Out on a limb
Virile-viruses experts at Symantec and Network Associates predict that new viruses will study their host environments and alter themselves based on them. Last year, both companies reported an increase in the number of "polymorphic viruses", which alter their code to evade detection and wreak extensive damage.
In a virtual presentation by Gordon Bell on the Web, the chairman of University Video Communications and 23-year veteran of Digital Equipment predicted that a consortium of Internet police will emerge to watch for copyright infringement, trademark violations and other sins against intellectual property. "I think there'll be a necessity for bit police since bits is bits and bits are free," Bell says in the virtual speech. "Many carry intellectual property. Lots of countries don't recognise intellectual property. They have printing presses to convert any bit form to any other and sell them royalty-free."
Other would-be seers are jazzed by the prospect of an interplanetary or even intergalactic Internet -- a mother lode of futurist fodder with roots in scientific research at NASA. In April, NASA demonstrated that it could use standard Internet protocols to communicate with an orbiting spacecraft just like any other node on the Internet.
Engineers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland successfully contacted UoSAT-12 spacecraft through a ground station in Surrey, England, using Internet ping packets. The project, called Operating Missions as Nodes on the Internet (OMNI), was the first time that a spacecraft ever had its own Internet address and was a fully RFC-compliant active node on the Internet.
