Fergus Cassidy

Trust up

EVERY day that passed I became equally pessimistic and self-scolding for what I'd done. In fact, I'd already started to write off the episode when my postman Jim (rural Ireland - where everyone knows your name) arrived and restored my faith.

Out of the back of his van came a cacophony of voices from some radio talk show and my parcel. Inside it was a new modem I had ordered on trust, a trust I was beginning to feel stupid for believing in the first place.

In rural Ireland, we get all the latest hand-me-downs from people who live in the Smoke, though that term could change after 1 January.

The most recent secondhand throwback is ISDN. Laughable to some I know, but when you're dangling out here on the frayed and unravelling edges of Eircom's network, laughter is sometimes all you have.

ISDN is like getting a seat for a bicycle. There's an obvious and blessed relief when it's fitted, until you realise that you still have to pedal uphill all the time. Against the wind.

But that aside, I'm still chuffed that I got it. I saw a for sale ad on the textual titan that is Boards.ie. After making email contact, a price was agreed. Only trouble was in getting the money to the person. So I opted for cheque.

The delay in arrival of the parcel only seemed to douse my smouldering notion of trust. When it arrived, the flame burned anew along with my old modem.

Trust is one of those human emotions that is uncomfortable to think or talk about. It implies some olde world ruled over by the Mayor of Naivete.

The last time I heard it being mentioned was to do with crime. And how in a previous era people could leave their front doors open and their bicycles unlocked. A kind of folksy place, put to music by Big Tom and Gary Portnoy's theme from Cheers: Where Everybody Knows Your Name.

Now there's actually a name for any generation that takes itself too seriously. Chronocentrics feel that they either live in the best of times or the worst. And trust is the benchmark of the latter.

It's held that trust is an endangered species which gets rarer every day and there are no shortage of daily occurrences to highlight this. It's not that trust is unimportant, it's just one of those human emotions that can't be tied down to time and location. Trust has entered the electronic and digital age and now inhabit machines and technology.

It never ceases to amaze me how much trust we place in machines, especially those which could kill or seriously injure us at any moment. Planes, trains and automobiles. And yet driving and flying is thriving.

Other machines store our financial and health details. One software glitch and we're too broke to pay for the hernia we get from worrying about the one we were mistakenly told we had.

As the future unfolds, the way we do things will involve even more trust or a suspension of belief as a minimum. It's a different sort of trust from the past, but just as important. Because many of the good things machines and technology can do will outweigh and even change our notions about trust.

With the internet, we've been chancing our arms so far. Prepared to suspend belief that we really know what's going on. If the subject line in an email said 'I've missed you', well we smiled while opening it. It couldn't last. Something had to give.

Harald Alvestrand, the IETF chair, last week elaborated on how trust was an essential part of the early internet. Those connected then weren't faceless. It was 'Jeff's connection' at MIT or 'Paal's connection' in Norway.

That internet was akin to a rural place where everyone knew one another and websites could be left unlocked all the time. It's a very different internet now. There may be many reasons why Microsoft closed down its chat room service, but underlying the reasons/excuses given is the issue of trust.

Gaining someone's trust by false pretenses is as old as an Eircom telegraph pole, and from the ones I've seen that's very old. The difference was we generally couldn't blame anyone but ourselves if trouble ensued. Now the internet gets blamed for everything.

"The IETF, World Wide Web Consortium and Icann, wish to announce the closure of the internet from 1 January 2004. This action is being taken because of spoofers, liars, cheats, thieves, terrorists, groomers, hackers, crackers phrackers and phishers".

Dream on, it's never going to happen. Every single facet of what makes us human shapes and moulds what happens to and on the internet. But I turn my back on most of the finger-pointers when it comes to what can be done about it.

This issue of trust is at the very heart of what happens next for the internet. A great number of the current so-called ills are down to trust - spam, viruses, chat rooms, commerce, copyright and piracy. Buy an album and give it to a mate was tolerated until you had 80m Napster pals.

Trust is being constantly updated and reinvented and these times are no different. But along with hand-wringing and negativity, what we're also very good at is adapting. And that's what will happen. It already is. Trust me, I know a doctor.

Founded last year, PlanetLab is a consortium of major universities (MIT included) around the world along with some heavyweight IT hitters like Hewlett-Packard. Intel are very heavily involved. Vint Cerf has added his voice as well. "PlanetLab is plainly an idea whose time as come", he said recently in a project press release.

That idea, according to PlanetLab researchers, involves "a first step toward an internet that has processing power built into the infrastructure of the network". In other words, if the net is a global electronic nervous system, then the next generation will have brains.

And that's a whole new ball game when it comes to trust. There are a generation of machines and technology coming, so complex that they are capable of being programmed to establish, monitor and enforce trust on the inter or any network.

Defining, discussing and agreeing on how that's done is something that the current internet can do very well. Myself and many many others place great trust in that.

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LINK
The current issue of MIT's Technology Review has an in-depth look at the PlanetLab project