Today the situation
is under better control, but there are still small providers
that cut costs by employing students or amateurs. There??™s nothing
wrong in being one or the other, but the loose relationship
weakens many of the deterrents that restrain regular employees.
If Alice??™s message makes it successfully to Bob??™s website, we
again encounter the same dangers with the Web host personnel
and within the business organization behind the website itself.
Even if all the staff of all the companies we touched in our
Eve could be
anybody
24 The Problem
perilous trip were perfectly honest, it??™s enough that one machine
on the path is compromised by a Trojan, allowing an external
Eve to, no pun intended, eavesdrop on Alice??™s ???secret???
message.
There are means of countering this threat; we explore some of
them in the section ???The Babel of Cryptography.??? However, the
existence of countermeasures does not always imply that they
are thoroughly applied. Take the example of wireless networks.
In 2005, I (Vittorio) used to commute between Pistoia and
Florence, about 19 miles (30 kilometers) mainly in the Tuscany
countryside; in that short segment, my pocket PC would pick up
more than 40 Wi-Fi access points, the vast majority of them
without any protection.
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