Reporter's Notebook: WWW9 Conference

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May 18, 2000 (11:46 AM EDT)

By Jason Levitt ,

Internet times have changed, and so has the International World Wide Web Conference, a semiannual event.

The 9th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW9) in Amsterdam this week has a distinctly more corporate flavor than the last one I attended, which was the 2nd International WWW conference in Chicago in 1994.

Of course, the Web was still largely a research and academic medium in 1994, and this conference was the only general-purpose meeting for the thinkers and dreamers in the Web community. Compared with behemoth trade shows like Internet World or Networld+Interop, it's still a funky, research-oriented show, and a place where ideas matter more than venture capital. Still, it's clear that the suits and ties realize the benefits ofparticipating in the Web research community.

Easily half the attendees here are from the commercial sector or from a research arm of a major commercial player. Companies such as AT&T (stock: T), Boeing (stock: BA), Cisco Systems (stock: CSCO), Compaq (stock: CPQ), Hewlett-Packard (stock: HWP), IBM (stock: IBM), Intel (stock: INTC), Microsoft (stock: MSFT), Sun Microsystems (stock: SUNW), and Unisys (stock: UIS) are all represented, and many are presenting papers.

Day One Keynote

Egbert-Jan Sol, vice president of technology at Ericsson Nederland kicked off the conference with a rousing keynote about the future of the "mobile Internet." Citing statistics such as 100 million PCs sold vs. 275 million cell phones sold in 1999, he said he sees a very near future where all cell phones (and many other PDAs and Internet mini-appliances) will have their own IP addresses.

In Europe, this revolution is starting with the implementation of the Global System for Mobile Communications-based packet IP network, called GPRS. Europe, of course, with only one digital carrier standard (GSM), has it much easier than other parts of the world such as the United States, where three or more digital standards (TDMA, CDMA, GSM, etc.) are offered by different cellular service providers.

Sol, not surprisingly, heavily promoted Ericsson's Bluetooth technology, a low-power, RF networking standard with a typical distance limit of 10 meters. Bluetooth is designed for small, probably temporary, connections between devices such as PDAs, keyboards, coffee makers, cell phones, and just about any device in a home or office that doesn't require much bandwidth to get its job done. It's very suitable for replacing infrared connections, because it doesn't suffer from infrared line-of-sight requirements.

An XML Business Case

Wireless technologies and XML were the research front-runners at WWW9, but there was plenty of practical application experience reported on as well. Jeff Barton, a consultant for Visa International, the credit card company, described how Visa has implemented XML solutions in its various credit card processing business areas. In particular, he described how Visa uses XML to offer up a single, consistent invoice to all suppliers. The Visa XML Invoice Specification is an XML language that Visa hopes to make into an industry standard. According to Visa, it's a "cross-industry, interoperable message format to enable processing of enhanced data across regions and industry sectors."

Security Worth Noting

David Kormann and Aviel Rubin, researchers at AT&T Research Labs, pointed out some risks and potential flaws in Microsoft's widely used Passport single sign-on protocol in their paper, "Risks of the Passport Single Sign-on Protocol." Passport is used by Microsoft to let users sign on to many different Web merchants' sites by "authenticating themselves only once to a common server." Kormann and Rubin said most of the problems with Passport are really problems with the underlying Web technologies (HTTP, JavaScript, certificates in Web browsers, cookies, etc.) that Passport uses, and not so much problems with Passport itself. Nevertheless, reports like this deserve attention from e-commerce sites that make use of Passport, as well as from users.

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