Dotcom slide set to become avalanche

The television advertisement for the San Jose Mercury News newspaper (Silicon Valley's major news source beside the finance page on Yahoo!) says it all. "Last year, you were a millionaire at 28. Now you're just 28. Life unfolds."

Cruelly amusing, yes, but boy, does it reflect the feeling out here of wariness and worry - although Californians are good about keeping a sense of humour (the running joke is that no one is jumping out of windows yet because what would be the point - the typical Valley tech company building is only two floors high).

The facts are frightening, sure, especially if you are involved with a dotcom. According to various surveys, 75,500 dotcom employees have been laid off in the US since December 1999, 25,000 of those in California. Some 30,000 further lay-offs are predicted in 2001. And it isn't expected to slow anytime soon. In the coming 18 months, 80 per cent of area dotcoms are expected to fail.

My sister-in-law told me of a friend who runs a medium-sized Net-area company who has nothing for her employees to do at the moment. She has enough money to keep the firm afloat for about a year, but the workers are literally doing nothing. She has been calling charities and non-profits to see if she can send them out to paint houses, work in soup kitchens, anything to keep them occupied.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the times, though, is that rents have dropped in San Francisco, particularly around the South of Market area downtown, where many of the dotcoms located during the boom. Anyone who has ever lived in what is referred to here as The City will know that rents never, ever fall, and haven't for decades. Usually occupancy rates are so tight that Dublin looks like a pushover for finding housing. Now, say reports, tenants are in the position to bargain for rent drops and landlords are offering a month's free rent to entice new occupants in to empty flats.

At the same time, the papers are packed with ads for technology jobs and the skills shortage remains a bigger long-term worry. Conferences are on everywhere; 10,000 people are at the RSA Data Security conference in San Francisco this week, and there's no drop in interest in all things technological and Net-related. Perhaps we will move into recession, but this is an industry that never sleeps, and no one has time to feel sorry for him or herself.

Having just received yet another e-mail press release from a company containing a serious computer virus - one that managed to destabilise my system enough to require me to erase my hard drive and reinstall my operating system and files when I received it (from another company) two months ago - I was grimly amused to see that most people think child pornography and credit card fraud on the Internet are more worrying issues than viruses and hacker attacks.

This is according to a new study by the Pew Charitable Trust (www.pewinternet.org), a respected group in the US that has conducted a range of such surveys. The leading consumer concerns about the state of the Net include child porn (92 per cent), credit card theft (87 per cent), fraud (80 per cent), hacker attacks (76 per cent) and viruses (70 per cent). Not surprisingly, the more experienced the Internet user, and the better educated, the fewer their worries about online crime. Those who have never used the Net expressed the most disquiet (52 per cent, compared to 34 per cent of the 2,000 person sample).

The reality is that child pornography, while horrific, is no more widely prevalent on the Internet than it is in society at large and most people will never come across it. Likewise with credit card theft - card issuers recently issued a report in which computer fraud was an almost negligible worry compared to plain old everyday credit card fraud that occurs when someone finds your card receipts and gains your number, or you give it to some unknown person on the phone to order your pizza.

But virus creators have the greatest likelihood of affecting every one of us at some point in our computer-using lives. Despite using virus software - which alerts me to just how many of the blasted things are hitting my inbox - a few slip through every year in the gap before I've updated my protection software. If you are on various organisations' group mailing lists - for press releases, for example - you are especially vulnerable to the rash of them that spread through popular e-mail programs such as Microsoft's Outlook Express. You get them embedded in a message, and if you open the message the virus enters your system, replicates itself, and e-mails itself out to your entire address book.

Those still running any Net enabled PC without virus software at this point - especially companies that can't seem to maintain clean enough networks to avoid sending viruses to clients and contacts - are fools and a risk to the rest of us. How ironic that the companies I've had viruses from are in the tech field or are PR companies representing them. What a way to impress.

Klillington@irish-times.ie