In computer news this week:

The problems with the Internet - slow and getting slower; poor service, token web sites.

It's been a long hot summer for internet users. America Online seems to have outgrown their capacity again, and once again has become virtually unusable like it was 3 years ago, when they were sued by every state. The AOL - Time Warner merger would be a disaster for consumers in my opinion.

I believe hackers steal hundreds of passwords everyday on AOL, and the company just isn't able to stop the problem.

Other services are having their problems too. I had been using Juno as a free service, and for awhile I could get on the Internet everytime with Juno and surf much faster than on AOL, but now Juno has slowed down. I even tried downloading another free service - altavista - but have never been able to get it to connect. Interestingly it uses one of the same local access numbers that Juno does.

One of the reasons of course is that the kids are home from school now during the day, and the internet is a cooler way to talk to friends than using the phone. They've run out of things to do; it's too hot to go outside, so they're parked on the internet until school starts again.

Ebuying still hasn't taken off. Last Christmas a news story said the majority of people who bought gifts over the internet weren't satisfied, and had hard times returning items. Amazon.com - supposedly the model of an internet marketer with a good business plan - is in the news daily; predicted to fail.

The amount of information on the internet has resulted in information overload. The search engines just can't find all the pages out there, and the accuracy of search engine results has been steadily dropping over the past 2 years.

One of my pet peeves is what I call token websites - companies that have websites but don't maintain them or respond to email you send via them. In the past month I've sent email questions to sites from Microsoft down to Tim's chips - a potato chip company - with no answers.

State and federal goverments have tried to do something about the spam email problem, but it's getting worse.

There's a frightening number of people who still believe the Internet is a gold mine, and who continually fall victim to internet fraud schemes.

The internet pornography problem, which I did a series on, has worsened and become more blatant.

For years I've been warning about the lack of privacy on the internet; how vendors put cookies on your computer and track your buying habits, and sell that information to other vendors. People don't seem to care about this. Hackers can theoretically connect to your computer and steal information or delete your files, without your being aware of it, while you're connected. Again, people don't seem to see the threat of this.

The only thing that has caused a mass panic has been the email viruses, like the lovebug. And yet, most computers are still vulnerable to those type viruses because noone downloads the patches that Microsoft makes available on their website. And there's massive security holes in Microsoft mail programs that they should have anticipated, but noone's holding them accountable for it.

Probably the biggest obstacle to improving the Internet is the fact that nobody owns it. Aristotle said "Men hold least dear that which is held in common." He sure had the internet pegged.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 Email: fdspokane@aol.com