Everquest is the online role playing fantasy game, where users across the Internet unite to fight monsters and hunt for hidden treasures. Its addictive nature has given it the nickname "Evercrack."

A former player, who wants to be known only as "Jane," has started a Web site that collects the stories of family members and friends who live with obsessed Everquest players. The site, called Everquest Daily Grind, is based on postings to the "Everquest Widows" online discussion group.

JANE: My social circle definitely suffered from playing Everquest. You end up sacrificing a lot of your own time. You don't do much anymore, you don't socialize, you stop pursuing other hobbies, and you don't exercise. One thing I was always interested in was music. And I found that during that time when I was playing excessively, I stopped doing all these activities. You become isolated, and Everquest becomes the one thing you do when you are not at work or not following any kind of obligations to family and so on.

GORDON: Do you still play too much?

JANE: No, no, it's totally fine now for me. I think the problem with Everquest is not just the computing aspect of the technical elements or the graphics that's really appealing; it's more the social aspect of it. It identifies a certain need people have to socialize, to be popular and to do well in life. And I think that's why it's so addictive to some and not to others.

GORDON: Characterize the kind of stories you post on the Everquest Daily
Grind.

JANE: The typical story that I see is someone's spouse or live-in partner sleeping in until 12:00 or so, getting up, sitting in front of the computer all day, and having the other partner go out and work, come home and make dinner, do the laundry and take care of the kids while the partner is still sitting in front of the computer. This is not an isolated event; I've seen those stories over and over. I want people to realize that the impact is not just that one person gets jealous because the other person spend so much time on the computer game, but that it actually has a negative impact on the household.

Eight years ago this week, Future Tense made its debut. About the same time, Internet research firm comScore Media Metrix issued its first report looking at the most trafficked Web sites on the 'Net. We thought we'd look back at that report to get a glimpse at how the 'Net has changed since we first went on the air.

Graham Mudd is a comScore Media Metrix analyst.

MUDD: In the beginning of 1996, we estimate that approximately 20 million people were online from from U.S. households. That's about 10 percent of households.

How does that compare to today?

MUDD: In January 2004, there were approximately 135 million household Internet users. That's between 60 and 70 percent depending on the estimate of household size.

Sometimes we think technological change is not coming fast enough. But that's quite a change in just eight years.

MUDD: It's 600-plus percent.

What kind of sites were the most trafficked back in '96 and how does that compare to today?

MUDD: The Web of the mid-90's was dominated by ISP sites, search engines and university sites. A lot has changed. While we see that ISP's and search engines are still near the top, many of them have taken the form
of portals. Three major networks of sites (AOL, MSN and Yahoo) now dominate the top 50 sites. And in fact those sites each reach more than 70 percent of the Internet population, and collectively reach nearly every single Internet user.

It's sort of fun to look back at the top sites of '96 for the oldies-but-goodies like Infoseek, Compuserve, Prodigy, Well.com and umich.edu. That's so different from today.

MUDD: It is. And back in 1996, there wasn't much of anything in terms of e-commerce or especially online travel. But in 2003 we saw more than 90 billion dollars spent and that's excluding auctions. If you look at just
travel alone, it was 40 billion dollars. It's become a major marketplace.

Here it is, Super Tuesday -- voters in ten states cast their primary ballots. It could turn out to be a big day for one of the Democratic contenders, but it will certainly be a big day for electronic voting. Voters in California, Georgia, and Maryland will cast their votes with a touch-screen. After the 2000 election Congress authorized funds for states to upgrade to electronic voting, but it's still a controversial technology.

In Maryland, officials are trying to shore up confidence in the new machines. Measures include tamper-proof adhesive tape to prevent anyone from fiddling with their programming or electronics. Linda Lamone is the state's top election official.

LAMONE: It's called "tamper tape" and it indicates on the tape itself if anyone has tried to intrude into the equipment. And it's placed across the door that leads to the area where the memory card is stored.

FUTURE TENSE: How confident are you right now that the system will yield accurate results?

LAMONE: I am completely confident, in fact both of the studies that were done on the Diebold equipment for Maryland said that they counted 100 percent accurately.

FUTURE TENSE: Do you consider this any kind of test run, or as far as you're concerned, this is the real thing, is the testing over with?

LAMONE: The testing is over with. This equipment has been tested at least four times in preparation for this election by different people, and it's had two risk analyses done on it. It was used in four counties in the 2002 gubernatorial election without any problems whatsoever, and it's been used in about 22 municipal or special local elections since then.

FUTURE TENSE: There are groups in a few places in the country that are using electronic voting, and I think there is a group in Maryland, that have encouraged people to avoid the electronic voting machines and use absentee ballots instead. Have you seen any surge in absentee ballots because of that?

LAMONE: No.

FUTURE TENSE: And what's been your response to these lingering concerns about the technology?

LAMONE: They're basically saying that the only way to ensure trustworthy elections is for the equipment to be able to produce a paper ballot that the voter can then examine to make sure it matches what they see on the screen. Well, of course if you have a rogue programmer that's smart enough to program the equipment to record a different result than what the person sees on the screen, that same programmer will make sure that what is printed on the paper matches what's on the screen and not what's recorded. So I think it creates a false sense of security. And if you look at the administrative and logistical problems of having printers in polling places, in Maryland we have 16,000 voting units. That means 16,000 printers that are capable of running from 7:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night, with enough ink and paper to accommodate that. And what happens when a printer jams?

FUTURE TENSE: There has been a lot of focus on the potential disadvantages, but what are the advantages of going electronic? How is this going to make things easier for your office and better for office?

LAMONE: Absolutely. Security is certainly an issue and one that we take seriously, but the real issue is how many voters are not going to be disenfranchised from the voting process due to the advantages of electronic voting. It provides a secret ballot to the blind and visually impaired for the first time in this state. It's much more flexible as far as language needs are concerned. We're offering the ballot in Spanish in two of our larger jurisdictions. It eliminates over-voting completely, which was a huge problem for some jurisdictions in the 2000 presidential election. And it greatly reduces under-voting. We have something here that is intuitive to use, the majority of the voters absolutely love it. And you need to have a balance between security and putting into place new barriers that could disenfranchise voters. We
We're confident, we like the equipment. Most of our voters like the equipment, and we think we're going to have a great election.

That's Linda Lamone, administrator of elections for the state of Maryland.

On April 3, students in a graduate do-it-yourself supercomputer class at the University of San Francisco will link together more than thousand personal computers. They want the DIY network to qualify as one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers, even if it will live for only a day.

To come up with the requisite number of PC's, the students will rely on the concept of a "flash mob." Twelve hundred flash mobbers are expected to bring their PCs to the school gym.

Greg Benson, associate professor of computer science at USF, says the project grew out of a desire to get supercomputers into the hands of people who don't normally have access to them.

BENSON: We're going to set up the gym with a bunch of tables, and we're going to bring in power, because this is obviously going to take a lot of electricity. We're going to have people setting up the day before and the morning of, bringing in their computers. We'll provide a high speed network to connect these computers together. We hope to have everybody up and running by about noon. At that point we'll start the benchmarking. We'll be running a software package that is used to determining supercomputer speed. And that will go on through the afternoon and we hope to finish up in the early evening.

GORDON: So you're not going to try to solve some world problems with this supercomputer. You just want to do it to say you did it?

BENSON: Think of this as the proof of concept to show that you could. The program that we are going to run does serious computation, sort of complex mathematical formulas. But no, we're not going to run an actual simulation of a biological model or something. But the idea is the next flash mob will.

GORDON: So once you prove it can be done, then what?

BENSON: Then we hope it will take off and people will start building flash mobs all over the world.

GORDON: What kind of things could these flash mob supercomputer groups do with their supercomputers?

BENSON: We envision that scientists could develop software that flash mobbers will want to run. So for example, an AIDS researcher might have developed a supercomputing application to do modeling of the AIDS virus. The idea is maybe the researcher is having difficulty getting time on some of the larger supercomputers. But maybe with a temporary flash mob for a weekend, that scientist could get some useful results. It's limitless in possibilities. High schools, community groups. For example, if there's a walk for breast cancer, not only could you have the fundraising effort and the actual walk, people could bring their laptops, set up a flash mob computer and work on breast cancer research.

More and more consumers are making phone calls that are routed through the Internet rather than existing telephone networks. Internet calls are generally cheaper, but have been less reliable, and often don't sound as good. Governments are concerned they will lose billions of dollars in revenue as consumers abandon heavily regulated and taxed telephone networks. They also want to insure that the Internet telephone industry provides effective 9-1-1 service, and provides law enforcement with wiretapping capabilities.

Tom Evslin is chairman and CEO of ITXC, an Internet phone call provider. He chairs the Voice Over Internet Coalition policy committee.

EVSLIN: Telephony regulation was developed in the days when all telephone services were delivered by monopolies. And of course monopolies do have to be properly regulated in the public interest. But voice over IP providers are not monopolies, and in fact the use of voice over IP has made it possible to challenge the old monopolies even when they have a virtual strangle hold on infrastructure. Voice over IP has not been an instrument for monopoly, but an instrument for greater competition. Therefore it's totally inappropriate to extend regulations that were developed in order to control monopolies to this new competitive field.

What do you fear that regulation would do to the industry?

EVSLIN: If we took this obsolete regulation and extended it to voice over IP, we'd slow down the growth. We won't stop it. The benefits are so great that the use of voice over IP will continue to increase rapidly. But there will be a real slowdown in the delivery of those benefits if we take the regulations that were developed for traditional telephony and apply them to these new industries. The ironic result will be that the former monopolies will maintain market share longer than if they were forced to compete.

One of the reasons people have said voice over IP needs to be regulated is that they're afraid that otherwise voice over IP won't support 9-1-1 services. In fact, voice over IP can and will voluntarily support 9-1-1 in ways that are much better than traditional telephony. We can do that because we can integrate voice with all of the other data that is available on the Internet. If we were to get rigid regulation, what we'll end up doing is having to emulate the less capable, traditional telephone system when we implement services like 9-1-1 or disabled access.

The United States wants to develop new weapons technologies that go beyond the never-realized "Star Wars" defense system proposal. In a recent story for Wired News, Noah Shachtman reports on a recent planning document (PDF) from the U.S. Air Force that shows how the United States plans to step up the militarization of space.

SHACHTMAN: The military has been using satellite for years, but
there seems to be a shift to the thought of putting weapons in
space. The idea is that our satellites our so important to our military, so precious, that we've got to have weapons up there to protect them. Now what some in the defense community are saying is that these weapons themselves will become targets for other countries, and therefore it will make it more likely that other countries will develop weapons of their own in space. And that also it'll just create a climate of instability by breaking a taboo you might start an arms race up in orbit, and I don't think anybody wants to see that.

GORDON: What kind of weapons is the U.S. talking about?

SHACHTMAN: There are a couple of different things. The first in general is denying other countries access to space, or to be able to knock down
their satellites. So that could be anything from sending radio frequency impulses to actual lasers of missiles that might knock down enemy satellites.

GORDON: Is this fanciful technology or something we're developing and might actually get?

SHACHTMAN: It's certainly not about to happen tomorrow. There is a range of technologies being discussed, from the extremely fanciful like sending giant metal rods from orbit crashing down onto earth, to stuff that's a lot more likely which is just crashing one thing into another to stop a satellite from being launched or knock it from orbit.

GORDON: Do these weapons look primarily defensive or offensive?

SHACHTMAN: They talk about them in defensive terms: protecting our assets in space, and making sure other countries can't deny us the use of space. But some of them have an offensive bent in that they're meant to cripple opponents' satellites. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of talk, except for that one crazy metal rod program I told you about, about positioning weapons in space that could then strike the earth. It seems to be much more about guaranteeing that we're the ones who run space, and that no other country can really have many assets up there.

GORDON: How much weight does a report from the Air Force carry in setting American policy?

SHACHTMAN: I was able to track down the funding for several of the space weapons program mentioned in the report, and it's not insignificant money: $60 or 70 million in this year alone for each of several different programs. Does this mean the U.S. is going to be putting weapons in space tomorrow? No, it doesn't, and I don't want to give that impression. But planning and research for it really seems to be on the up tick.

Forrester Research says U.S. companies will export 3.3 million service and technology jobs in the next 15 years. H.M. Hervey is steaming mad about that. Hervey says he's pro-business; that he's not a protectionist; and that he's never been personally affected by so-called "offshoring." But the 56 year-old Silicon Valley software executive believes the export of engineering, programming and tech support jobs to India and other countries could seriously hurt America.

Here is an transcript of a Future Tense interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

HERVEY: American companies are sacrificing the long-term economic future of this nation by decimating the middle class by sending jobs and technology offshore at the expense of America.

We want IBM and Hewlett-Packard and other big companies to be profitable, right? Why shouldn't we let them make their profits by finding ways to reduce their work force costs?

HERVEY: Making profits and hiring U.S. workers are not mutually exclusive. We believe that you can do both. There's no reason to decimate the middle class and think you can just do it for profit. When corporate executives tell you that the reason that we have to send jobs offshore is to cut labor costs and reduce overhead, the question that jumps to mind is why don't they themselves take such major reductions in their compensation package? They deserve money, no one begrudges them their money. But when you tell me they need to cut labor and overhead costs but they continue to retain their multi-million dollar salaries, expense accounts, bonuses, and corporate jets while they're cutting a $60,000 a year job in order to cut costs, that doesn't ring true.

The movement of jobs from the United States to other countries has happened for a long time and we're still a strong nation. Is it possible you are over reacting or being a little alarmist?

HERVEY: That's like comparing a trickle to a torrent. The number of jobs going offshore is increasing. The bottom line is we're going to see a continued erosion if we don't stop it.

What do you plan to do about this issue?

HERVEY: We're going to focus directly on the companies themselves in a number of ways. We're going to engage them face to face in the boardroom. Secondly we're going to present them with a cogent plan for reversing this trend, and why there's a good business reason to change this trend, and appeal to their common sense and patriotism. Then we're going to back that up with acquiring a share of stock. We're going to be active shareholders in these companies. We're going to purchase stock, we're going to gain stock through proxies, we're going to gain stock through pledges so that we can help change from within. In addition we're going to generate, if necessary, boycotts of their products and services, marches and sit-ins and shareholder lawsuits.

SearchEngineWatch recently named Google its "Outstanding Search Service" for the past year. It won most other awards, too, including "Best Design." But it wasn't a total sweep, and SearchEngineWatch associate editor Chris Sherman says Google is far from invincible.

SHERMAN: We saw some really strong performances from a number of other search services other than Google. In the Outstanding Search category for example, we really felt very strongly that All the Web and Yahoo were just about on par with Google. It was a really difficult decision for us to make. We didn’t give them the award in the end, simply because Google has the broadest array of search services available. Had All the Web or Yahoo been able to match that, we think the quality of the searches they provide is as good or better than Google, and they’ll certainly be in the running next year for winning that Outstanding Search Service award.

Besides All the Web and Yahoo, what companies are gunning for Google and might present more of a challenge in the coming year?

SHERMAN: We’ve seen a very strong showing from Ask Jeeves. This is a search engine that sort of fell out of favor and they’ve really done an excellent job at improving what they’re up to. And of course we have Microsoft now saying they’re going to enter the Web search space. Who knows what they’re up to and how well they’ll be able to compete.

So in you’re view, Google hasn’t cemented anything -- the loyalty they’ve built up could go away?

SHERMAN: I think so. In fact there was research released this week comScore, which actually tracks behavior of Web searchers. comScore is saying there really is very little loyalty among search users. They’re saying people don’t hesitate to switch from one search engine to another when they’re not finding what they need. And if you think back to the late 1990’s, the reason that Google actually became as popular as it did was because the other search engines that were really popular at the time, like Alta Vista and Infoseek, really took their eye off the ball. And we’re seeing signs today that Google isn’t as highly focused on searching as it used to be. They’re buying all these companies. A social networking company for example, the blogging company. There’s a variety of things it is doing that really has nothing to do with search. So they need to be careful in terms of really keeping their eye on the ball. People love Google, but it’s something they’re going to have to keep earning.

During his day, Aristotle was known for deep knowledge about all scientific disciplines, and his ability to teach science. Vulcan, the venture capital arm of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is funding a long-term project to develop a computer program that might eventually serve as an Aristotle for our times. The goal is to develop computers that can answer scientific questions they've never heard before, and show the reasoning behind their answers. It's called Project Halo, and in one early test, it was able to correctly answer three out of five questions taken from an advanced placement chemistry exam.

Noah Friedland is Project Halo Manager.

FRIEDLAND: There are two primary visions for what it is we want to accomplish. The first is an interactive tutor that can teach students the sciences. The second is an interdisciplinary research assistant that could help scientists in their research work. In the latter case you can imagine a situation where these various scientific communities, because of all the knowledge that exists, have become focused on very narrow areas. The big advantage of the "digital Aristotle" will be the ability to communicate across those research disciplines.

Give me an example of how a high school student would use the digital Aristotle.

FRIEDLAND: We might envision a smart textbook application. Many scientific textbooks already come with a CD-ROM in them with various materials on it. Think of a CD-ROM that accompanies a scientific textbook that's capable of answering questions. The student would install the application in their PC, and then be able to pose scientific questions and problems. The application would not only answer the questions but break down the detail of how the answer was derived in such a way that the student could understand. This would be a terrific study guide for a high school student.

This idea that it could give you the reasoning for the answer is somewhat novel, right? You could find answers to scientific questions by using a search engine or something like that but if you find the answer your not going to get the reasoning for the answer.

FRIEDLAND: This has a number of novelties above search engine technology. In the case of a search engine you are limited to what answer exists in even a fairly large corpus of documents that may be the entire Internet. And certainly if you do find an answer somewhere out there, it's not going to contain a step-by-step decomposition and explanation of how that answer was derived. Since our technology is capable of reasoning about the science itself, it could come up with answers that don't necessarily appear in any document anywhere.

In a recent edition of the New York Times Magazine, journalist Clive Thompson profiled several computer virus writers who create code to demonstrate security holes in Microsoft software. Thompson says this is a different group from the criminal element that write the most destructive viruses and worms, such as SoBig.

THOMPSON: What the virus underground is composed of is essentially young men who are very smart but also very bored. And as anyone can tell you, that's always a loaded combination. Some of these guys are living in the
middle of nowhere in small towns in Europe or in Asia. They get online and find all these Web sites with interesting virus code, and the challenge then becomes to see if they can do something that's really cool that's never been seen before. A lot of their motive is to impress all the other guys in the virus underground by doing something so cool that they can brag about it. It's a rebel underground thing.

FT: Most of the virus writers you met live in Europe. Why is that?

THOMPSON: It's a global phenomenon. They are in Europe, Latin America, Russia, Asia, Australia. I spoke with people in all those countries. I did not encounter very many in the U.S. because the U.S. is one of the few places where the police are very active about busting cybercrime.

FT: Why do these kids write viruses?

THOMPSON: Some of it is that there's this intellectual challenge that's almost fungible -- it could be applied to anything. They could be building model planes. It's just something that really keeps them going when they're bored and young. And to a certain extent they also seem themselves as part of the immune system of the Internet. They think all this Microsoft software and a lot of other software, too is very unstable and filled with insecurities and holes. So they create viruses that expose the holes in the security, thereby forcing the software makers to clean up their act.

FT: Did you like these people?

THOMPSON: Yeah, generally I did. They're young, very smart, very funny, they're surprisingly self-effacing. Very few of them were the big braggarts you'd expect.

FT: What is at the root of our current virus epidemic?

THOMPSON: One reason that we're seeing such a boom in viruses and worms right now is that the underground is kind of mature. It's been around for ten years. There is a lot of worm code and virus code out there. It works really well, and almost anyone who wants to can go out there and snap the pieces together like Lego bricks and set it running. That means it's sort of de-skilled. There's a lot of young "script kiddies" who can just go online and take this stuff that's been posted by the authors who made it and get it running without knowing what they're doing.

Meetup is the community-building Internet service made famous by followers of Governor Howard Dean and other presidential candidates. During this campaign season, thousands of citizens have logged on to Meetup.com to find like-minded people in their towns and arranged face-to-face meetings to discuss and promote their favored politicians.

But Meetups are not only for the politically minded. You can find groups that get together over a cup of coffee or a beer to talk about quilting, Oprah Winfrey, paganism, Wi-Fi technology, and thousands of other topics.

Scott Heiferman is CEO of Meetup.com.

The political use gets all the attention and Howard Dean was the poster boy of that. But in fact a full two-thirds of the people who have signed up for Meetups in the past year – a million people – have signed up for Meetups that have nothing to do with politics. The Pug owners or Chihuahua owners that want to meet up with other people who have the same dog breed. Or the people that want to Meetup around a health condition. Out on main street, it’s being used in much more than political ways, even though it’s the politics that gets all the attention.

Do you think you tapped into a real need for community that was unfulfilled?

I think so. It’s a culture where talking to strangers is a dangerous thing, not necessarily something that is good. People used to be a part of a local community group or they’d go to some meeting. But now we work more, we commute more, watch more TV, sit in front of the Internet. All these things which disconnect us from community. We live in a world of Wal-Marts and Gaps and Starbucks and the question is how do you use this infrastructure we have now, the infrastructure of the Internet, the infrastructure of Starbucks on every corner? How do we used it to re-engage community, to revitalize community? Meetup is just this little tool which will organize when and where people are going to Meetup. People wanted something like that.

Is the concept of Meetup mature? Or are you taking this somewhere else in the future?

Good question. How we’re going to evolve it just listening to what people want from Meetup. They want to be part of something bigger than just their local group. Those Chihuahua owners in Minneapolis, they know they’re not just Chihuahua owners of Minneapolis, but they are the Chihuahua owners of the U.S. and the world. Seeing how these groups of Meetups interconnect and really questioning what it means to be an association. And so where we’re going is just listening to how our users want more control, more power, more influence, and how their Meetups work.

Howard Dean harnessed the power of the Internet like no presidential candidate before him. His tools included an e-mail list of two million people, an Internet-fueled fundraising campaign that took in more money in one year than any Democratic candidate in history; an army of Webloggers singing his praises, and Meetups, where like-minded netizens formed ad hoc pro-Dean groups.

But Dean has fared poorly in the primaries and caucuses, leading some cynics to conclude that maybe the 'net isn't such a powerful political tool after all.

Former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi will have none of that. In a speech before a group of technologists in San Diego this week, the architect of Dean's Internet strategy said fearful competitors and the media saw to it that grassroots Internet groundswell was crushed.

"It's a dotcom miracle being shot down is what it is. What happened was, alarm bells went off in every newsroom in the country, and the Gephardt campaign, the Kerry campaign, the Lieberman campaign, the Clark campaign, the Sharpton campaign. That alarm said kill 'em now. Kill Howard Dean right this second. 'Cause if we don't kill this son of a b right now, he's gonna be the nominee. The press corps -- that alarm bell went off and said this guy is about to be the nominee of the party. We gotta go hammer him. We gotta put him through that ringer that every future nominee goes through and we gotta hammer the living daylights out of this guy."

Trippi says the proof of the Dean Internet strategy's success is in how far Dean came -- from a fringe candidate with $157,000 in the bank to a front-runner who raised $45 million dollars in one year. He says even though politics-as-usual all but crushed the campaign, its grassroots Internet legacy lives on.

"We have moved, energized, totally energized -- you have record turnouts in state after state; more young people voting Democratic in the primaries than in any time as these record turnouts happen, ok? That's because there's an energized Democratic Party that's taking on the president. There's a reason George Bush is vulnerable today. And it's because of the 'blogs. It's because of Howard Dean. It's because tools were out there that let hundreds of thousands of Americans get involved and let a debate happen in this country again that wasn't happening."

Trippi shouldn't blame a conspiracy to crush the Dean "dotcom miracle" for the campaign's misfortunes, according to Jonah Seiger with the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. After Trippi's speech, Seiger said Dean was hurt by his own missteps -- including statements on the capture of Saddam Hussein, the role of his wife in the campaign, and a controversy over a possible vice presidential running mate.

"It was almost as if, in the process of re-inventing campaigning, they forgot some of the basics of communication strategy and media strategy. At the end of the day the best technology in the world is not going to make a difference if a
campaign, whether it's for dogcatcher or the President of the United States, doesn't have a compelling message that's resonating, that can really get the public's support behind it, and if the candidate starts to stumble and can't get his or her footing back that's going to be very costly regardless of the number of Meetups happening, or the number of people bloggin' for you or the number of people on your e-mail list. Message matters."

Seiger says the Internet helped Dean be successful early, but that it appeared to help fuel his rapid downfall as well, saying Dean's problems "cascaded through the network."

Future Tense interview transcript, Feb. 6, 2004

Sonia Arrison is director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute.

ARRISON: One of the reasons why we get so much spam now is that the economics are all wrong. The spammers get to send for free, and the people who wind up paying it are the recipients and the ISPs. So if you shift the economics a bit, then I think it would drastically reduce the amount of junk e-mail that everyone is getting.

I wonder what other kinds of consequences it might have, though. We like this idea of the Internet as a kind of free place where we can communicate without hassle, and the idea of having to pay for e-mail is anathema to much of the Internet community.

ARRISON: I know, and whenever I explain this idea to people, their first reaction is to get very nervous. And so I tell them that there's ways to set the system up so that you can still have free communication between people who know each other and between friends and family.

How should a postage system work?

ARRISON: The way I would like to see it happen is, basically anyone you don't know has to pay to send you e-mail. Anyone you do know, you've got sort of like a little white list, and you put your friends and your family on it, and they get zero-dollar stamps attached to their e-mail through the system. So they still have a stamp on their mail, but it's a zero cost. So that way, you can filter based on whether the mail coming in has a stamp or not.

Purely out of self-interest here, as a journalist, I e-mail people I don't know all the time. I've got to pay for that?

ARRISON: You put it the other way. Usually a journalist says to me, I get lots of e-mail all the time, but I want to get all that e-mail, and so you don't want to make the charge too high for people to come into your e-mail box. But the thing I would like to see is for people to be able to set their own price for stamps. So say you are a journalist and you want to get lots of mail from people, you might set your price really low. Or you might set no price at all. That's the beauty of the system as I'd like to see it. Everybody would be able to set their own prices and it would be very flexible.

What do you think an e-mail should cost?

ARRISON: That's a good question. I think that one penny would be enough to stop the major spammers, to stop all the Viagra, Nigerian scams, that kind of stuff from coming into your inbox.

Because once you add up the million messages you might send in a day or a week, you're talking real money?

ARRISON: The economics aren't there. Spammers have to send out a lot of messages to make any money. So even with one penny a message, they'd be put out of business.

How tough do you think this idea will be to sell?

ARRISON: It all depends on how much we as a society really dislike spam. Everybody talks about it and everybody complains about it, but actions always speak louder than words, and if this is something that people really, really, dislike, here's a solution that will work.

Security researchers say an Internet voting system for U.S. citizens overseas is so insecure that it should be ditched.

David Wagner is assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley.

WAGNER: When people vote from insecure home computers over an insecure network you can end up with an insecure election. So for instance, we've suffered from virus attacks in the computer industry in the past. Now imagine a custom virus that specially targets SERVE. If you vote from an infected machine the virus could change your vote without you realizing it. So we could very easily see vote fraud on a massive scale. It could be launched from outside of U.S. soil and might even go completely undetected.

How is SERVE supposed to work?

WAGNER: The SERVE system is very familiar. If you've ever bought anything over the Web you will understand how to use the voting system. You use a Web browser, and you select your choices using a Web browser.

Go into a little more detail -- how would a malicious hacker or even a terrorist compromise this system?

WAGNER: We identified several different risks to the system. One of the risks is that all of the votes are stored on a single, central server. That server presents a very tempting, large, single point of failure. If that computer gets hacked, all the votes cast through SERVE could be viewed or modified. Another risk is denial of service attacks, which could render the SERVE Web site unreachable. Defense Department spokesman Glenn Flood says the Pentagon is confident the Internet voting system is secure. He says the Pentagon has already addressed the concerns raised by the security researchers. SERVE is scheduled to be used for primary elections in Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.And as a result many voters might be unable to vote on election day. So there could be significant disruption to an online election.

What ought to be done?

WAGNER: We're recommending that the system be shut down. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to fix these problems.