Electronic Commerce
Initially, the Internet was designed to be used by government and academic users,
but now it is rapidly becoming commercialized. It has on-line "shops", even
electronic "shopping malls". Customers, browsing at their computers, can view
products, read descriptions, and sometimes even try samples. What they lack is
the means to buy from their keyboard, on impulse. They could pay by credit card,
transmitting the necessary data by modem; but intercepting messages on the
Internet is trivially easy for a smart hacker, so sending a credit-card number
in an unscrambled message is inviting trouble. It would be relatively safe to
send a credit card number encrypted with a hard-to-break code. That would
require either a general adoption across the internet of standard encoding
protocols, or the making of prior arrangements between buyers and sellers. Both
consumers and merchants could see a windfall if these problems are solved. For......
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