Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 24 May 1997, 9:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
"NEW PRICING PLAN FOR YOU!" screams my AOL mailbox, with an official looking ID claiming that even cheaper access is here. Click on the link, and you're taken to a Web page designed to look just like an AOL page. I know the difference; you'd know the difference; most AOL users wouldn't. The page invites credit card details and other stuff. I decline, and shortly afterwards AOL causes the page to go away.
This sort of thing is going to get worse, with better and better fakes populating the untrammelled frontier towns of the Internet. Lots of naïve users are going to be conned. You can either think of this as evolution in action, or an indication that as the Web gets more widespread the need for security isn't going to be limited to making sure data is safe in transit. Some mechanism for checking the validity of a Web site is going to be needed
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