Wire Pirates

Someday the Internet may become an information superhighway, but right now it is more like a 19th-century railroad that passes through the badlands of the Old West. As waves of new settlers flock to cyberspace in search for free information or commercial opportunity, they make easy marks for sharpers who play a keyboard as deftly as Billy the Kid ever drew a six-gun. It is difficult even for those who ply it every day to …

…that if unauthorized packets do somehow find their way to it, they cannot pass. But other people foresee an Internet made up mostly of private enclaves behind fire walls. A speaker of the government notes, 'There are those who say that fire walls are evil, that they are balkanizing the Internet, but brotherly love falls on its face when millions of dollars are involved'. In the meantime, the network grows, and people and businesses ent