05/06/96 A NEW LANGUAGE FOR SAFER CYBERBIZ

A NEW LANGUAGE FOR SAFER CYBERBIZ

EVER SINCE PEOPLE BEGAN connecting with one another on the Internet, it has been clear that the Net has great potential as a place for building virtual communities--electronic ``places'' where people will socialize, transact business, and relate as professionals. But how can members of such communities, and the computers that represent them, trust each other in cyberspace? How can you be sure Netizens and cyber-merchants are really who they claim to be? Or that security is reliable and that software received off the Net is harmless? Without such assurances, virtual communities may never take shape.
One solution is to rely on some sort of central authority to keep track of who's who. A server can maintain the master list of a community's computers, for instance, and verify their identities as a service to everyone else on the Net. That approach will fail, however, when hundreds of millions of computers start asking for service and overload the central computer.
Electric Communities, a Los Altos (Calif.) company, has developed what it claims is an approach that will work no matter how many people log on. It's based on a new computer language, E, that extends Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java language. E stems from Electric Communities' experience in designing an early online community called Habitat. With E, computers will be able to automatically establish who they are across a network. Then they can share software and exchange payments safely. The company plans to make E freely available across the Net in hopes of making it a standard. Electric Communities will make its money by selling E-based programming tools.
EDITED BY JOHN W. VERITY