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Broadband Access Leading to Internet Breakdown?
"Spam, adware, worms and viruses are now able to propagate much faster than ever before. Worms are also growing bigger, more advanced, as it's possible to transfer more viral code in less time. It's as if slow dial-up lines acted as a kind of immune system that prevented effective propagation of worms and made DDoS attacks so much less significant.
I'm not only worried about viruses and spam levels. Part of the reason the MPAA and RIAA are taking such an interest in Internet activity is that file sharing has become so much easier with the availability of broadband, and as usual there are murmerings of regulation. Before the broadband revolution, the involvement of the MPAA and RIAA in Internet affairs was small, and their argument was less convincing.
As broadband grows, will regulation become necessary not just to prevent illegal distribution of copyrighted material but more likely to protect Internet users from themselves (we're already seeing ISPs adding spam e-mail filtering to their default services, for example)? Will the Internet fall in popularity as it becomes more and more frustrating and dangerous to use, or will we simply see a massive improvement in coding practices and more secure software?"
The web is in danger of nothing. More importantly, the Internet is more important to commerce than ever before.
Unless a large, physical attack on the wires carrying all this data occurs, everything is pretty much A-OK.
I have been pwned because my
I suppose it depends on how you define the current freedom. I don't believe that it is going to lead to increased censorship. I don't believe it is going to lead to increased tracking or monitoring (although certainly other things, like the recent FBI/DOJ request for increased wiretapping ability may do just that).
I think that it will lead to increased filtering on the ISP side of things. More ISPs will be using Spam Assasin and similar programs behind the scenes. Undoubtedly, some legitimate e-mails will be caught by these SPAM traps, and the end-user might not have access to them.
Personally, since Dartmouth College starting running virus scanners and SPAM filters and the like, I constantly get e-mails where the "suspicious" file was automatically removed, and although most of those removals were viruses, I also lose legitimate files that are sent to me. As an end-user, I don't have access to change the settings or tell the system that a file is, in fact, OK. Instead, I have to e-mail the person back and ask them to resend the file to my AOL account.
I suspect that as more people use cable and DSL and the malware increases, this behind-the-scene tinkering will increase.
A serious blow to current freedoms on the Internet? I'm not sure. A pain in the ass? Absolutely.
99% of the people you ask would say not having broadband would be the biggest blow to their freedom on the internet... unfortunately we have to take the good with the bad, or start kicking people off the net...
Imminent death of net predicted.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
While unix boxes went through 25 years (since ARPA contracted UCBerkeley to make this "TCP" thingy) of evolution on networks that were, in retrospect, pretty safe.
The Morris Worm in '88 woke a lot of us up, but we've known for decades about "doors" and "locks" and such.
Windows is/was/and will be a consumer operating systems whose main impetus is features to push sales. Security hasn't appeared to be on their radar screen except as a check box ("did you think about security?" Um, yeah. "Good enough for us. Ship it").
I'm getting hammered by spam and worms and EVERYTIME I nmap back to the sender (okay 0.001% of senders, randomly chosen as I get pissed off), it's a windows box.
I love broadband.
I love VOIP to mom and video and streaming stuff to relatives (all legal)
I hate the bad neighbors running windows. The metaphorical slaughterhouse next door.
How could you make a case to go back to dial-up? How about ditching your phone and just using snail mail? I have difficulty seeing how faster communication is ever bad. Not perfect, certainly, and the flaws need work, but the the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
...And every little old lady that comes in and purchases a DSL circuit for email makes me cringe.
All I can think is that she's just another virus infection waiting to happen on my network.
For some, it's senseless and stupid to have a broadband connection. I mean, my bread and butter requires that people DO have a DSL circuit, but there's no sense of responsibility with their internet connection.
People bitch all the time about spam, and how to get rid of it. That same person comes in and has a SMTP relay cleaned off their system a month later. They can complain about it, but they don't realize they're part of the problem as well.
Then there are those that come in and tell me to my face "Bah, I don't care if I have a virus, it just makes things a little slower." Those people piss me off the most. Those same people get pissed when I shut their connections off because they're sending out 20 messages/second, drowing their outbound pipe.
I swear. Sometimes I think owning a computer should require a license.
Can you ping me now? Gooood! | Manhappenin.Net - Things to do
I work at a local mom and pop computer store, and it seems like somewhere around half of all PCs brought in with problems stem from broadband used improperly.
/. aside) can't deal with it. They destroy the usuability of their PCs with it.
We had one guy come in, who had always-on Comcast cable, the same provider I use myself. He had bought a PC from us roughly 2 weeks before, and was hell bent that the "piece of shit" we sold him was to blame. Of course, no antivirus, no firewall, AOL for broadband added...so much spyware. That AdAware count was, I kid you not, 3,250 or so.
As a person who has to deal with people like this quite often, it's not hard for me to see the side of an ISP who would LIKE to impose restrictions. There is also part of me who wouldn't be against it. As much as I would like unfettered access, I know most people (those on
So I have mixed feelings on all this. What would I like to see? You have no fetters, at first. Then, you start acting as a spam relay or something, you get restrictions (I know, this happens, and I applaud for it). You act as a waypoint to spread viri and trojans, cut back another notch. And so on. This should all be spelled out in the license agreement, but I think it's nearing necessary.
Internet usage is not a RIGHT. It's a PRIVILEDGE. And it's one you should have to be responsible to keep.
Like most things, it depends.
If worms, virii, spam, etc. don't become more damaging than they are now, the status qou will be maintained.
If, on the other hand, bad guy capabilities increase until someone does something that takes lives and/or billions of dollars, then I think we'll see legislation to deal with it seriously.
Don't forget, too, that if the internet becomes too damn annoying or risky to use, people will stop using it. Seems to me that's a more likely way that my internet freedom will be restricted.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I don't know about you all, but if you have an open node in the net you WILL be owned on 56K or broadband. The virus might -spread- faster, but it won't destabilize the long term growth of the net.
You'll be surprised at how fast ISP's implement manditory transparent virus/worm filering if the problem ever reaches the levels that you're implying. 2/4 ISP's that I've dealt with filtered back orifice without notifying customers.
Question:
Would anyone mind spending $2/month extra for an ISP to implement manditory WORM/Virus filters? If you want to play with them, use your LAN! This would solve all the worlds hunger problems!!!
Bye!
One virus vector is plain old portscanning......
But you can't portscan 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 possible addresses very fast.
But IPv6 is a ways off, yet.
What we will see is an emergence of firewalls, etc, that make things more difficult for spam and viruses.
And my guess is that the backbones will also grow, as there is a lot of dark fibre left over from the internet boom. And for the RIAA, I think the genie is out of the bottle. Even mailing disks around would perpetuate it.
Fellowship 9/11
I have mediacom cable internet. Quite fast but if DSL was here, I'd consider taking it. Why? because mediacom does not allow servers.
Reading through thier various offers is interesting. Not only do they not want home users to run servers, but they even want to limit servers to certain business users, too.
In my opinion, this is going to lead to less people offering content on the web, as the bandwidth becomes more restrictive, and your choices decrease down to a few broadband options.This is in direct contrast to the mid-90's promise of the net where it was seen that anyone would be able to put up any thing.
I feel very sad, myself: I pay boupcoup bucks for a good connection (at least, compared to dialup) but I can't do jack shit with it (at least I can't do 2/3rds of what any healthy geek would want). Barely seems worth it.
More of consequence in my mind are the MILLIONS of machines acting as bots for a DDOS attack. It's less spam (spam is bad, m'kay?) than the ENOURMOUS connection points that are running and spreading viruses that can harm me.
My house has been Windows-free since it was on the Internet (1983 or so). When I helped remove a rootkit from a brother of a friends linux box (again, a nat box woulda done wonders), he looked at my rack with ~9 working machines (the others are elsewhere) and asked which windows *I* ran. I looked at the SGI, Sun, NeXTs, Alpha and couple Intel boxes and said, "none. But I have a linux box to play games on."
My systems are generally fine until 5000 windows boxes running worms wake up and decide to visit and visit and visit until my bandwidth is used up.
Spam annoying as hell.
Viruses dangerous to everyone around.
If your messages are encrypted, then you don't have to worry about automated programs kicking them for their content or attachments. That will be up to the decrypting party. I pity the ISP that starts blocking messages because they are encrypted.
Learn how to cryptographically sign your mail on Mac OS X 10.3
Just put a clause in the contract. If a PC is put onto the network without antivirus and firewall and it gets infected (thus becoming a threat to the ISP), the account is immediately terminated without right of appeal.... in theory ISPs could already do this (as infected machines are often spam vectors and spamming already has such penalties) but an explicit contract stops them saying they didn't know.
Publicise it... make sure that the ordinary users are given every chance to comply (a CD that automatically installs Norton should do it), and that's 90% of the problem solved.
True that the time to distribute fixed and patches goes down, however the time to create these fixes/patches at best stay constant, at worse take longer to make due to the complexity of the worms/trojans/etc... This is because of the human factor can not be speed up, unlike the data transfer.
"As bandwidth costs become cheaper and more people adopt cable or DSL over standard dial-up connections,"
Where is this happening? Cable connection runs in the $40-$50/month range right now. A couple of years ago you could get them for about $35 in my area.
There really doesn't seem to be any price pressures on broadband access yet. Most places have either DSL or Cable. Some places have both. Neither the telcos (who do DSL) nor the Cable cos seem inclined to compete on price yet. Maybe when wireless broadband or broadband over powerlines become more common you'll start to see some competition.
After noting the current surge in Internet worms and the so-called Darwinist evolution of these things into more and more powerful incarnations,
It's not exactly Darwinian evolution. These things don't mutate on their own, people change them.
No, but the proliferation of crappy Microsoft software will. In fact it has already.
I find amuzing that I actually got moded down and got a whole slew of passionate responses about bashing Microsoft. Perhaps M$ has reached such a point where people are already tired of being dissatisfied and would prefer to just "let it be".
My statement is still true - the vast majority of all the problems we are having are due to problems with primarily Microsoft Outlook, as well as other Microsoft software.
There used to be days when virus writers used assembly. Now, anyone semi-profficient in visual basic can write a very destructive virus. And Microsoft is to blame for that. Nothing personal against them, but it is their fault, and that's a fact, sorry.
I also have an IPv6 tunnel to that remote (by 3k miles) box. Protocol 41/port25 is not filtered :)
The all new, shiny, "UhOh"'s (this decade) style CONSUMER internet is not the [D]ARPA-Net that some of us grew up with. Not even the "rough town" internet of the mid 90s to the late 90s.
No this is the network for those people who believe that one network of the Internet is the "intranet." Where even those that thought SMB and IPX were good ideas were considered "technical." (I remember the first time I deal with a Novell network, asking my friend the admin how to turn off the curses interface and get to the real command line. "No, that's it." I setup my Sun IPC to do print and file service and his box with PC-NFS and asked why they thought novell was worth $20k) (the IPC was fairly used at the time, but BSDi 1.0 was just out too, for less on them Pentium/33s).
The consumer net has people who need protection. Perhaps under the banner of "to help them" but just as important is to protect ME from them.
I long ago proposed that AOL, Compusa, Prodigy (the trailer park of the Internet) and those guys have OC48's between them and a 56k modem to the rest of us. Didn't happen and now those people are all around dumping sewage into our streams.
I'm about set to refuse mail that DIDN'T come from an IPv6 address and regress.
So filter port 25. The net is in crisis from the consumer FatPipe providers.
Motivate the vendors (MS, but also the Linux distros, Sun and everyone else to NOT COME OUT OF THE BOX WITH 20+ ports listening!!).
I clean up hacked Linux and Sun regularly. We need "echo" on for WHAT good reason? If Sun can't come up with a simple CLI tool to manage inetd.conf (it's a perl script), then they shouldn't be playing on the net.
Linux needs rpc's by default why?
99%* of linux user use packages built by strangers for what good reason? (at least with source, 1 of thousand of users can LOOK at mutt-1.4i.tar.gz that md5 checksums to:
a67bcdf1a1cd53d61ccd3ebf3993ba59
With a binary, it's a crapshoot.
The internet is a bad neighborhood and some folks need protecting and we need protecting from some folks. Just don't tell gramma that we're walling her IN, just 'splain that the wall is to keep the baddies OUT.)
--
Mr Cranky
(in my 22nd year of using this new fangled "network" thingy. Archie was good enough for me.)
* ok, I made up 99% but anyone have real numbers that frighten less?
Treat everyone who gets a virus like a child. If your computer is a broadband connection and you get a trojan or virus which is detected by the broadband company then they should have the right to treat you like a child because you have shown that you are not responable enough to use the Internet without "training wheels.
These "training wheels" would consist of software that these people would be forced to use after they get infected. First the broadband company should shut down access from that computer. Then if the person wants to use that broadband company agian, he must agree to have software installed on his computer which will check for and update virus definition files daily and check for security patches daily and download and install them if a new one is present.
This system only punishes the guilty (fools who already got a trojan or virus somehow) and leaves everyone else alone to use the Internet as usual.
I'd like to point out that I haven't been infected by a worm or virus yet. Thats not to say my system is bug free.. though linux does have its ups when it comes to security. As far as spam goes, mail delivery needs to be redesigned. And not one of these dumbass MS solutions of a nickle an email.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Windows XP has a software firewall that is simple, but works pretty well for most users. Stateful, permits outbound, denys inbound. It will allow inbound upon user request (in the config menu) or program request (not sure how that works). It's off by default.
However, it's not going to be for long. Service Pack 2 is going to turn it on by default. This will cause plenty of whining and MS bashing, I'm sure, but hopefully it will help a little bit.
However the main problem these days is with attachment-clicking syndrome. Most viruses don't come through exploits, they just come through e-mail. For every one like Blaster that uses an exploit there are 500 like Bagel that go via e-mail attachment. People need to learn to quit opening random attachments.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
There are mitigating factors, and ironically most of it is tied to the baby Bells and their competitors.
Every communication line is multiplexed. In other words, a telephone trunk line open to the public at large may actually only be able to handle 1/10 of the total possible traffic.
But broadband lines have been multiplexed much worse.
So that as long as everyone does not use broadband, the speeds are high; but as soon as everyone goes over to it, guess what will happen?
And then those who want the speed they had in the beginning will get a new offer: pay twice as much again and you can have it back. And so forth.
So things are faster now, but it's not a constant upward curve.
This idea of broadband access creating a "breeding ground" for new malicious code as well as allowing the code to be spread more rapidly and universally seems to parrallel the problems that have been facing public health officials for the last century.
With the increase in human mobility due to cars, trains, planes, etc. more people can come in contact from disparate places more rapidly and more often. This has resulted in once isolated diseases with limited scope becoming important health concerns. SARS is a prime example. Toronto became an infected city, though thousands of miles away from the epicenter. Yet we develop technology to aid in the detection and treatment of diseases. We don't, though, regulate people's movement. Temporarily there might be economic forces that isolate areas (i.e. airline travel stops due to lack of demand) but such effedts are temporary.
I don't see a need to necessarily worry that broadband access's negative effects will trigger overregulation. Instead, I think that systems will be developed that mimic biologic systems. Oftentimes, evolution has produced solutions to complex problems in very elegant ways that we could not have developed using traditional methods.
Are you sure about that? I thought it was signs of some *software* breaking down. Keep in mind that the vast majority of regular users who doesn't have much insight in security are coincidentally also using one of the least secure operating systems with Internet access.
Maybe the inter... ahem, software would heal with new development philosophies?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!