Reviewed by: Robert Bruen, MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision
Systems. May 17, 2000.
Think about be the extent of network - it's everywhere. And it's fast,
not just when you send out something, but when that something
generates a response. It's convenient - put up a web site and your
customers come to you. Make a change and it is there immediately
for everyone to see. What more could a business want?
For starters, trust and risk are elevated as concerns. Knowing you
customer is more difficult. Keeping track of them is bit harder. And
by the way, understanding the technology is a bit beyond opening that
little lemonade stand. The issues go beyond just security, not that
security is a small feature of internet commerce, because without secure
transactions there will be no internet commerce. However, security
is about trust and risk. As Bruce Schneier puts it, "security is a
process." Nothing is totally secure, but rather one engages in a
constant
assessment and management of risk, making tradeoffs every day. Underneath
this approach is the problem of trust.
Trust is a fundamental piece of our interaction with other people. When
it is broken, it is very hard to repair. Think about money for a moment.
The US currency has been off the gold standard since Nixon. The money
in your pocket is only worth as much as there is trust in the US
government to back it up. Of course money is important to any business
venture, so trust requires procedures, rules, regulations and laws
to govern how the exchange of money for goods and services happens. For
the most part, this is all well understood. Now, enter business on the
net - not so well understood.
Jean Camp has pulled together the technology, commerce and the ideas of
trust into a wonderful, readable book. She clearly understands the
technology as she explains the basics of TCP/IP and cryptography, but
she also explains money, commerce and how trust works in relation to
the technology. She delves into privacy, security and data with insight
that comes from extensive research. The book is detailed without
being boring and the switching between the topics is smooth, so that
the reader does not have stop to ask how she jumped to some point
from another point.
I hope that lots of people will benefit from reading this book. It is
an intelligent presentation of one of the most far reaching changes
in our way life today. This is contribution to help us understand
the problem, as she obviously does. I highly recommend it.
In spite of the fact that many, old time net purists cringe when
they see marketing material as the peruse the web, commercial activity
is really a natural evolution of network use. The use of such a
marvelous communication medium for any communication should not
be such a surprise nor cause dismay. Given that business as usual
is taking place over the net, there is lots of adjusting for the
business world to do. Although business can be conducted almost as
usual, the net offers some features that have tremendous consequences
that must be taken into account in order for success to be achieved.