Well I guess we were all reminded of a couple lessons last week with the Hotmail fiasco. You're exposed on the Internet. Second, technology is only as good as the people behind it, and guess what? People make a lot of mistakes.

Hotmail is the free Internet-based e-mail service owned by Microsoft Corp.

Last week security flaws potentially exposed millions of personal accounts to hackers. Those who knew the way in through the flaw could read others' e-mails and impersonate those with Hotmail accounts.

Apparently the way to get in was being sent around the Internet to hundreds of wanna-be hackers over the weekend until a European newspaper made it public.

The discovery of the breach meant Hotmail was closed off briefly last Monday and 50 million account holders couldn't get access to their e-mails while Microsoft fixed the problem.

The problem was a simple code that allowed hackers to get access to the Hotmail accounts. For me the major problem was Microsoft's slowness to act when it was notified of the security hole. The company took 12 hours to respond to the alert according to Wired magazine.

If you go the site at www.hotmail.com and read the company's explanation, you'll see Microsoft had the arrogance to pass the whole problem off as a minor kerfuffle. Even though Microsoft stated in the letter the problem has been fixed, there's no guarantee that it has been. I'm a Hotmail user and I'm looking around at the other options.

I haven't, and won't send sensitive personal information by e-mail, whether it's by Hotmail or by my local account. If I have to, I'll use some form of encryption to make the task harder for any prying eyes. Any Logic or North Rock employee with the right access and knowledge can gain access to the information you're sending or downloading through their servers.

So, delete all sensitive e-mail on your various e-mail accounts. Since your Hotmail account has been compromised by the recent break-in, switch to a different provider. There are plenty of other free e-mail accounts providers out there. I like the Internet e-mail services because they're easy to access them from any machine and easy to remember.

And if you have to send sensitive information use one of the encryption programs to make it harder to gain access to the data. Check out www.netaddress.com, www.yahoo.com, www.mailcity.lycos.com, http:/infoseek.go.com or www.prontomail.com for free e-mail services. Sign up to all of them if you want. Then there's always www.1on1mail.com, a site where the founders aim to ensure that your words self-destruct after the e-mail is read. The free service, created by London-based Global Market, uses private and public key encryption to deliver e-mails. The program decrypts the text when the message is opened, and closes it if the computer is left unattended.

Two hours after being opened the e-mail will self-destruct. The "autoshredder'' also automatically delete messages on the recipient's computer after a set time period. Another feature overwrites all traces of a message from a recipient's computer, preventing it from being undeleted. The program also prevents e-mail from being cut and pasted. The company is offering $50,000 to anyone who can break the encryption program.

While there's a lot of hype about electronic commerce these days, it's sobering to note investment analysts are forecasting Internet sales in the general merchandising category are expected to account for less than half-a-percent of sales during the Christmas season.

A Jupiter Communications report on electronic commerce found the Internet is not creating new sales, but mostly cannibalising existing sales.

Rather than dismissing the Internet, existing businesses -- what the e-commerce promoters call the "bricks and mortar'' or "traditional'' merchants for want of a better term -- should instead conclude they need to get wired. Fast. Or their business will be stolen away from them by startup competitors.

They will at least be able to lower costs as a separate report from Giga Information Group concludes. Giga forecasts that e-commerce could save companies worldwide as much as $1.25 trillion by 2002 from $17.6 billion worldwide in 1998.

Factoid of the week: The number of US banks, thrifts, and credit unions that allow customers to perform transactions like paying bills and transferring funds online had grown from just one in December 1995 to 2,100 by June this year according to the General Accounting Office (GAO), an investigative arm of the US Congress.

The GAO projected the number of US households using Internet banking services would increase from 6.6 million at the end of 1998 to 32 million by 2003.

Scam of the week: For those with too much money to burn, there's www.newprayer.com, which for $7.50 will use what it calls a "directional radio transmitter'' to beam your prayer to God's last known whereabouts.

The site strains credulity by proclaiming: "We know that God was at the birth of His universe. We know how the universe began -- with a `Big Bang'. We know where the oldest part of the universe is located. We can transmit radio messages to this precise location.'' My wife, Za, asked me if the site was really serious. "If people believe in God, what are they doing putting him in a little box somewhere?'' I could only answer that there's a sucker born with every click of the mouse.