magazine article that severely criticised Internet, because of security considerations.

BSL has just been given Government permission to market Internet Island wide, opening another personal and corporate form of international communication.

Mr. Weare said the issue of security can easily be addressed. In fact, the issue of security became very clear to the Bermuda Biological Station, who went on line last August.

Associate research scientist, Dr. Tony Michaels confirmed: "As soon as we got connected, we had all kinds of people trying to log on and get into our system.

"A lot of people just want to see if they can break into the system. Our main concern was to establish a level of security that prevented anyone from getting into our system and causing damage.'' An article published in the May edition of Data Communications, by the director of Data Comm test lab and president of the Tolly Group, Mr. Kevin Tolly, said Internet suffered from "two fatal flaws that make it unsuitable for carrying anything more than trivial traffic''.

One was poor reliability , the other is a total lack of security, he said.

But Mr. Weare responded: "There is nothing inherently insecure about Internet. There is every opportunity to apply the appropriate measures to secure your Internet access point.

"Security couldn't be an insurmountable problem, because you wouldn't have 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies using it.

Mr. Weare said the Internet system being used by the magazine author was an amateur version. The system being offered in Bermuda, he said, is the commercial version.

Mr. Tolly complained messages sent on Internet are recorded by a host of unintended stations and can actually be intercepted and altered before reaching thetr intended destination. He said that programmes that copy all passwords of users logging on to Internet-attached computers are now a fact of life.

Mr. Tolly argues that even if encryption schemes are used to encode the messages, computer jocks can still find out who is communicating with whom and their interest can be piqued with an unusual and sudden flurry of communications between two companies that may suggest a takeover or a lawsuit was in the wind.

The article also criticises the system for a lack of reliability, saying that delivery of messages is not guaranteed and the sender has no way of knowing whether the messages arrived or not.

But Mr. Weare said that that is not a problem with the commercially robust system being offered in Bermuda, because the messages are transferred literally within seconds, and if addressed incorrectly, a message is returned to the sender explaining that it could not be delivered.