly has the final say of the assignment of domain names - elected five members from the Internet community to serve on its board of directors.

The voting was electronic, and the constituencies were roughly speaking the various continents. Needless to say there were glitches, not to mention attempts by ICANN to rig the nomination process by submitting their own preferred candidates. In the event things proceeded better than could have been expected for the first ever mass international electronic election. The results were not exactly to the liking of some of the existing ICANN directors with long time ICANN critics Andy Mueller-Maguhn and Karl Auerbach elected by the European and North American constituencies, respectively.

I suppose it was entirely predictable, given that they have just run the first successful international electronic election in history, that ICANN have now set up a working party to see if they can get away with abolishing elections in the future. I suspect some people want to make sure there are no more embarrassing outbreaks of democracy!

Incidentally, there are supposed to be nine places allocated to elected representatives of the Internet community, but only five places were filled! This was not, as you might imagine, because there were not enough candidates, but because the election was set up to only fill five places. The remaining four seats are being filled by existing, unelected, board members who have earned themselves the sobriquet of 'Board Squatters'

Nearer to home we have had the struggle over software and business patents - should we go down the American route, or should software patents be more stringent. The jury is still out on this one, and users will need to keep the pressure up to prevent European patents from descending the slippery slope. You can be sure the big software companies will not cease lobbying for American style patents just because they have suffered one setback.

I believe it is still possible to make submissions to the UK Patent Office on this issue. The URL for the web page about this was published in the Secretary's report in the last C Vu.

In the UK we now have some of the most repressive Internet legislation in the western world with the 'Regulation of Investigative Powers Bill. Usually known by its initials, 'RIP', the bill gives extraordinary powers to government clerks and law enforcement agencies. Since we do not have a constitution, unlike the US, there seems to be no way it can be legally challenged. Make sure you do not lose your PGP key you could be liable to two years imprisonment.

The stunning lack of debate when this measure passed through the House of Commons was indicative of the abysmal ignorance of most of our elected representatives on matters pertaining to anything invented in the last fifty years.

Other matters affecting the computing community during the year included email spamming, denial of service attacks on internet servers, and e-mail viruses, worms and trojans. Of course much of the latter was self-inflicted (or at least Microsoft inflicted).

The irony is that the security dangers of linking your applications too closely to the underlying operating system were known and written about twenty or more years ago. Unfortunately, the lessons learned in running mini-computers, let alone mainframes, have been totally ignored. Karl Marx's dictum that 'Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." comes readily to mind when surveying Microsoft's achievements.

Sadly, it is Microsoft's customers who are doing the suffering, rather than Microsoft itself.

A pretty hectic year all told, but - in spite of the comments above - I think there is a positive balance sheet. The last five years have been pretty crazy, and could not continue. The reason there are so many weird things happening is because sanity is starting to return to the field, and the process is painful.

Some things will be resolved because we have to start paying for them, so we stop squandering resources. Spam, for instance will find ways of evading laws passed in blithe ignorance of the way the web works until the day people have to pay for their e-mail.

Some things will be resolved because of the technical and deployment advances. To cite one example, this year has seen the first tentative steps toward deployment of IPv6. Full deployment will solve a number of pressing problems in the address space and security realms.

And some things will be resolved because our field is growing up and moving out of adolescence. Most of the networking is built on tools originally designed when networking was confined to the academic community. The requirement then was open communication. But we are older now; we have found out the hard way that there are nasty people out there who get their kicks from destroying other people's hard work. This means we have to redesign our tools to protect ourselves as well as opening channels of communication, and the lesson is just starting to sink in.

Take, for instance, the sendmail program used overwhelmingly by mail providers. Until recently it was virtually impossible to configure it so that only a limited number users could send mail. As a result spammers were frequently able to use other people's mail servers to disguise their origins. The latest versions of sendmail have facilities to say just exactly who is allowed to use the server. To my mind this is a significant change in a program with a long and distinguished pedigree.

Well, time flies and the word count mounts up, so it only remains for me to wish you all a fruitful and happy 2001 - may all your odysseys reach their goal!