From the New York City blackout, to Hurricane Isabel, to coordinated hacker attacks, the World Wide Web endured an array of extreme challenges during the last year. Still, the Internet, conceived in the late 1960s by the Pentagon as a communications link for key government policy players in the event of nuclear war, remains vulnerable to attack by cyber-terrorists and cannot be considered completely reliable by users for e-business or e-mail. “The Internet is a complex animal,” Paul Leroux, chief technology officer of Gomez, Inc., of Waltham, Mass., a leading consultancy, told United Press International. “It is a system of distributed computers, working to provide services to PCs all over the world. There are too many steps in the process for it to be 100-percent reliable.” That complexity also is a virtue, however, as far as technology experts are concerned. “You can have terrorist attacks and terrorist attacks, within a region,” Arun Srinivasan, chief operating officer of BroadSpire Inc., of Mission Hills, Calif., a managed hosting provider for Paramount Pictures and others, told UPI. “But you can route around those particular cities, or locales.” Growth of the Internet remains robust, and about 81 percent of U.S. households are expected to be online by 2007, according to Jupiter Research of New York City, an Internet consultancy. Full Story
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