Electronic Commerce :: social issues

electronic CommerceInitially, the Internet was designed to be used by government activity and academic users, but now it is rapidly becoming commercialized. It has on-line shops, til now electronic shopping malls. Customers, browsing at their computers, can view products, empathize descriptions, and sometimes even try samples. What they lack is the means to buy from their keyboard, on impulse. They could pay by credit card, transmitting the necessary entropy by modem but intercepting messages on the Internet is trivially easy for a clever hacker, so sending a credit-card numeral in an unscrambled message is inviting trouble. It would be relatively safe to send a credit card number encrypted with a hard-to-break code. That would require either a general adoption crossways the internet of standard encoding protocols, or the making of prior arrangements betwixt buyers and sellers. Both consumers and merchants could see a windfall if these problems are solved. For merchants, a g ood and easily divisible supply of electronic money volition locomote more Internet surfers to become on-line shoppers. Electronic money will also make it easier for smaller businesses to achieve a level of mechanisation already enjoyed by many large corporations whose Electronic Data sky heritage means streams of electronic bits now flow instead of funds in back-end financial processes. We need to resolve four key applied science issues before consumers and merchants anoint electric money with the same real and perceive values as our tangible bills and coins. These four key areas are Security, Authentication, Anonymity, and Divisibility. commercialised R&D departments and university labs are developing measures to address security for some(prenominal) Internet and private-network transactions. The venerable answer to securing sensitive information, like credit-card numbers, is to encrypt the data before you send it out. MITs Kerberos, which is named after the three-headed w atchdog of Greek mythology, is one of the best-known- private-key encryption technologies. It creates an encrypted data packet, called a slate, which securely identifies the user. To make a purchase, you generate the ticket during a series of coded messages you exchange with a Kerberos server, which sits between your computer system and the one you are communicating with. These latter two systems share a secret key with the Kerberos server to protect information from prying eye and to assure that your data has not been altered during the transmission. But this technology has a potentially weak link Breach the server, and the watchdog rolls over and plays dead.