Only last year a group of clever teenagers at a famous English public school devised a programme which they put on the internet. Its task was simple: find any series of 16 digits that may be flying around and report them back to base. The smart lads from Highgate had worked out that most of the principal credit cards in the world had 16 digits; here was their chance to build a collection of them. Armed with the digits, our heroes embarked on a modest attempt to reflate the British economy, or at least those parts of it which trade in items most commonly associated with acne and hormones: hi-fis, guitars, keyboards, computers, videos and the like. Following telephone calls from puzzled purchasers in Tokyo, Alaska and Hamburg, Inspector Knacker did not have much difficulty in apprehending the villains. Once again the internet proved itself to be unsafe for actual commerce, as opposed to news about commerce.
Fast forward to 1996. Barclays Bank is launching what it claims to be a first for a British bank: an internet site dedicated to the needs of "expatriate and foreign national customers." Without embarrassment they have named the site: "http://www.offshorebanking. barclays.com." Formally, it will operate out of Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Jersey; but if you want to meet a human being employed by the bank to discuss, say, why your e-mail is always wrong, there is an actual building in Knightsbridge (where else) that houses this antiquated technological device.
The Barclays net site is certainly pretty; encryption has come a long way in the past year. But I wonder if the actions of the Highgate boys, and other famous hackers, have not put too many of us off the idea of putting sensitive or valuable information "out there." The thought that you might be able to pay your gas bill while you are stuck in Adelaide, or sell your electricity shares while carrying out important company work in Colombo, is obviously attractive. Those of us who travel abroad a lot know the frustration of time shifts which make direct communication with our bank difficult; and who could be blamed for giving up on the banking practices of countries where English is not widely spoken? But before the Barclays site really takes off, I fear that a great deal more will need to be done by banks to convince enough people that the internet is safe.
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there are now some 200 web sites provided by UK public sector agencies, including over a dozen emanating from the government itself. You can find an index of them on: http://www.open.gov.uk/index/oindex.htm. The recently established Environmental Agency managed to open its web site on the same day that it opened for business. And the European parliament and the rest of the Brussels bureaucracy are now moving on to the net. So what about Westminster?
If you type "Hansard" into your web browser you will be able to review the proceedings of the parliament of Canada, but not those of our own mother of parliaments. This is about to change. The information committee of the UK parliament has just published a report supporting the publication of parliamentary papers on the internet. The wonder is that it has taken this long. If you work within the high-tech parliamentary building of 7 Millbank, London SW1, something like an intranet already exists and is about to be extended to MPs and their staff. Assuming they have the right hardware in place it should be quite simple for parliament to put itself on the internet. I wonder what surfers in Tierra del Fuego will make of Dennis Skinner? Will the subtlety of Tony Banks's quips come across among the netties of Nairobi?
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my thanks to the Prospect reader who sent me a learned note about the middle kingdom. Beijing now requires pioneer internet providers to sign a document saying that they will not carry material which could be potentially harmful to China. Hmm. The restrictive software packages already being developed to protect children from undesirable words or images clearly have a very large potential market in authoritarian regimes. Who will write the package that will suit Iran? Or Saudi Arabia? Will we need one to keep Franglais out of la belle France? Predictably, it is the financial markets that seem to have had the greatest effect in moderating Li Peng's otherwise illiberal intentions. Key information providers have expressed concern that direct state intervention or sieving through the data might slow the system down considerably. Can you have the economic benefits of the information society without stimulating political liberalism? We shall see, but I rather doubt it. Once the information genie is out, it's hard to get it back into the bottle.
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here's a web site which I am sure many of you have been waiting for: the Journal of Basketball Studies has finally made it on to the net. You can find it on: http://cmr.sph.unc.edu./ ~deano/bball. If you have ever wondered about the importance of the original shooting angle, or the chemical composition of the hoop, you need worry no more. n
John Carr
You can contact the Net Position on: 100643.455@compuserve.com
