Shebang: Do you feel safe when you put your credit card number on the internet? Do you do that?

Soggie: Yes

Shebang: Do you use a separate credit card?

Soggie: I make sure that whenever it’s transmitted that it is encrypted and in most cases that is sufficient, and OK. there is always some trust involved but if you go to a restaurant you give your credit card to the waiter and the waiter can also copy down the number. And anyone doing a summer job somewhere can take a pile of copied credit card slips and copy down all the numbers from there. So I wouldn’t give my credit card number or buy anything on the internet from a company that I would certainly not trust.

Shebang: Is there anything you are afraid of in all this? What would you warn people about? And how do you see the future of hacking and encrypting.

Soggie: Hacking and encrypting will exist and that is not too much of a problem. And people who break into systems in most cases just download a simple programme from some website which allows you automatically to crack a site. And of course that works because there are a lot of web servers which are just left unmanaged or haven’t been administered or perhaps haven’t been looked for 2 or 3 years. You have probably already encountered a lot of websites which have not been altered or looked at in 2 or 3 years. And there are complete systems like that. So two years later if someone finds out, or the vendor of that system has security updates, after a while they do get well known the exploits that are available for any given system. And if the system administrator hasn’t regularly updated the system then it’s trivial to get into those systems. There are of course programmes which do that automatically for you, and most people are using those things now. But there’s no challenge in that. You don’t need to know anything about that or anything. That’s not that interesting any more.

Shebang: So what is interesting?

Soggie: Currently? What is currently interesting is the entire open source movement and everything around it. They are building up a pool of free software which empowers everyone to have access to that full suite of software.

Shebang: So what you’re saying is that the more open things are the better, and the less people try to hide stuff the less successful they will be?

Soggie: What is important also is the loss of privacy. And that companies are able to track your behaviour on the internet. In many cases it’s as simple as all the banner advertisements — most of those that you see on websites are controlled by a small number of big internet advertisement agencies. And when you load a page from, say, cnn.com, if it contains an advertisement in most cases the advertisement itself is not hosted by cnn.com but by some ad agency. And that ad agency has ads placed on different websites, so technically they are able to track if the same person has looked at one of their ads on that site and one of their ads on the other site; and they can and they do combine that information to build up profiles about people on the internet. That’s being done all over the world by the companies. And they admit it. They don’t see anything wrong in that also. As a customer you are often not aware that those things continuously happen. Those things were also possible before the internet but it was simply not as easy. It’s the same thing with police archives or regular archives. In many cases you are able to look up whether your neighbour has a criminal record. You can go to Town hall, police and look in the archives and so forth. People are not really concerned about that too much. But when you put all those things on a computer, logically it is still the same, but it suddenly becomes a whole lot easier to do it. When you have access to such a system it’s not a big problem to look up information about everyone you might know. It’s not a lot of effort. but if you have to go and look through filing cabinets and so forth, you are going to do that unless you have a very good reason for it. That also changes things which before the internet were acceptable, because it is now becoming so easy for people to gather information on you.

Shebang: One of many worries, a main worry?

Soggie: That is a worry but over all I am pretty optimistic.

Shebang: Really. But give us an idea of other worries, then.

Soggie: Another example is bad software. Many people are still forced to use bad software, either out of ignorance or because they need a particular kind of software for their job. They are forced into it by marketing reasons by the companies selling those products, and so forth.

There seems to be a lot of anger when people are trying to do presentation using power pints and at a lot of other times, people tend to knock Bill Gates, and curse Bill Gates...Windows gets a lot of stick.

It’s rather the people who buy it I would say

Shebang: It’s their own stupid fault?

Soggie: In many cases it is. People accept a lot more software companies than they would from other suppliers. If you see what software suppliers can get away with in their license agreements that’s not the kind of agreement they would accept if they were to buy a car or any other kind of -

Shebang: Product.

Soggie: Product or service