We are (en mass) not telepathic. May be for good.reasons. But our com-puters are, more and more. They can read and in many cases write informa-tion from one processor to another almost instantly via networks. More and more this set of interacting computers cannot be called "just computers" and "just communication cables". Something new has been created, and this rapidly developing something needs a new name. Cyberspace is this name.

Cyberspace, formed by millions of computers linked into networks, has been rapidly developing during last years. On an historical scale we could call this process explosive. Internet, worlds biggest superset of computer net-works, is still growing 20% a month despite all normal people who say "THAT cannot go on for a long time, there must be some physical limits!" Still, it has been growing at the same speed for years. And the Internet is not the only network system. There are other ones, not based on TCP/IP.

CYBERSPACE HAS DRAMATICALLY CHANGED

As it is commonly know, the Internet started as ARPA, a small advanced experimental network for military and front-edge researchers to use compu-ter resources better. Initially, it was meant mainly to execute programs on remote computers and to receive results. Message exchange, what we call E-mail now, was kind of an unexpected side effect... but the genie (djinn) was out of the bottle.

During further development there was quite a long period when the Internet was mainly academic, i.e., belonging mostly to universities, cam-puses, and research organizations. People discovered the pleasure of sending E-mail all over the globe in milliseconds and participating in discussions using newsgroups of almost any topic, from religious issues and philosophy to alt.sex.bondage and further.

Nowadays Internet and other commercial networks are driven mostly by profit-oriented commercial organizations, and thus user base expands very rapidly. The imaginable average John Smith in the USA has discovered Cyber-space last year, and imaginable average Janis Berzins in Latvia is going to discover it as fast as Lattelecom or some competitor who will deliver better communication channels for lower cost. Remember we are going to join the European Community (EU), and there will be no monopolies in EU in very short time.

GATHERING

Now, who are out here in Cyberspace looking for information? Possibly, your information? Maybe information you allowed to be freely distributed. Maybe not.

Huge changes in attitude to information in general and computer networks in particular, in fact some kind of revolution during last three years, have been happening on governmental levels in developed countries.

Robert David Steele in his famous thesis "Information Concepts and Doctrine for the Future", from the First Symposium on Open Source Solutions, 1992, formulated (I have shortened a bit) tasks for the intelligence community of USA, but I believe they are the same for all kinds of information, not only intelligence:

Users of Open Sources

So who is looking around for information in cyberspace? Hackers? No. Hac-kers are only very small part of the total population. Real people in networks looking for information could be:

ANALYSIS

If you have good Internet connection -- and those of you who haven't, will have it in very near future -- you can have as much information as you want. Well, almost. Now, what are you going to do with this terrible flow? It's like having the end of regional water pipe -- 2 meters in diameter -- in your room. Just touch it and you will be simply washed out...

Information searching on the cyberspace is a new speciality and a whole new business. Yet, in fact, this is an old business, because libraries have done it for centuries. But librarians have somehow allowed this business to be slipped out of their hands as far as networks are concerned. The so-called information super-searchers employed by leading organizations like NASA are very well-paid young people, typically with hacker or librarian background. Probably it would be worthwhile to bring this business back to libraries where it could help get back part of networking expenses.

It's a new "fashion" to have WWW -- World Wide Web -- server or at least some rented page today for almost every organization and for many private people too. Sometimes I wonder who's gonna to read all these Web pages? There are global hypertext links between web pages, however browsing them remains slow and hard manual work. Web pages in my humble opinion urgently need some classification system just like books in libraries. It's very hard to orientate in Cyberspace without them. One can easily simply get lost because there are so many interesting things all around... One can easily forget why he/she came in at the first place...

Government organizations in several countries have started to use some automated equipment, like text analyzers -- specialized computers containing thousands of processors, capable to read and search literally everything what's going through them. Special description languages are used to define which things you are interested in. In some devices newest concepts like Neural Network technologies are used to implement fuzzy recognition which is much better than the pure classical yes/no logic.

It seems to me obvious that after a few years when prices of such devices will inevitably fall they probably could be used in libraries to form generalized topical indexes in advance, based on typical requests from readers of this library. Fulltext and multimedia databases are very nice material for such analysis.

ATTACKING

Who is going to attack you, and why? Well, natural things in the first place. These include:

So how do you protect your information and your computing/networking environment in this open source system? You need a specialist or several of them. Then, find ways to protect your data -- security and encryption.

Information Security and Ecription

Computer and Information security is a whole new business developing as rapidly as networks themselves or even faster. It is a full scale job. Don't be naive thinking you can buy some "universal" program which will protect you from everything... Things develop so rapidly in this area that it takes a big part of the working day just to listen to main events showing up. Private links and contacts are very very important in this subworld and no outsider can get easily into it. Security consultants are often ex-hackers and ex-military officers (sometimes they are the same person).

However, there are some things you can do almost immediately. Protect your sensitive information by using decent operating systems and network environment which can really ensure who has access to what info on which machines. Windows NT and OS/2 LanServer 4 Advanced are good examples for the PC-based systems today. Some good routers will help a lot to separate your LAN segments and hostile outer world. Don't forget to save information often enough, and make backups!

Encrypt your sensitive data. Strong encryption has become widespread and very easily available during the recent years, thanks to another famous man - Philipp Zimmermann. NSA still cannot forgive him for releasing PGP - Pretty Good Privacy, freeware encryption program which is strong enough to make some headaches for some of the world's most advanced organizations. This is a whole separate topic about encryption, so it will not be dealt with in more details here. What you should know is that there are freeware programs running on every PC making really good encryption. You can protect your E-mail and your valuable data even today not having to wait until tomorrow. So, for heaven's sake, stop using passwords like something containing six times the same letter, i.e., XXXXXX...

There are worldwide organizations which will help your professionals to improve your security. There is the famous USA-based National Computer Security Association (NCSA), which in fact is international. There are Compu-ter Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC) bulletins, issued by the U.S. Depart-ment of Energy. These bulletins provide urgent warnings which warrant your immediate reading and attention.

Finally you still inevitably need professional services in this area. They can come from either your own employees or from contractual arrangement. One sure thing is that this is not going to be cheap.

CONCLUSIONS

Don't be too idealistic about the tremendous achievements of information technology. Be realistic. Don't trust computers too much. Somehow I love computers, because I have spent more then thirty years with them starting in 1962 as a schoolboy with BESM-2 in Latvian University and continuing up to now with advanced distributed operating environments. I understand compu-ters, sometimes even better than people. But I still want to repeat: keep your own brain working. "Get a life," as hackers say, and be at least aware what's going on.

REFERENCE MATERIALS

The following are only a few sample good popular books which cover the topics of this paper:

Garfinkel, Simson. (1994). PGP: Pretty Good Privacy: Encryption for every-one. O'Reilly and Associates. ISBN 1-56592-098-8.

Schwartau, Winn. (1994). Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1-56025-080-1.

Smith, Martin. (1993). Commonsense Computer Security: Your Practical Guide To Information Protection. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-707805-5.

Toffler, Alvin & Toffler, Heidi. (1993). War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of Twenty-First Century. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. ISBN 0-316-85024-1.