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Consumer Reports on 'State of the Net'
netbuzz writes "A " State of the Net" survey to be released today by Consumer Reports contends that Americans lost $7 billion over the past two years to malware and myriad online scams. Not surprisingly, a significant portion of this financial pain appears to have been avoidable, as the survey reveals a widespread continuing negligence toward the use of home firewalls and virus protection. As for underage children using MySpace and the like? There, too, the risks in many case look to be self-inflicted, as 13 percent of children fail to meet the 14-year-old age minimum on MySpace, and, as the organization notes: "Those were just the ones the parents knew about."
I guess I'm not surprised they came up with such a huge figure for dollars lost-- I hate to be the person that's just going to get modded down for this-- but maybe if >80% of computer users werent using windows and there was more diversity on the net (client-wise, at least) viruses and, to a lesser extent, malware wouldn't find it so easy to inflict such damage. A monoculture can be brought to its knees by a common vunerability.
When I was in school I was punished for doing anything with a computer that wasn't within the teacher's scope of instruction; making spreadsheets and word processing. Most parents know next to nothing about how to operate a PC outside of simple browsing and email. Anything else is intimidating techno-wizardry. Teaching more advanced computer classes in grade school could easily reduce that "cost." I've found parents are more than willing to take little Bobby's advice on computer related topics, because at least he can program the damned VCR.
If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
The response will be more cracking down on MySpace and other community networking sites (thinkofthechildren and all the crap), because it's beyond the comprehension of kids to understand it might not be a good idea to click on every single craplink offered to you. After all, that's something even 30 year olds don't understand, how should 13 year olds?
Sure, it won't solve a thing. But hell, we did something. We didn't do anything that changed anything, but nobody can complain that we don't do anything.
Instead, it could maybe be a good idea to educate people that they should use some AV kits, firewall kits and most important some brains when clicking up and down the 'net. Yeah, I know, I know, everyone wants to replace good ol' common sense (why is it called "common" sense is beyond me, but hey, you know, maybe in the old times when those idioms were created, it was actually common) with technology, we want to bubblewrap our kids instead of preparing them for life, but hey, it simply and plainly does not work. It never did and never will.
Education and information is the key weapon against trojans. Sure, that requires you to learn how to protect yourself and how to defend yourself against malware. You don't want to? Ok, then I don't want you in my net. Get outta here 'til you learned how to operate safely in an environment where your clueless, careless actions cause harm to other people!
How that harms me? Well, considering that there are DDoS sheeps worth a few hundred gigabit/sec, one could see (if one knows how BGP works) how this could be a minor inconvenience to the internet as a whole. So far, "critical mass" is not yet obtained, and they are not in a centralized hand. But I shudder at the thought that it might be. Imagine someone actually having the ability to bring the net to its knees with sheeps firing intercontinentally simultanously. We're heading there. Think he could do the Dr. Evil prank of asking for (pinky-at-mouth) a million bucks and he'll be paid?
All made possible by clueless people who don't give a jack about security, ignorantly participating in DDoS attacks every day.
And what's best about it, they're not even liable for it. I wonder, maybe one should set up a protest through the 'net, and whoever wants to participate and protest against some oil company that fills our seas with crud or clothing companies that employ kids at sweatshops, simply lets himself be infected by a trojan which then DOSes those companies' internet access lines. Hey, don't worry, you're not liable for it. You're just a poor victim yourself, infected by that nefarious trojan.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Part of this may sound like preaching to the choir, but bear with me. There is a tendency to want the government to do something about every problem, and the hassle of online scumbaggery is no exception. Individuals (and their guardians) need to take responsibility for their own protection, and not expect either the government to protect them (which it cannot) or for faceless strangers to be kind to them, which a tiny but significant portion will not.
Each of these steps solves roughly half of the remaining problems not solved by the previous ones.
So what do you do if your kids download some game, P2P app, or other crapware-laden piece of stupidity? Take away the computer. What if you have several kids, and you don't know who did it? Enlist their aid and hold them all accountable. Tell them that if any of them downloads crapware and the guilty party won't come forward, they all do their homework at the library (for a week or month or whatever).
sigs, as if you care.
During a year of not working i "lost" 50K.
By downloading my albums from itunes rather than buying locally, my local record shop "loses" perhaps $100 a year.
Of course all of these are not even paper loses, as they do not represent money that is any way real. They barely qualify as opportunity costs.
I really don't understand why these numbers are represented as losses. If a firm pays $.25 for each advertisement, do they lose that money for customers who do not buy anything, or do they just alginate the entire thing as a loss, or do they say it costs, say $2 to acquire a customer. When a computer is down, is this a loss, or cost of doing business with that computer. Presumable if the computer started generating actual losses, the firm would no longer use it. In fact machines are brought in because not using machines costs more money, and represent real losses. Of course, once the machines are in the savings are often not as great as one calculated, which some might consider a loss.
Of course even if this is a loss, it hardly seems significant. It is like $20 per person. The recent price increase at Starbucks likely has a greater impact.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black