Guy Kewney

It's all too easy to forget that most people don't have broadband internet, or perhaps I should rephrase that: "It seems that Microsoft has forgotten that the world is full of dial-up users."

The result is, of course, the current flood of viruses, and it works roughly like this.

Recently, I got the call I dread from a friend: "My PC is going very, very slowly, is taking 10 minutes to load Windows and won't run anything. Fancy dropping by for supper and taking a look?"

You can't say: "No, I don't fancy dropping by for supper." But you can say: "That sounds serious, I think you should contact your PC's support line right away," even if you know they won't. They will probably say: "Yes, good plan," but you know that, when you get there, they will say they "simply didn't have time". So off I went for supper.

The machine was sick, no doubt about it. It had three different antivirus packages on it. The main one was AVG, which is an excellent package and in most respects useful and user friendly; but it has just one flaw which can be fatal if you don't know about it - it doesn't update itself more than once a month unless you tell it to.

Then there was Norton AntiVirus. This isn't my favourite package, as it seems to be impossible to set it up without slowing down the machine. Norton always says this is because of 'user error' which it may well be, but errors are all too easy to make.

And if you try to delete the program, it seems to leave all sorts of bits and pieces behind. No doubt that's a user error again, but it makes things uncomfortable. The third was a package which was recommended because 'it includes a personal firewall' - which it does, but not in the free home version.

I deleted all three and quickly brought up Task Manager, which showed that one particular application - a Dell keyboard handler to give the user 'multimedia keys' (which nobody ever uses) - was using 98 per cent of the CPU cycles. I killed it and then the machine worked.

If my friend ever wants that utility back, it's between them and Dell as to how they do it. They never knew they had it, so that's not the issue. What is an issue is the state of the machine.

It was a top-of-the-range Dell P4, with half a gigabyte of Ram, a 100GB hard disk and was less than a year old. When I got to it, I first made sure all Microsoft's security patches were installed. Instead, I found Windows Update reporting 41 critical updates waiting.

The dial-up connection my friend uses is fine in terms of speed and price - dial an 0800 number and stay online as long as you need to. So in theory, they could have downloaded all the patches they liked. But it isn't just the cost of the call, it's also a question of using the phone. "I'm trying to call home and you're using the phone to download patches?"

In practice, some proportion of dial-up users don't download the latest patches, but so what? Well their machines get compromised. PCs are taken over by worms, phages and viruses and are used to launch millions of spam spasms around the world, filling our mail boxes. We then find messages from people saying: "You sent me a virus!" when we aren't infected and didn't send them anything.

The computer industry acts as a weathercock for other industries in a lot of ways and it's tempting to ask if the internet metamorphosis hits the rest of the world the way it has hit IT, what is the future of other arenas of competition? In all seriousness, I think it's a sensible approach.

For example, IT publishing was turned upside down by the internet - the reasons you buy a magazine like this one are completely different from the motives behind the pre-internet readership. All of us in IT have computers and most of us have fast broadband; but readers in other areas may not have either. Their future is still some way away.

But if the lessons of the past can point to the future, and they do, then the opposite is also true; the lessons of the future shouldn't make us forget the past. Science fiction stories in the 1960s somehow failed to predict the fact that even 20 years later, most houses in Britain would still be Victorian.

The future of the connected world is something we can see coming, but bits of the unconnected world will always be with us. Somewhere, there will always be people who read books, people who can't reach fibre links, people with limited processing power and people with dial-up speeds.

And the message is: what we do affects those people, by depriving them of access to 'the future', but what they do also affects us. The virus plague can't be stopped until our software designers remember that there are people who can't download 20MB every day to keep up. The spam pestilence won't be completely wiped out until we stop pretending that ADSL is universally accessible.

The poor and the dial-up users will always be with us.

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