Word: modem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Illinois computer lab gave him what amounted to $100 million worth of free computer time. Hart, son of a Shakespeare professor and a mathematician, decided to harness the new technology to humanistic ends by posting a copy of the Declaration of Independence that anyone with a computer and a modem could read for free...
...birthday this year. It's the same thing I've lusted after for a couple of birthdays now, and I'd trade in all the socks, ties and humorous cards about aging if only I could have it. Unfortunately, I can't, because it's a cable modem--which lets you traverse the Net at about 20 times the speed of a 56K modem--and cable-modem service is very spotty right now. In Manhattan, for example, I'd have to live between 59th and 67th Street, or in the ultra-hip East Village. Service will arrive in my slightly...
Hackers like an easy target, and computers hooked up to cable modems are potentially the lowest-hanging fruit of all. Especially if they're running Windows. For reasons known only to itself, Microsoft makes its operating system default to friendly mode, entirely open to network sharing. This means when you hook your brand-new PC up to your brand-new cable modem, you unwittingly become a node on a massive network whose members can come and look around your hard drive, perhaps download your financial records...
...even better news is that cable-modem providers like Road Runner (partly owned by Time Warner, parent company of this magazine) and Excite@Home are working on bigger and better firewalls to help stop snooping. Since they're twice as fast as DSL phone lines, cable modems are worth the risk. They will never be hackproof, but they should be a lot safer by the time my next birthday rolls around. This year, I'll have to settle for socks again...
...meantime, it doesn't take much to imagine how soon the rest of us will be untethered from our modem wires. Novatel is already talking about its next-generation modem, which will abandon Seedy Petey for gsm, a cellular standard that handles data far better--and faster. That GSM-compatible Merlin, which the company expects to start selling in the middle of next year, will supposedly send and receive data at Mercury-fast 144 kbps, even from a train. I bet it'll be cute...