Many say cyberspace needs rethinking

An environmental engineer in Parkville, Mo., he has piped broadband into his office for research and to keep in touch with clients and colleagues. An aspiring musician, he is learning to play the banjo with free instruction from a Web site. His prized instrument, a set of golf clubs and an expanding collection of scrimshaw-handled knives are testament to the eBay marketplace.

Yet like so many of us, Bob Sholar hates the Internet.

He Googles something and has to page past dozens of genealogical sites to get what he is looking for. He is anxious about identity theft. And then there are the viruses that have eaten his computer innards. "I've had some pretty horrible experiences," Sholar said. "I've lost three hard drives."

It's enough to make you think that if the Internet isn't busted, then at least it's not built too well.

Some of the same people who cobbled the Internet together with the cyber equivalents of chewing gum and baling wire are giving serious thought to junking the old model or giving it a severe overhaul.

"Right now, it's like there's a lot of duct tape holding it together," said Barrett Lyon, whose Prolexic Technologies has clients around the world assaulted by online extortionists and saboteurs. "It works just well enough for people to not need to change it. ... But that may not be true for long."

The National Science Foundation is in the early stages of a massive rethinking of the Internet, devoting $300 million to draw up new Internet "architecture" that would keep computers connected while filtering out devious software and hackers.

Reforming the Internet to fence off thieves and to shore up performance could make cyberspace safer and possibly faster. In the transition, however, much of what is appealing about the Internet â€" the abandon with which information is traded; the ability to sound off anonymously; the wealth of links built over the brief, rich history of the World Wide Web â€" could be lost.

Still, a growing consensus finds the Internet has been proving lately it is as imperfect as it is invaluable. Overrun by viruses, worms, and even Trojans, it makes our computers as peppy as Yugos running on bad gas. Spam overloads e-mail inboxes. While "phishers" send e-mail that looks like it came from eBay even though it does not, "pharmers" trick computers to make it appear as if users have gone to a bank's Web site when they have actually surrendered account numbers to a Russian mobster.

The picture is no better for the big guys. Corporations struggle to keep hackers from peeking into their most sensitive records. Businesses labor to fend off strong-arm geeks who flood a company's computers with mischievous Internet traffic of hijacked PCs if extortion payments are not made â€" or simply to crush a competitor. Digital thugs tap into computers, encrypt the contents, and hold the descrambling passwords hostage.

Government worries about the terrorists, and how weaknesses in the Internet could lead to attacks on the electrical grid, on health-care records, on banking and the stock markets.

"If you'd asked me 10 years ago would I still be sending e-mail today that's not encrypted, I would say no. But I am," said Jamie Love, the director of the advocacy group Consumer Project on Technology. "I would have thought everything would be more secure. But it's not. And it's something to worry about."

If only we had known 30 years ago what the Internet would become, much of the danger might have been avoided.

The Internet sprang out of American military research in the 1960s to find something better than the telephone or radio to set up elaborate command-and-control functions for Cold War weapons systems.

By the early 1970s, the protocols â€" the language and rules computers within the network used to trade messages â€" began to take shape, in part, from a Harvard graduate student's radical idea of letting computers talk to each other. It was trick enough to pass information from one computer to another, so people were not yet worrying about somebody eavesdropping or trying to mess with the messages.

Military and university researchers were thrilled in the early 1980s to trade some odd new messages called e-mail over what was known then as ARPANET used by fewer than 1,000 people.

Today, there are an estimated 60 million Web sites and several times that many e-mailers.

"In some ways, it's a miracle that it came together at all," said Gurdip Singh, professor of computing and information science at Kansas State University. "It ended up being used in a number of ways that weren't envisioned early on."

More than seven in 10 Americans regularly use the Internet. About half the country has bought something online. Some 25 million Americans have used the Internet to sell something.

Two in five Internet users told the Pew Internet & American Life Project they have been hit by spyware, adware or some other malicious computer software. As a result, almost one in two now stays away from certain Web sites. One-fourth has stopped swapping music and video files to avoid getting unwanted software on their computers. And online retailers report that even as people buy more online, consumers are also becoming increasingly anxious about doing so.

Those are among the reasons researchers are at work on a better Internet. In a room whirring with the soft buzz of computer hard drives financed by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security, computer scientists set up a mock battlefield at the Cyber Defense Technology Experimental Research Network, or DETER, on the campus of the University of Southern California. Stocked with a thick library of subversive software, the project offers a "test bed" equal to 2,000 quarantined personal computers where worms and viruses are set free to war against good-guy software.

"It's an arms race out there, and the criminal element is finding new ways to beat systems all the time," said Terry Benzel, the deputy director of the Computer Networks Division at USC's Information Sciences Institute. "Here we can see what works and what doesn't."

Meanwhile, the Internet2 consortium of more than 200 universities and several large companies aims to craft and launch a better Internet â€" including one more able to increase the capacity so things like uncompressed high-definition video can easily move over the transom.

Yet researchers are unsure what a better Internet might entail.

"The systems are so complicated that it's just impossible right now for humans to look at any part of this and verify that this part or that part works correctly," said Alan T. Sherman, a computer science professor and cryptography expert at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

He anticipates piecemeal fixes in which people who sell Internet services, maintain Internet routing systems, and rely on the Internet to conduct business will use more rigorous and cumbersome defenses, depending on the situation.

"You don't need the same security to buy a $20 book," he said, "as you do to transfer millions of dollars from one account to another."

The difficulty is there is no Internet czar or commission to call the shots. And as firms from AOL to Microsoft move to add security, they do so warily.

"You find yourself in this strange situation of having to compete and cooperate with each other," said David D. Clark, who has been among the chief architects of Internet protocols since the 1970s.

Eventually the virtual world might also travel on two Internets â€" the existing network used almost as a hobbyist venture for casual communications and research, and a super-secure Internet for swapping data that cannot be lost or spoiled. To complicate matters, various tools in the security basket may make Internet usage more expensive, slower and more complicated.

"There's no silver bullet," said Tom Leighton, the chief scientist and co-founder of Akamai Technologies, which makes sure its clients' Web pages remain available online even when they come under organized attack. He is also a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. "We have to change as we go. The problems aren't going to go away overnight."