Broadband Access Leading to Internet Breakdown?

TwistedSpring asks: "As bandwidth costs become cheaper and more people adopt cable or DSL over standard dial-up connections, the time it takes to distribute worms and other unwanted or malicious material (read: spam) across the Internet decreases. After noting the current surge in Internet worms and the so-called Darwinist evolution of these things into more and more powerful incarnations, I wonder: will the proliferation of broadband Internet access deal a serious blow to current freedoms on the Internet?"

"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?"

Comments

More mod abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

I need to verify this, but it appears that users with a very low uid can move their post above other posts. Mods then go through and mod comments below this upgraded comment that say something similar as Redundant. This causes this low uid person to appear as if they thought of the idea and get the visibility and mod points for it, but in fact THEY STOLE THE COMMENT! Has anyone else found this to be the case?

There is also a group of idiot mods running over the threads modding anything they dont understand as Troll. There have been some very intelligent comments recently that have been modded as Troll, purely because the mods either didnt get the joke, or the post does not follow the slashbot groupthink.

How many others have been experiencing the above mod abuses recently?

We Must Stop Skynet

[BEI01]

Pull the plug now! We can't let Skynet take over.