Disruptive technologies set the tone for 2004

Wired on Friday/Danny O'Brien: They call them "disruptive technologies": the new ideas that barge out of nowhere and force all of us to wiggle around to make room for them.

For some, they make life better and provide new opportunities. For others, they can devastate profits, turn long-term profit forecasts into science fiction, and render years of experience obsolete.

The changes they wreak might be sudden, but they're not always a surprise. Net users were trading MP3s years before Napster made it a mainstream activity. Teenagers were sending SMS messages long before the adults caught on. So what are the underground tech trends that will rewrite 2004's rulebook?

The easiest bet is on Voice Over IP, or VoIP. It's already got a slangy pronunciation ("voyp"), and a growing crowd of evangelical users. VoIP phones let broadband Net users treat their DSL or cable line as an ultra-cheap phone line. You plug a normal phone into the box provided and then plug the box into your network connection. Both incoming and outgoing calls are routed over the internet.

Commercial VoIP providers such as Packet8 and Vonage are offering US users unlimited calls across the US and Canada for $20 (€15.66) a month and unlimited call plans to Europe for $30.

But these companies don't care where you are. If you have a DSL line anywhere in the world, you can sign up for a US phone number and take advantage of the same offers.

VoIP threatens to devastate the already slim profits of phone companies who can't keep up: AT&T in the US is rolling out VoIP services, even though they compete with its standard long-distance rates and give a fraction of the revenue.

Skype is a mutant offspring of VoIP and the last generation of disruptive tech, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. P2P powered the Napster revolution. Now the creators of one of the largest file-sharing networks, Kazaa, have their own VoIP application.

Skype doesn't let you make calls to normal phones but anyone using Windows can talk to any other Skype user for free. Similar services are available for Mac iChat users, and Yahoo Messenger, but Skype's service has managed to hype itself to more than a million regular users - and for no cost in infrastructure.

Like P2P networks, there's no central exchange - calls are routed between users directly. In Estonia, doctors use the free Skype program to talk to their patients.

And free telephony is changing how people use the phone. A friend of mine works in Helsinki. He leaves a Skype connection to his London girlfriend on all the time so they can hear each other as though they were in the same room.

VoIP should set more than the telcoms' bells ringing. Services such as Skype and Vonage are encrypted. That means that other Net users can't snoop on the calls - but it also makes it difficult for governments to slap on legally required wire-taps.

Even in the new post-9/11 paranoid world, policy lags behind technology. But don't expect to see "Are terrorists using VoIP?" headlines for another couple of years. After all, protecting our computers has taken years to reach the news and is only beginning to change technology.

The new rule for 2004 is an increasing awareness of security on our computers. Like VoIP, some computer users have been fretting about the fragility of the networks for years. Others have been taking advantage of it, to secrete intrusive ads, relay unsolicited email or even launch attacks against individual corporations and governments. But only now are people starting to pay attention.

Microsoft began to take security seriously this year, after a concerned memo by the company's founder, Bill Gates. It stopped development on its latest products for two months while retraining its programmers in secure-coding techniques.

Other companies are taking the demand for more resilient equipment into their own hands. The spam and virus problems on the Net mean that more and more users are paying third-party mail providers to take the problem away from them. And open-source companies such as Red Hat are finding that their notoriously stingy users are happy to pay for speedy updates to the latest security flaws.

Meanwhile, the truly disruptive tech - viruses, intrusive ads and trojan horses - continue to grow more sophisticated. This may well be the year that someone you know gets their computer "owned" by a remote malfeasant through a security flaw.

Tech is one way to fight this battle. The law is another. And 2004 may be the year when new technology finds itself disrupted by the encroach of law and politics.

Anti-spam legislation across Europe, the US and Australia comes into force in 2004 - a test of how tough law enforcement can be used against such a new crime. And other legal battles in the courts, for good or bad, will determine the landscape of the internet for some time.

Rogue Utah computer company SCO should see its day in court in its battle against the free operating system Linux, to which it claims to own the exclusive copyright.

The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America will continue their court battles to finish off what they see as the criminal menace of music and movie piracy.

Will all this come to a head in 2004? Hard to say. It's easy to predict how established technology will change our lives, although not the timescale - and the law of men grind much slower.