Don't Write Off the Internet

AT&T says it had to start from scratch to create a state-of-the-art network capable of supporting agents and agent-based applications, such as shopping and smart mail. While there's surely truth to this claim, it may be slightly self-justifying or merely a reflection of how radically the company had to confront its own cultural biases. It doesn't mean, however, that everybody has to start from scratch.

The most noteworthy example of a more incremental approach is the Internet, which is nothing if not resilient. People are now working to add technologies such as security, encryption, and agent-passing to the Internet, and someday it could offer functions similar to those of PersonaLink.

The most immediate option is CommerceNet, a set of commercial services built on top of the Internet. A group of organizations heade d by Electronic Information Technologies (Menlo Park, CA), Stanford University's Center for Information Technology, and the Bay Area Regional Research Network (BARRNet), with a membership that runs from companies like IBM, Intel, and Pac Bell to Citicorp and American Express, is promulgating standards and technologies to address the Internet's weakness in security, lack of billing capability, and need for a good user interface. Using RSA public key encryption, the Mosaic front end, and other widely supported technologies, the CommerceNet consortium aims to ``business-enable'' the Internet and thus allow its commercial potential to be exploited. The key breakthrough is an enhanced version of the basic World Wide Web HyperText Transport Protocol, called Secure-HTTP, that will allow secure, authenticated comunication of information among Web clients and servers.

For agents, Safe-Tcl (Tool Control Language), a limited version of the Tcl scripting language for Unix, is emerging as an adjunct to the MIME (Mu ltipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) E-mail standard. Safe-Tcl scripts embedded into MIME messages can travel to remote systems and execute there with less risk of performing dangerous activities. Release 1.0's Jerry Michalski asks rhetorically, ``Is [Safe-Tcl] Open Telescript?'' He responds that while they are similar (robust and extensible scripting languages that use tunneling), they are emerging from different cultures and have different front ends. Safe-Tcl builds on the extensive Internet infrastructure, whereas PersonaLink has to start from scratch.