Elliot Shmukler's Tech Talk

It's that time of the year again--the time when city boulevards and student dorm rooms gain the peculiar glow of holiday lighting; the time when everything from our televisions to our radios becomes infected with the holiday spirit; the time when uncounted throngs of shoppers brave long lines in order to buy the perfect gift, or at least one that is merely good enough.

For many of these shoppers, their exhausting treks to the mall lead to one persistent thought: There must be a better way. Well, holiday shoppers, that way is here.

It's called e-commerce, the process of buying and selling consumer goods on the Internet and particularly on the World Wide Web (WWW). Basically equivalent to shopping on-line, e-commerce has long been heralded as the key to long-term Internet growth.

The target of recent Presidential remarks and a variety of emerging Internet standards, e-commerce is certainly on the rise. And with its initial concerns largely solved, the technology behind e-commerce has reached a maturity level sufficient for its widespread use.

By far, the most pressing of such concerns has been the issue of security. After all, shopping on-line inevitably requires the transmission of credit card numbers, addresses and other personal information necessary to purchase a product and to have it delivered.

The way the majority of World Wide Web services work, however, allows such information to pass unaltered throughout the Internet's cabling. Any computer connected to a cable used to transmit such information could then easily intercept it. And a user of such a computer could then proceed to wreak havoc on your credit rating. Not good.

To combat this problem, e-commerce vendors employ a technology known as SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer. SSL allows your personal information to be encrypted via the application of a sophisticated mathematical formula. The encryption process turns your information from a form that is easily understood by any human to a mass of seemingly random gibberish. The intended receiver of the information can then transform the gibberish back into its original form via a decryption process that uses a different set of mathematical formulas.

Thus, although various computers on the Internet can still intercept the information you are transmitting, the encrypted nature of this information renders it meaningless. Attempts to decrypt the information, by anyone but the intended receiver, involves the commitment of years of computer time, frequently more years than the average human lifepan.

SSL is a general technology, allowing the secure transmission of any information that is meant to be safe from prying Internet eyes. It is SSL, for example, that secures the transmission of the course grades you can retrieve from the Harvard Registrar's on-line site, thus making sure that your nosy computer-geek roommate has no way of knowing how you did in Expos.

So, now that the security question is all settled, it is time to unlock the true power of on-line shopping. Sure, shopping on-line allows you to forgo trips to the mall, long holiday season lines and the aggravation of popular products being out-of-stock, but you are also forced to forgo the ability to touch and examine the products you buy and the convenience of bringing such products home as soon as the purchase has been made.

Furthermore, although you are probably familiar with the location of the stores that you intend to shop in, finding e-commerce vendors within the Internet jungle is no easy matter. Thus, to many, the advantages of e-commerce simply do not justify its disadvantages.

But the true power of on-line shopping cannot be experienced without the use of an Internet-based intelligent shopping agent. Such agents are similar to Internet search engines in that they allow you to find particular Internet resources. But unlike search engines, which allow you to find World Wide Web sites that present content on a particular subject, shopping agents seek out the World Wide Web sites of e-commerce vendors that sell a particular product.

The most advanced of these agents, such as MySimon (http://www.mysimon.com/), can simultaneously present information on the sale of a particular product by thousands of Internet vendors. By instantly comparing the prices and features offered by these vendors, MySimon allows you to easily make the best purchasing decision. The result is the ability to easily comparison-shop a maximum of 10,000 vendors. Try doing that at your neighborhood mall.

MySimon is not the only intelligent shopping agent in the game. Agents such as Jango (http://www.jango.com/) are beginning to partner with leading Internet search engines such as Excite and leading credit card companies such as Master-Card to put together an even easier framework for on-line shopping.

All such advanced agents allow you to easily select the product you want, analyze the prices and features offered by a variety of Internet vendors and purchase the desired item with the click of the mouse button. Some of the agents even allow you to search Internet classifieds and auctions along with traditional e-commerce vendors. Above all, these agents make on-line shopping fun and easy. And with the ability to comparison-shop a large number of vendors, you are bound to get a pretty good deal.

So stay out of the mall this season and enjoy the holidays.

Elliot Shmukler '00 is The Crimson's general information-technology guru and can be reached via e-mail at elliot@thecrimson.com. Like most things in life, he leaves his holiday shopping till the last minute.