Beginning of Essay
Someday the Internet may become an information superhighway, but right now it is more like a 19th-century railroad that passes through the badlands of the Old West. As waves of new settlers flock to cyberspace in search for free information or commercial opportuni ....

Middle of Essay
.... first or be killed." To understand how the Internet, on which so many base their hopes for education, profit and international competitiveness, came to this pass, it can be instructive to look at the security record of other parts of the international communications infrastructure. The first, biggest error that designers seem to repeat is adoption of the "security through obscurity" strategy. Time and again, attempts to keep a system safe by keeping its vulnerabilities secret have failed. Consider, for example, the running war between AT&T and the phone phreaks. When hostilities began in the 1960s, phreaks could manipulate with relative ease the ....