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

Re:It's not the broadband

[gtrubetskoy]

And Microsoft, while their security practices are abysmal, aren't the only ones to blame.

So who do you suggest is to blame, if not Microsoft?

The article makes an assertion that proliferation of worms will negatively impact freedoms of the Internet. Microsoft created Outlook and Explorer, both of which can be made to execute arbitrary code on an unsuspecting user's machine, which is the vulnerability exploited by literally all of the worms circulating out there right now, and your suggestion is that someone other than the party responsible for those vulnerabilities is to blame? This is sort of like saying that criminals aren't the only ones to blame for their crimes.

Re:It's not the broadband

[gtrubetskoy]

the vast majority of all the problems we are having are due to problems with primarily Microsoft Outlook, as well as other Microsoft software.

Any proof or facts to point this out, or is this just another one of your false blanket statements?

Proof: here, here and here; and there is plenty more where that came from, these are just top three for today - note how they all exploit MS Explorer vulnerabilities.

Now, anyone semi-profficient in visual basic can write a very destructive virus.

Yet another blanket statement with no proof or backup.

It is pretty well known that many of the e-mail worms out there were written in visualbasic. here is an example.

In any of your posts I have yet to see any facts, the only fact that you have presented is that you don't have any resources or any backup/proof for anything you say.

Well, I'm sorry you are so uninformed that you don't know about these things already.

Say hi to Tanya for me.

Whatever