But there is a funny mathematical result of having the ínetís population double every year: It means that half of the people on the network have less than a year of experience. Most people are newbies, electronic virgins. And just like in high school, where it was difficult to separate the myths about sex from the straight dope, the newest members of the worldís electronic communities are hearing myths and rumors about the Internet and repeating them as if they were the God-honest truth.

Indeed, many of the myths of the Internet have been repeated so many times, by so many people, that many Internet old-timers feel as if they are standing in a hall of mirrors. There are just so many half- truths, being repeated by so many different people, that itís hard to remember just whatís what.

1. The Internet was developed to survive a nuclear war.

Untrue! The Internet, as we know it today, was developed by a bunch of companies in the late 1980s that wanted to commercialize packet-switch technology and offer a commercial TCP/IP network to the public, but were stymied by the Acceptable Use Policy of the National Science Foundation. The Inter-Net[work] was actually a set of interconnections among the existing TCP/IP networks of the time.

But werenít the basic TCP/IP network protocols, and the very idea of packet-switching, developed to allow the military to communicate after a global disaster? Wrong again. Original packet network protocols (which bear a relationship to TCP/IP the way a child is related to great-grandparents), were designed to be resistant to momentary interruptions in military communications, the kind that might happen if a bridge carrying a telephone line gets blown up, but they werenít designed to protect against total destruction of the networkís control center.

It doesnít make that much sense, from a military point of view, to design a network that will still function after all of the generals who are supposed to use it have been vaporized. The designers of the Internet knew that different technologies, such as burying their control centers inside mountains or flying them on aircraft, would better protect them against nuclear calamities.

As for the researchers who were actually building the network itself... the real reason that they built the network was so they could exchange electronic mail on the SF-LOVERS mailing list, and telnet to the computers that had good games such as Adventure and Doctor.

2. The Internet is the World Wide Web.

Not true, according to companies such as First Virtual, who are actually trying to make money by selling things on the network. Al- though people who have Web browsers on their desktops are tempted to think that graphics and text are the be-all, end-all purpose of the information infrastructure, many of the countries that are connected to the "world wide" Web are using it for e-mail and little else.

Of course, if you simply look at the raw numbers, then it is true that most of the users on the Internet have access to the World Wide Web. But thatís because most of the users of the Internet are in the United States. So perhaps we should start calling the Web the United States Wide Web, but USWW doesnít have quite the same ring to it.

3. The Internet is multi lingual.

Tell it to the French! Alas, English is the language of the Internet, and it is not likely to change much in the near future. Although it is true that increasing numbers of documents are available in some foreign languages by clicking your mouse, the overwhelming amount of the networkís content is written in English. And not the Queenís version, but Uncle Samís.

The reason has a lot to do with development of the computer industry itself. Most of the worldís programming languages were designed and developed in the United States, as is most of the worldís software. All of the Internet standards and protocols -- the god-given RFCs -- are written in English as well. Until this year, knowing English, at least a little of it, was a prerequisite of being on the Internet. Writing in English has been a requirement if you are interested in making your documents intelligible to the Internetís masses.

This point was made dramatically clear to me a few weeks ago, when I was working with a Japanese technical writer on the translation of my book PGP: Pretty Good Privacy (OíReilly & Associates, 1995). The translator, it turns out, speaks English better than most Americans I know. Heís found grammatical errors, factual errors, and typographical errors that slipped past me, my editor, the publisherís production department and most of our readers. Without that command of our language, he would never be able to survive in the new electronic world.

4. Cryptography can protect your privacy. Encryption for credit-card numbers is necessary to protect the consumer.

Cryptography is a mathematical technique for scrambling information so that it can only be understood by the intended recipient. Itís been heralded as a tool for protecting our privacy in the networked future. While itís true that good cryptography can protect phone calls from wiretaps and electronic mail from eavesdropping, itís not true that cryptography can protect peopleís privacy. Thatís because most people donít lose their privacy due to wiretaps and electronic mail intercepts. As far as Iím concerned, most of the times that people have read damaging electronic mail from me, itís been because I mailed the message to a somebody, who then forwarded it to somebody else. Credit reporting firms like Equifax and TRW survive by selling your personal information to as many buyers as possible. Cryptography simply canít protect against intentional disclosure by an authorized recipient.

What about encrypting credit-card numbers, so they canít be sniffed by network hackers? Although such network sniffing is a concern, the only reported case of stolen credit-card numbers on the Internet was the result of a hacker breaking into a computer and stealing a file from an accounts-payable system -- not from lifting the card numbers in mid-flight. But the fact is that U.S. law limits the liability of consumers to just $50 in the event of a stolen credit card, and to $0.00 if the merchant fails to obtain a signature, but simply sells something over an 800-number. The