Believe in Technology (Properly Controlled)

Citation

Arthur Mihram, G. (1999), "Believe in Technology (Properly Controlled)", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916cac.002

Believe in Technology (Properly Controlled)

G. Arthur Mihram

Introduction

Held from Monday, 4 May through Thursday, 7 May 1998 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the NETWORLD + INTEROP'98 Conferences also hosted three satellite meetings: the CUnity (or CommUnity) Conference and the ISP (Internet Service Providers) Forum, each on May 4-5, and the Engineers Conference May 6-7, 1998.

The conferences drew an enormous number (about 650) of exhibitors, dealing primarily with the latest products in electronic communications technologies. Indeed, the conference itself distributed a guide to all the "New Product Technologies" being exhibited, the listing citing over 250 among the exhibitors who had on display such novel products.

Therefore, if one were anxious to attend a conference with the intent of being at the forefront of knowledge on electronic communication technology, he or she could have spent the entire three days in the exhibition halls. (There is now, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, both a North and a South Hall, distinctly separate.) Of course, since the exhibitors included Microsoft and IBM Corporations, the computer connexion to the electronic communication technologies was also evident at the NETWORLD + INTEROP Conferences.

Thus, the conference readily displayed the highly touted and ongoing "convergence of technologies" (itself phrased within the CommUnity ConferenceNotes (CommUnity, 1998) as "data, voice, and video come together") as being well under way:

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  the postal service yielding to tele-phonic data streams;

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  the telegraph yielding to E-mail;

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  telephone yielding to digitised voice mail; and

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  the television screen yielding to the computer monitor.

Many might add that the term, "computer telephony" (CT) encaptures equally well this convergence and, indeed, this is quite satisfactory, provided that one recognises that telephony in a digital age is not the telephony of the preceding (analog and voice only) age. Voice and images, once digitised and transmitted along the (largely fiber optic) network from computer to computer, reveal that the resulting networks constitute an "electronic postal service": letters and reports (and voice) transmissions are also being accompanied along the transmission lines by the equivalent of both "periodical subscriptions" (such as, specifically, a weekly sitcom or, more generally, a cable channel) and "book orders" (such as video-on-demand) from the earlier age of the postal service.

Indeed, one of the forums at NETWORLD + INTEROP '98 was the ISP (Internet Service Providers) Forum, two days of presentations which overlapped one day of the three-day General Conference of NETWORLD + INTEROP with its own 40 technical sessions. The two-day Engineers Conference, sponsored by the Communications Section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers [IEEE], overlapped with the final two days of the General Conference, so that on each of four days one had either two or three concurrent sessions (conferences!) to distract one from the exhibits. The Engineers Conference provided its own published notes (Engineers Conference, 1998) which included not only the slide (or transparency) collections of most presenters but also the full-length papers of many authors who made presentations.

NETWORLD + INTEROP conducts annually a series of conferences at locations around our globe and included in 1998 two in the USA, two in Europe, two in Asia, and a final 1998 conference in Sydney, Australia: November 23-24, 1998. Overall, the stated primary purpose of NETWORLD + INTEROP is straightforward: in one word, education.

Though the Engineers Conference portion of NETWORLD + INTEROP is quite technical (e.g. on "broadband access," on the performance of TCP over ATM), anyone anxious to learn about these latest developments will be well served attending NETWORLD + INTEROP Conventions ­ provided that he or she is willing at the Engineers Conference to condone the typical engineer's fault of introducing acronyms (IP, TCP, ATM, ISP, SONET, QoS, ...) without feeling the need to provide the audience with the respective definitions.

NETWORLD + INTEROP can be found electronically at www.interop.com and the daily reports of any ongoing conference are available at http://www.interop.com/daily. The offices can be contacted either postally at P.O. Box 5855, San Mateo, CA 94402-9645, or by telephone at (800) 944-4629.

Questions of interoperability of diverse technologies are, of course, of increasing concern to information technologists and are themselves in the context of the convergence of technologies on which Danielle and/or I have earlier published (Mihram, G.A., 1974; Mihram G.A. and Mihram, D., 1997; Mihram, D. and Mihram, G.A., 1998) and reported (Mihram, D., 1985; Mihram, D. and Mihram, G.A., 1987; Mihram, D. and Mihram, G.A., 1995; and, Mihram, D. and Mihram, G.A., 1997). One should be equally ­ if not more ­ concerned about the obsolescence of each successive technological development, particularly as it regards the recording format (Sarnowski, 1998; and Sarnowski with Mihram, G.A., 1998). Hardly a decade has passed since both the introduction of the "floppy disk" and its superposition by the "hard disk"; yet, the mechanism (machinery) by which one can retrieve information stored on a floppy ­ or even to "translate" it onto the hard ­ disk is already gone or disappearing. Of course, most librarians are quite familiar with a similar difficulty resulting from the introduction of new technologies (e.g. microfilms and microfiches) in the pre-electronic age.

How are librarians going now to fulfill their role as archivists in such an unregulated technological environment?

Opening Keynote Address

At NETWORLD + INTEROP '98, the opening keynote address, presented by Eric Benhamou (President and CEO of the 3Com Corporation), included his question, "But is Technology our Enemy?", and gave one indication of an affirmative response: virtually every "intense Internet user ends up sacrificing from 30 percent to 70 percent of their time from alternative activities like sports, reading, sleeping, or [even] watching TV."

Audiotapes of 106 of the sessions, including Benhamou's presentation, at the four conferences of NETWORLD + INTEROP '98 are available at $10 (or $20 for extended two-part sessions) per session from Audio Archives Int'l, 3043 Foothill Blvd, Ste #2, La Crescenta, CA 91214 or (800) 747-8069.

The Destiny of the PBX

At the CommUnity Conference's Session on "The Role of the PBX in an IP World," Dan MacDonald of MITEC Corporation noted the change from an organisation's dependence on their own internal telephone exchange (PBX) to its conversion to the computerised local area network (LAN). Originally, administrators saw this as the need "to place a bit of data on a voice line"; today, they recognise the requirement "to place a bit of voice on a data line." He noted also the inclusion of graphical-voice interfaces and now the introduction of the video-conferencing camera(s) within a LAN, especially with the move to Internet Telephony (IT), which he prefers to term the "Information Telephony."

Mr MacDonald adds that "new hires" in Internet-connected corporations should be (already or soon) trained in both voice and data transmissions, not just one or the other. He made the interesting conclusion that digitised voice technology is already an ideal example of a "real-time application" of computing, one which we will all be imminently experiencing daily.

In the same session, moderated by David Passmore of NetReference, Inc., Karyn Mashima of Lucent Technologies added that, on the increasingly IP-based networks, security and access need to be coordinated. She noted that software programs for LANs and IP-based networks will likely include greater capabilities to mime human PBS operators' abilities to adjust to situations (e.g. by determining priorities among "1-800" callers in a queue, as if in a "self-healing" process) or by granting executives greater power to discriminate among competing callers without giving out "busy" signals which might prove too annoying among the privileged within properly authorised incoming callers. It seemed a bit strange that no direct use of the word "simulation" was heard to describe these software (programming) developments. After all, every discrete computer program is actually a simulation model of some decision-making process or procedure. Indeed, properly done, some of these self-adjusting programs might be better termed "emulations" than "simulations." At the preceding session of the CommUnity Conference, Jim Burton, CEO of C~T Link, spoke on the state of convergence, and preferred to speak of the impending "funeral" of the PBX in terms of a "communication/information fusion" of computers, telephones, and the Internet. His earlier paper is available at http://www.interop.com/Education/Pdfs/converg.pdf

Mr Burton spoke again the next day at CommUnity's session, "The Telephone's Last Stand," a session which moderator Michael Bayer of Computer Telephony Solutions announced by noting that the personal computer gradually is replacing "each and every desktop tool or appliance, from the typewriter to the card file to the desk calendar....[and, at last!] the telephone."

Convergence

Of course, the more complete view of "convergence" notes the rapid replacement by the desktop computer of the TV set, but, then, the TV was never usually considered a "desktop tool" in an office environment. Phil Thompson of Lucent Technologies added, in this same session, that desktops will become neither phone-centric nor PC-centric but, rather, "person-centric" or "transaction-oriented." We shall begin to view, he noted, every transaction (whether by PC or by phone) as just another datum.

At this same session, Kevin Asay of Mitsui Comtek Corporation also provided a lengthy list of desk accessories which are rapidly becoming computerised ­ Rolodex, phone, watch/clock, calendar, FAX machine ­ adding that the Internet itself is driving new access devices, such as Web-TV and telephone platforms.

The session prompted this attendee to ask from the floor whether the speakers were aware of the suggestion for standards ­ such as an enhanced electronic postmark (Mihram G. A. and Mihram, D., 1997) presented late in 1997 ­ which is governmentally secured and issued. Mr Thompson replied to the question, as might have been anticipated from a speaker representing one of the many extant multiple carriers, that the technology is being driven more by consumer demands than by government.

Clearly, this is true, but even the government (e.g. the US Senate's Committee on Governmental Affairs) is aware of the increasing danger (not only to national security but also to governmental transactions) of the lack of enforced standards (e.g. dealing with authentication and authorisation).

Similarly, at the conference's ISP (Internet Service Providers) Forum, Marilyn Suey of Assured Access Technology, Inc. spoke on many convergence issues dealing with authorisation and authentication. Her presentation, on "Standards and Policies Are the Drivers," revealed that much of the technology-driven communications industry is still not putting their own developments into proper historical perspective. Over the preceding three centuries, history records:

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  first, that Cardinal Richelieu, operating in an environment (seventeenth century) probably described well by A. Dumas's novel, The Three Musketeers, founded the national postal service;

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  then, in the eighteenth century, the founders of the American republic recognised that, in order to accomplish one of the six announced reasons ("to ensure domestic tranquility") for having government, there is a requirement for the government to provide post offices and post roads; and

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  then, in the nineteenth century, most of the world incorporated telecommunications (the telegraph) into the postal service, and then the nation-by-nation "PTT": Post-Telephone-Telegraph.

Clearly, the historical perspective reveals that we are in considerable danger (of ignoring domestic tranquillity) if we continue to be directed only by the marketplace, by increasingly deregulating the telecommunications industry.

Perhaps we are allowing the technology to pace itself so rapidly while unregulated that we are failing to ask ourselves whether we are aware that we need to have a governmental involvement in the operation and maintenance of the Internet. Similarly, the international acquiescence, to our American governmental infatuation with privatisation of the industry, appears misplaced, once this matter is placed in the historical perspective (Mihram, G.A., 1974; and Mihram G.A. and Mihram, D., 1997).

Telecommunicative Security

Fortunately, at NETWORLD + INTEROP's General Conference, the session "Firewalls Aren't Enough" recognised the problem of (if not the solution to) the restriction of electronic access. The speaker, Frederick M. Avolio of Trusted Information Systems, added that the "electronic/software firewalls," even if implemented by means of a peripheral computer with very limited access to itself, still face what he terms "the main threat" to one's institution's computer's files: namely, the insiders, one's own employers, whether they be disgruntled or "gruntled." He felt that the damage to one's (organisation's) reputation is a leading motivation for increasing one's computer security "beyond the existing firewall technologies."

James Allchin, Senior Vice-President for the Business Systems Division for the Microsoft Corporation, presented one of the keynote addresses: "Future Direction of Windows NT: the Foundation of the Digital Nervous System." Mr Allchin spoke about Microsoft's Windows NT 5.0 Workstation and how he views it as providing for a user essentially an "extended (digital) nervous system." This could be exemplified by the rapidly developing capability for "declarative programming" by which one may eventually be able to tell his or her computer the desired tasks to be (both immediately and at a future time) performed. One can, for example, keep one's calendar verbally, can even "broadcast" remarks (and self-images) over "networks" of addresses and even (selectively!) view the auditors among the digital audience. He views the computer as being capable shortly of planning around unplanned events (such as an executive subordinate's illness) or of planning events themselves (maybe even based on a set of subordinates' digitised calendars).

On Wednesday, a pair of sessions were conducted at NETWORLD + INTEROP '98 on Web security. At the morning session, Jonathan McCown of the Int'l Computer Security Association suggested that one should go beyond the firewall approach, becoming at one's institution an "intrusion detective" by thinking as if one's computer should become a "motion detector" which detects and intercepts arrivals having strange attributes. He suggested also that one should not only be an intruder so as to test the firewalls but also in so doing should use old passwords and search for (removed) Web pages. He added that computer security personnel would be well served to read the logs afterward; yet this is the very difficulty which academic librarians fear that security personnel are beginning to conduct in violation of the librarians' credo not to involve themselves in whatever a client is examining among the holdings.

Robert Kane, of Security Dynamics Technologies, spoke under the title, "Guard Your Network Like You Guard Your Home," and also added that one should monitor actively one's firewall logs. He favours a two-factor ID for computer access, Password/PIN + Biometric(s), a position quite contrary to lawyer Robert Ellis' letter (Ellis, 1998) in Internet Computing, distributed at the conference.

Ellis feels that "highly secured organisations have always had adequate non-biological means to identify persons who are authorised access" and that "the fact that biometric security is available doesn't mean that we should use it" seems astonishing. Has he not reflected that facial recognition (by, say, a guard at a gate) is in reality a "biometric" identification? Furthermore, if lawyers like Ellis fear the possibility that the government would be the agent locating abuses of/on the Internet, then surely he forgets that it is, after all, the government (rather than some "electronic posse" which one is able to gather) that we always expect to be the investigator and collector of evidence in criminal activity.

At the afternoon session on Web security, MIT's Jeffrey I. Schiller made probably the most knowledgeable presentation (on the subject among the several sessions throughout the conference) which dealt with the general topics of authentication and authorisation. Though he distinguished between attacks that are "passive" (an attacker just "sits and listens" once inside your site, or just, while there, "sniffs about") and those that are "active" (an attacker introduces changes within your site), Mr Schiller seemed to be thrilled at discovering how intruders do so without being detected (by finding a "back door" for an electronic exit even though not appearing among those who have logged into the site). Yet, the listener was hard-pressed to find in his presentation concrete suggestions for avoiding ­ or, better, for preventing ­ such illicit access.

When he was asked (Schiller with Mihram, G.A., 1998) from the floor whether he supports the use of governmentally secured postmarks and/or electronic watermarks so as to prevent unauthorised access to Web sites generally, he responded, "The market needs to demand security." But, as has been pointed out, he had noted earlier in his presentation that "Seatbelts would never have been required in automobiles because of market forces." In a follow-up question on this logical incompatibility of his positions, it was suggested that he should feel compelled to be much more in favor of a governmentally secured and/or operated telecommunications network.

We indeed need to recognise the shortcomings of our infatuation with deregulation, with privatisation and the concomitant, multiple carriers, particularly with their status as being essentially unregulated and/or without standardisation.

SONET

One of the most interesting presentations at NETWORLD + INTEROP '98 was that of Siegfried Luft and Gerald Neufeld, of Fiberlane Communications, Inc., on "Introduction to SONET." SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) is the international standard for transmission over optical fibers, including loop schemes in the network for automatic back-up for any fiber cut. Their slides are available at sig@fiberlink.com and are recommended to all who seek to learn more about the distinctions between the earlier copper-based and the present-day fiber optic cables.

The optical fibers were defined at BellCore in the 1980s and then SONET became the standard of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The error rates for copper were approximately 10^­6 bit errors per second, whereas the rate for optical fibers is about 10^­13 bit errors needing correction in a second.

He noted that fiber does not divide the available bandwidth, whereas with copper a desire to upgrade bandwidth (so as to be able, for example, to incorporate images in transmissions) may require laying a second wire. Security is also significantly enhanced with optic fiber, since it is difficult to splice an optical cable without rather obviously degrading performance.

Believe in Technology?

One additional session, "Defenses Against the Top 10 Security Threats," at NETWORLD + INTEROP'98 dealt with authorisation and authentication. Chris Klaus of Internet Security Systems cklaus@iss.net noted that there are still few laws on either hacking or copyright protection in the digital world, particularly overseas. He noted that security safeguards are access control (firewalls), authentication, and encryption, and he warns of electronic "browsers" which may record credit card numbers.

It seems disturbing that the sequel to Mr Klaus' presentation was that by Ray Kaplan (of Secure Computing Corporation) who felt that security on the Net is simply to be a matter of trust. He even voiced support for hackers who (illicitly) break into a computer system and thereby reveal its faults; he does not feel that such activity is criminal. But, surely, this depends upon whether such a hacker is revealing ­ each and every time ­ his or her discovery to the owner of that computer. Clearly, national security can be put at great risk with such uncontrolled hackers.

Of course, the conference's overall theme, "Believe in Technology," may itself have unintentionally contributed to a rather prevalent attitude, among presenters, to discount one's national responsibility and, rather, simply to trust. A member of the library community clearly can appreciate that safeguards need to be addressed seriously ­ whether a safeguard be for limiting access or be for securing an archival repository of humankind's knowledge.

Engineers Conference Notes, 98 Las Vegas (1998), ZD COMDEX & FORUMS, Inc., 303 Vintage Park Drive, Foster City, CA 94404-1138.

Mihram, D. (1985), "Toward a digital world: the 7th Annual Pacific Telecommunications Conference (PTC '85)," Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 1 No. 18, July/August, pp. 9-10.

Mihram, D. and Mihram, G.A. (1987), "Pacific telecommunications users: a spectrum of requirements," C&RL News, Vol. 48 No. 10, November, pp. 614-16.

Mihram, D. and Mihram, G.A. (1995), "On the convergence of technologies in communications," Library Hi Tech News, No. 122, May, pp. 6-8, 18.

Mihram, D. and Mihram, G.A. (1997), "EDUCOM '96: transcending traditional boundaries of information technology," Library Hi Tech News, No. 139, January/ February, pp. 7, 12-14.

Mihram, D. and Mihram, G.A. (1998), "Telecybernetics: standards and procedures for protecting the copyright of digitised materials," Internet Librarian '98, Information Today, Inc., Medford, NJ, pp. 196-203.

Mihram, G.A. (1975/1974), An Epistle to Dr Benjamin Franklin, Exposition-University Press, NY (Pompano Beach, FL). Still available from the author @ $5.00, ppd.

Mihram, G.A. and Mihram, D. (1997), "The enhanced electronic postmark: integration of military and commercial communications for the next century," Integrating Military and Commercial Communications for the Next Century, IEEE, New York, NY, pp. 1145-51.

Sarnowski, J. (1998), "Why digital will fail and what we can do about it," Internet Librarian '98, Information Today, Inc., 143 Old Marlton Pike, Medford, NJ 08055, pp. 226-29.

Sarnowski, J. with Mihram, G.A. (1998), "Digital archiving," Internet Librarian '98, AudioTape B3, Thursday: Conference Audio Services, 3901 Edenvale Place, Oakland, CA 94605.

Schiller, J.I. with Mihram, G.A. (1998), Audio-Tape No I80504-C34, NETWORLD + INTEROP '98: "Making the Internet more secure," Audio Archives, 30-43 Foothill Blvd, Ste 2, La Crescenta, CA 91214.

G. Arthur Mihram is an author and consultant, Princeton, New Jersey.