COLUMNIST

A Lesson For The '90s: Ignorance Is FUD

by Timothy Haight

I was leafing through old issues of Network Computing and CommunicationsWeek a while back, finding the dates of events in computer networking for a poster we published last month. In the process, I found something else, something that made me think.

Back in 1990 or so, a two-inch item on an inside page of CommunicationsWeek said that Intel had reported finding an error in its 386 chip that could result in some erroneous calculations. That was it--two inches. I don't know if I even noticed it back then. Pretty different from the recent blowup over Pentium. Why the difference?

Around the same time, I saw a story about how a French hacker had cracked the 40-bit key to a message encrypted by Netscape's export version. Well, the next day, Netscape's stock dropped significantly.

A few days earlier, the big story had been how Microsoft's Windows95 registration procedure took information from your computer and sent it to Microsoft for who knew what nefarious reasons. There were rumors that software would be checked for piracy and confidential files scanned.

In both Netscape's and Microsoft's cases, the facts ultimately revealed that neither company had done anything wrong. Microsoft was simply automating a process long done by hand--a voluntary listing of the hardware configuration and the presence of some software.

In Netscape's case, decoding the 40-bit key of one message took approximately $10,000 worth of computer time. Few messages are worth that much effort. Were it not for restric tive U.S. laws on exporting encryption, the code would have been much harder to crack, as the domestic version is.

Two reasons probably explain why these stories are getting so much attention. First, they all received wide attention on the Internet. Once they had gotten circulation there, the vendors had to respond. What we have hoped for has happened, there is now an alternative channel to the mass media that can affect the national news agenda. Right now, this seems to be most influential about computer stories. When it goes beyond that, say, to politics, it may be extremely important.

The second reason is that the stories on the Internet are being picked up by both trade and general-interest daily newspapers. They are generating stories by reporters on dailies and news weeklies for whom computing is just one kind of news among many. They are then being reported to ordinary people with very little computer literacy.

Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is FUD--fear, uncertainty and doubt. Without the years of evaluating products that most of you readers have, users in the general population can hear of a problem and not understand its limits. General assignment reporters or business-section writers--still generalists to us--will ask broad questions. The result is bound to be more speculation. That's why incidents that may have gotten two inches in the trade press five years ago rate screaming headlines now. It's as if the Netscape Navigator had been found to have "inhaled" or hired an undocumented nanny.

That's not all bad. For the mass market to adopt computing, it's not only products that are going to have to become easier to understand. It's also the advertising, support and publicity. If there's a lesson for the industry to learn out of this, that's it. But it's not going to be fun.

Timothy Haight can be reached at thaight@nwc.com.

October 15, 1995