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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?"
Obviously, the time to distribute fixed and patches goes down as well. As does the ability to spread the word about things going around... I see the "always on" thing as more of a security risk than the higher speed, definately.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
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.
Wasn't IPv6, combined with proper filtering supposed to curb these problems?
Alot of the blame falls on the ISP, they helped turn the Internet into a always-on appliance, now they have to make it robust.
Why does my ISP allow packets off my network that obviously don't originate from it? Is it considered a feature to allow DoS attacks? Why is port 25 open by default? Why isn't NetBIOS closed by default? Where is the IPv6 testbed that my ISP was supposed to have had 3 years ago?
Granted, the average Joe User can be an idiot, but part of the ISP's job is to make the Internet more idiot-proof.
...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.
am going to write that lame joke you thought I would.
Instead i would like to say that the Internet is not a medium that should be regulated or cencored.
If the dumb users are getting hurt by its wildness, that same darwinism should do its work.
And if we will see more secure software? Dont hold your breath.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
A digital divide is probably more likely, as most people on broadband are accessing fuller multi-media experiences while poor souls have to avoid big-combo sites.
I think from the history of technology advancement, things always get bigger, better, faster, strong etc, and they usually don't break themselves down in the process.
Take our transportation for example, when the gravel roads got too crowded, we paved them, then widened them, then built highway motorway causeway, then we moved to train, light-rail, bullettrain.
At first we only tried to travel a short distance if you had to do it by foot, when we have cars, we want to travel further and eventually it is too far for cars, and we move to flights etc etc.
The cycle just keeps going.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The problem is the transformation of most nodes of the Internet from peers to clients. That's what's going on with broadband; they lure you to the service with speed and reliability then after you're in they let you know you can't run any services and they're putting a mandatory (and poorly-run) spam filter on your incoming mail.
You're no longer part of the network. You're only a consumer and spectator. Spam is bad but RBLs like SPEWS and the admins that force them on their users can be worse. There used to be a time when you could hook into the Internet and go pretty much anywhere you wanted to go; today everybody wants to lock you down and force you to pay for things you once enjoyed for nothing or move to a different server because of some political battle over spam. When people like John Gilmore get screwed for running a mailserver, or a website like Something Awful has its business operations hampered, I can see the writing on the wall.
We need to get back to the days of having Internet access being a utility, much like electricity or water, where one could hook in and use it any way one will. The looming threat is control, lockdown, and homogenization that promises to render this medium as stale as commercial radio.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
I think the proliferation of broadband has helped the internet become a more valuable tool for the average 2.5-kids-having-explorer-driving-all-American-fami ly, which has caused it to be a greater part of all our lives. As such, it is now on the radar for the type of people who are threatened by anything beyond their control.
The more we become dependent on the internet, the more interest there will be in regulating it. The level of freedom, possibility, and power that the internet affords to the average person is simply unprecedented. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press. With the advent of the internet, the average soccer-mom now has a press that can publish to the entire world for pennies.
Attempts to regulate and lock-down the net are inevitable. It is the nature of those who seek power for themselves to deny and control the power afforded to others.
The possibility of always-on connections spewing a constant stream of malware and sludge is just an excuse. The proliferation of broadband is dangerous because it put the issue on the map and a very high level of power in the hands of the people.
The Dalai Llama
Citizen of a nation where freedom of speech, bought with the blood of heroes, is used to spread pr0n and reality TV shows.
My sig could be your sig!
>>As I see it, it's that the users are using
>>Windows, not that they are coming in high speed.
Ahh..... bullshit.
Most of the worms and trojans and crap that are going around lately are all user spawned. They haven't crawled in through a remote exploit. They've been emailed to/downloaded by some genius who will execute any damn thing. I swear, these people would probably pick up a used syringe off the ground and jab it into their own arm to see what would happen.
Do you think it would be any different if the world was all running Linux? Or Solaris? Or MacOS. Please - stupid people will be stupid no matter what OS you put in front of them. It isn't going to change anytime soon.
>>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.
Geee --- and what percentage of computers out there are windows boxes? What a shocking correlation.
Yeah, and not just humans either. The worms are starting to use encryption too. Some versions of Bagle are spreading themselves in password encrypted Zip files, with the password in the message body. The pace of the arms race is incredible. Antivirus vendors then updated their scanners to scan the message body for the Zip file password and decrypt the attachment. The virus writers then started sending the password in a bitmap attachment to foil the virus scanners.
Of course that story was from 2 weeks ago so it's old news. This week the latest variant has no attachment at all. It's just HTML that exploits an IE bug that downloads the worm from the infected computer that sent the message.
I've found that most folks like to be told how to make their computers more secure and decrease their chances of infection/spyware...
I have made it standard practice to install 3 applications on all Windoze machines that I fix anything on...
1) Install Avast! Home Edition and set it to do automatic updates of both the Core Program and Virus Database. Because most people don't pay for Anti-Virus upgrades after their free trial version runs out...not to mention the fact that Avast! is better than Norton and most for-pay AV apps anyhow...
2) Install Spybot Search & Destroy and make sure that the primary user(s) see what the result of the initial scan is (shock value) with instructions on how to use the app...
3) Install FireFox (no link needed) with the follofing userContent.css...
If they still insist on using IE I will install Google Toolbar and enable popup blocking...
I then proceed to replace any spyware apps with free non-spyware apps (WeatherBug -> Weather Pulse, etc)
As for a firewall, I talked most into buying a wireless router (generally a cheap 802.11b router) to use as a firewall and future network upgrades. I don't think any windoze software firewalls are very good...IPTables is about the ONLY software firewall that I trust...
After doing this, I find that these systems stay fairly clean and have much fewer problems. Not to mention the owners of said machines tend to be much happier afterward.