Electronic Commerce :: social issues

Electronic CommerceInitially, the Internet was designed to be used by government and academic users, but now it is rapidly suitable commercialized. It has on-line shops, even electronic shopping malls. Customers, browsing at their computers, can view products, read descriptions, and sometimes even try samples. What they lack is the means to obtain from their get a lineboard, on impulse. They could pay by credit card, transmitting the necessary selective information by modem but intercepting messages on the Internet is trivially easy for a refreshing hacker, so sending a credit-card number in an unscrambled message is inviting trouble. It would be relatively safe to send a credit card number encrypted with a hard-to-break code. That would require either a general adoption across the internet of standard encoding protocols, or the making of prior arrangements between buyers and sellers. Both consumers and merchants could meet a windfall if these problems argon solved. For merchant s, a secure and easily divisible supply of electronic money will motivate more Internet surfers to fix on-line shoppers. Electronic money will also make it easier for smaller businesses to achieve a level of automation already enjoyed by many striking corporations whose Electronic Data Interchange heritage means streams of electronic bits now flow instead of cash in back-end financial processes. We need to resolve quartette key technology issues before consumers and merchants anoint electric money with the same real and perceived values as our tangible bills and coins. These four key areas are Security, Authentication, Anonymity, and Divisibility. Commercial R&D departments and university labs are developing measures to address security for both Internet and private-network transactions. The venerable answer to securing sensitive information, like credit-card numbers, is to encrypt the data before you send it out. MITs Kerberos, which is named after the three-headed watchdog of Gr eek mythology, is one of the best-known- private-key encryption technologies. It creates an encrypted data packet, called a ticket, which securely identifies the user. To make a purchase, you generate the ticket during a series of coded messages you exchange with a Kerberos server, which sits between your computer system and the one you are communicating with. These latter two systems share a secret key with the Kerberos server to protect information from prying eyes and to assure that your data has not been altered during the transmission. But this technology has a potentially weak join Breach the server, and the watchdog rolls over and plays dead.