The Maturing of the Net and the Pluses and Minuses That Came With it.

 By I.J. Hudson

As the number of websites exploded so did the amount of information to sift through and to gauge its credibility.  The Internet was no longer the exclusive domain (sorry) if the white male geek.  The rest of us were joining the party, and by 2000 half of the netizens were female.  They used the Internet a bit differently from men, and in particular, were interested in health information for their families and themselves.

A group called the Alliance for Aging Research had been around for a few years and served as a clearinghouse for reliable health info. A lot of bad info promising cures for this and that was all over the place.  The Alliance is still around today.

It may not have been the first use of social engineering, but the “I Love You” virus certainly caused a stir. people were apparently eager to believe someone actually loved them, so they clicked on the email attachment.  That triggered a little program that sent the virus to everyone in the person’s Outlook Contacts.  Ah, sharing the love.

I interviewed a young CEO of an internet security firm about viruses.  The company was RIPTech; his name, Amit Yoran.  One of his quotes from my story: “We need to be ready to protect our infrastructure.” Yoran went on to become the National Cyber Security Division Director for Homeland Security, and then on to other things.

Cell phones, wireless phones, smart phones – whatever we call them ---- we had about 92M of them in the U.S. in the year 2000; now it’s more than 300M.  And about 26% of us use only a wireless phone – no landline. You can get more stats at the CTIA’s website.

AvantGo was an interesting mobile service that was trying to bridge desktops with the “almost” wireless world of Windows CE and Palm organizers.  Believe it or not these devices could store email and news.  When you synched – you got new stuff from AvantGo sources.  AvantGo is no longer in this bizz. 

In 2000, the music industry was busy shooting itself in the foot - and suing Napster.  The suit charged Napster was enabling piracy.  My, how the business model for online music has changed. 

Vision III Imaging is still out there.  I saw some of the neatest video at their place in Northern Virginia.  They developed MOE, a Moving Optical Element.  The iris of the camera was computer controlled for exposure and scanning – and the frequency at which the iris moved determined how much information would be picked up in the frame.  The results were impressive.  I would love to catch up with these guys….