 
30/06/1997
Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce
2001 -- SOME SPACE FOR AN ODYSSEY
by Miran Pecenik
translation by Michele Clara
ITALIAN VERSION
Miran Pecenik
is in charge of IT at Nuova Banca di Credito di Trieste. In the
Eighties he supervised the creation of the internal IT network for
the bank. In 1995 he has brought the bank on the Web, and devised
more than 80 pages, among which the one on Italian on-line banks.
In January 1996 he set the bank intranet with around a dozen internal
services. As a speaker, he took part to numerous conferences and
he has published a number of articles on Italian, Slovene and Canadian
journals. In 1996 he also contributed actively to a statistical
research on the use of the Web in Italy, receiving 1750 replies.
We are all asking ourselves where this thing called Internet will
take us in the near future. Nowadays we are watching , writing,
we talk, seing each other, and in a while we will be even shopping
without even leaving our homes. On-line work minimizes fixed overheads
and it is going to become more and more profitable, in spite of
the danger that a whole family of jobs (an example of which are
those US airline companies that have subcontracted their reservation
operations to South-East Asia) will be displaced and relocated elsewhere
in the world where costs are lower.
People more famous than me have been already addressing this issue.
What I would like to add are a number of conclusions on a greater
danger, that emerges from the advance of technologies on a broader
scale. Let's use our logic to browse through the developments that
are taking place. It is by now clear that by the year 2005 all available
addresses (e.g. 255.1.255.1) will be exhausted. Some authors forecast
that, two years later, all citizens of the world will have an IP
address.
The solutions seems clear: it would be sufficient to re-design the
whole procedure to allow each user to have 60 trillion addresses
each. Why so many? Have we been forecasting what will be happening
in the year 2350? Have the net-engineer been working on procedures
to allow for such a multitude of addresses? Home technology, leaving
Personal Computers aside, is rapidly turning to fuzzy logic. The
task is to make home appliances (but it is also the case, inter
alia, of automobiles) clearer, to allow them to learn the tastes
and habits of users, with the excuse of improving their effectiveness.
Washers and dish-washers that choose autonomously the right task
and the right amount of water, while the net provides the necessary
information, without even the need to look for them; the TV set
or the HI -FI system provide movies or music that are interesting
to the owner, and so on. We are still at the onset of a strategic
plan, that I feel is not yet shared by all producers, but that is
increasingly felt to be a novelty (or as a gadget, to put it better)
by larger numbers of consumers.
So far so good.....the latest news tell us that IDE and SCSI (7
units on line) technologies are dead, while new technologies will
enable us to connect a single PC to 64 or even 127 peripheral units.
A couple of examples: TV, VCR, HI-FI stereo, washer, dishwasher,
microwave, telephones, pacemakers, counters (some models exist that
allow for remote control), and so on. From the electronic log of
these appliances, it will be possible to go back to the habits and
tastes of each single user.
Telecommunications are increasingly more wireless, from the old
remote TV control, to keyboards, to infrared printer, to DECT telephones.
The latest technological attempts (from the AT&T telephone super-cables
or the use of electricity cables tested by Novell) haven't yet seen
the light, if they will ever do. During the last year, a student
at the University of Palermo and I, have been working on a statistical
project on the use of the Web in Italy. The task we had to face
was how to attract the largest number of visitors. We decided to
try and provide gifts; since our budget was very limited, I created
a free-of-charge news-by-mail service, called Netzapping. After
the user fills in the details of a questionnaire with 15 questions,
s/he has the opportunity to enroll on the news service choosing
from 10 among sites and topics.
Analyzing the log-in details I found out that visitors leave behind
data that identify them. I can follow them and see, on the basis
of the pages chosen, their choices, tastes and/or habits. If I insert
every now and then some form requests, I can find out with even
greater details what the user is interested in. I found it ironic
that, over the same period, there was a great deal of discussion
over the newly-drafted law on data privacy in Italy.
Personal computers are becoming more and more means of communication
for information, and less and less creative machines. The prevailing
use nowadays is connection to the Net to search for software of
information. Ownership is not yet very widespread; furthermore not
so many users have the technical competencies to upgrade regularly
operating system, browsers and plug-ins. Wouldn't it be much simpler
to identify an alternative avenue for the Net, like the TV set upgraded
with a black box and a simple input device?
Nowadays, in the Untied States, cable-TV stations offer access to
Internet on the channel they would otherwise use for teletext, thus
allowing users to navigate using simply their remote control. Because
of the need to upgrade to the new 16:9 standard, or other satellite
standards, everybody will probably be able to use these new-generation
televisions, including Internet-TV as a component, and not even
as an optional.
In the banking world the buzz-word is home-banking. So-called offshore
banks (in fiscal heavens such as Bermuda or Antigua) are already
offering this service in a very comprehensive and visible way; US
banks have been offering it bundled with other home-finance applications
such as Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money. In Italy half a dozen
banks have followed a soft approach fearing hackers' attacks and
waiting for (and to invest in) a National or International standard.
After the first wave of banking software and services on the Internet,
who will refrain from offering suggestions about providers and products
tailor-made to the interests of users, interests that can be readily
accessed from the electronic information left behind by the users
themselves? When we will need to buy a new car, we will not need
to go out and search for it; we will be, on the contrary, searched
after, on the basis of our tastes, on the number of members of our
family, on our financial capabilities. Science-fiction? Not really,
just a long sequence of bytes ...
If these are the ingredients of the cocktail, each ranked because
of its relevance, can we try and guess its taste? The electronic
heart of our home will be the personal computer (or maybe the TV
set). We will be able to connect to it every electric device. Every
device will have its own, unique Net address, probably not on the
Internet as we know it today, but on something simpler and more
global. Each consumer will communicate its own tastes to the producer
of the device (clearly on-line). There will be continuous verification
(free of charge) to allow the device to communicate with its producer
(an electronic "Trojan Horse") to provide the latter with all the
information necessary not only to improve the product, but also
to learn the habits of the user. Let us imagine, for example, a
Japanese producer of electronic appliances , computers and cars;
what will prevent such producer to violate more and more the privacy
of consumers.
Referring to the title of a famous movie, in the year 2001 will
there still be space for an odyssey? Individual, privacy, and initiatives
will be words of the last millennium. I don't want to sound excessively
visionary. It is now more than twenty years that I have been working
with computer, and more than three that I have been involved on
the Net, because I am convinced that this medium can have great
use, if it remains within some ethic boundaries.
The technological steps that I referred to above remind me of the
phases that led to the cloning of a sheep in Scotland. After the
event, there has been a great deal of movement and discussion, but
in the meantime the target had been reached. To say that something
is illegal, after it has been done, is long overdue. Other people
are already in a position to use it for their own objectives. I
truly hope that a similar fate will not be shared by Internet.
Copyright Miran Pecenik, 17-May-1997
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