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Who Protects the Internet?
strikeleader writes "TechCrunch has an article from an interview with General Kevin Chilton, US STRATCOM commander and the head of all military cyber warfare.
Who protects us? 'Basically no one. At most, a number of loose confederations of computer scientists and engineers who seek to devise better protocols and practices — unincorporated groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the North American Network Operators Group. But the fact remains that no one really owns security online, which leads to gated communities with firewalls — a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security.'"
Meh. The question really should be "Who protects the Internet from being used as a military asset?" Cause that's all this guy is talking about.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What could possibly go wrong?
Al Gore of course. After all it's his baby.
I destroy the interwebz everyday by bittorrenting, and filling the tubes.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
And thats the way I like it. Please keep the government's greedy and controlling hands out of this.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Batman.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
This is an easy one
Uncle Ted himself, who else understands the internet as well as he
Although now he may be doing it from his new base in cell #1576 Cell block E
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Military Intelligence is truly a ridiculous concept. Anyway, who's playing quake with me on NSA supercomputers tonight?
What's the alternative? Globalized security, courtesy of Big Brother?
Don't good fences make good neigbors?
I suppose it's wasteful, in code, for module entry points to validate parameters, too. :)
I don't think you want to centralize anything like that, at least not to the exclusion of everyone having local protections. Your firewall is under your control and you can make it as secure or unsecured as you want it.
If you want the cyberspace equivalent of a national army, you're just asking to have lots of power taken away from you and given to someone else. That being said, I think there is a case for prevention of nations attacking other nations en large, or 'war by other means'.
but carry it too far and you end up destroying the global feel of the internet - you'll end up with cyber borders as bad as our real borders - checkpoints you can't cross without 'your papers please'.
Easy. Anonymous is the guardian of the internets.
I thought that was Slashdot's job ;-)
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
The idea that 'someone' 'owning' 'security' would somehow provide us with more online protection I find unbelievably stupid and ignorant. If you open your eyes you'll realise we wouldn't even have the internet if it weren't for essentially random collections of like-minded people each contributing a piece of the puzzle - it's called evolutionary process, and nothing any businessman or politician has ever invented has come close to it's effectiveness.
...People carried guns for protection.
And individuals who learned to best use their 'protection', with faster assessment of threats and the resulting execution of such with precise accuracy, found they had a satisfactory level of self-protection.
I say, legalize some offensive capabilities for "Internet Users" and set up some general universal use rules. After all, when you point a gun to shoot at someone else, you are tacitly giving them permission to shoot back at you (or even preemptively), hence the deterrence of pointing a gun at someone else WHO IS ARMED.
I truly hope this is not just FUD for setting up a new government great-firewall bureaucracy in order to big-brother those of us lucky enough to still have open unfiltered Internet.
It seems that the article author and the poster are lacking ideas just as gen Chilton. Why then shoot down somebody's strategy without offering something better?
I suppose the actual moral of the story is the cash that goes on TSA, DHS - or at least part of it - could be better spent elsewhere?
Why have ONE type of defense when you can have a multitude of defenses that people may or may not know anything about?
"But the fact remains that no one really owns security online, which leads to gated communities with firewalls -- a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security."
Actually, it is far more secure that way, if one organization did somehow owned all security online, the internet as a whole would be much less security because now you have a single point of failure. Once someone exploited that vulnerability, the entire Internet as a whole would be affected. Also I get the feeling from the article that what they are really after is not necessarily security, but CONTROL of the Internet. Lastly, that man DOES NOT protect the Internet in any way, shape or form. He might be responsible for the USA military Intranet, but that's about it. Stop the fear-mongering already.
"But the fact remains that no one really owns security online, which leads to gated communities with firewalls -- a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security."
Actually, it is far more secure that way, if one organization did somehow owned all security online, the internet as a whole would be much less security because now you have a single point of failure. Once someone exploited that vulnerability, the entire Internet as a whole would be affected. Also I get the feeling from the article that what they are really after is not necessarily security, but CONTROL of the Internet. Lastly, that man DOES NOT protect the Internet in any way, shape or form. He might be responsible for the USA military Intranet, but that's about it. Stop the fear-mongering already.
Hopefully they are just asking for funds for some kind of military abomination. But we all know where this kind of talk usually ends up. Public surprise buttsecks!
Nobody owns security offline either, and nobody should. If you own something, or care about something, you protect it. Some things have additional protection from the police or the military (e.g. I have a reasonable expectation that the police will prevent me from getting beaten up in some circumstances), but in the most part "the authorities" have a fairly punitive deterrent role. But anything that needs special protection gets it: got valuables in your house? Alarm, strong doors, insurance. All privately paid-for and provided. Got valuables on your computer? Backups, firewall, antivirus. Also privately provided.
Basically, the people who care about things know how much they're worth protecting. It isn't sensible to have military-grade security around my old Corolla, but my laptop's pretty secure because it's got a few worthwhile things. If the good General has infrastructure or secrets worth protecting, he should protect them. If it makes sense to exploit economies of scale and worth with other branches of the community, great.
It's also not true that there's a loose confederation of people (Vixie & co) protecting the internet. There are plenty of people around who want to protect or improve their own reputation, and security is one of those ways. If the military wants contact points in the wider security community, they shouldn't be looking for an owner, but they should be working with reality: getting out there making those contacts.
Normally I think such anarchy is stupid, but in this case it actually is common sense.
a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security
I disagree. It's a terrible thing that we do not have a force dedicated to cyber security, but I wouldn't call the individual security nets "wasteful".
Is it wasteful to have both an enterprise firewall AND anti-virus software? No, you should have a net at every point possible - especially if we're talking issues where the government would start to be concerned. In that case, the person sitting on the other side of an attack is likely as sophisticated as the highest paid engineers on our side. Redundancy is essential in that case.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I look forward to Stephen Conroy protecting my internet from unwanted material.
</sarcasm>
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
If you want the cyberspace equivalent of a national army, you're just asking to have lots of power taken away from you and given to someone else.
All those spammers building botnets, eventually, they're going to become "security companies". Nice web site you've got there, it'd be a shame if no-one could get to it. Once they start collecting taxes from a large enough group of people, they become a "legitimate" police force. After all, they don't want anyone else building a bigger botnet than theirs.
How we know is more important than what we know.
When Obama appoints a white house CTO, there will at least be an official figurehead in charge of this matter. Proposed candidates for the role currently include Eric Schmidt, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos and Julius Genachowski from IAC.
Emphasis is mine, please be kind to your new -potentially- M$ loving uber-CTO and use only approved root kits, that utilized security holes those are already hot-fixed by people who put them there in the first place, from now on...
Yes, my network is just fine, thank you for asking. No assistance needed here. Goodbye.
Looks like the internet is ready for Metagovernment. National boundaries seem so pointless in this day and age.
This is a really weird analogy, but this reminds me of snow crash - individual areas secured by their owners, and huge unprotected wastes and everything in between. Too far fetched a nerd reference?
Al Gore?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I hope you don't support Net Neutrality, because that is the Trojan Horse for government regulation of the Internet.
I find your rampant speculation refreshing
Attics are terrible, all the heat gets trapped there! Just think of how many fewer computers you can viably run.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
The secret guild of Internet protectors?
Slashdot please put this under Propaganda classification. according to wiki - "Propaganda is the dissemination of information aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda While I don't mid a bit of propaganda for a good cause . I think you have to call a spade a spade. Information wants to be free.
...the party protects you!
Net neutrality is anything but.
and the "internet" is the chaos that arises from connecting all these networks together.
My organization needs to make its own decisions on what policies it need to implement on its network.
Communications between my college and many strange corners of the globe occur daily. If I dropped kerberos at my borders, Xbox wouldn't work anymore, and I would be risking bodily harm from the rioting mobs.
Now, if a federal department had such traffic crossing its borders, they'd have a rapid deployment team there within minutes to figure out what happened.
Anyone who tells you that security can be solved easily is probably trying to sell you something...
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
It's either the governments, or ISPs, or Corporations...
The best and only way to shake the control is to misbehave, en masse. Perpetual Renaissance.
Bob protects the internet. "To mend and defend"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ReBoot_characters#Bob
This sounds a lot like fear-mongering designed to convince the uninformed masses, because the informed minority like things the way they are, that a new level of beauracracy needs to be introduced to save us all from the evil internets. It's for the children. We must save them.
me
As always who watch the watchmen ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
IT, of course.
"It had to be destroyed to be saved."
Several governments are already making progress on this game plan.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Who protects the outernet?
censoreth.
proud caffeine whore
Both sides are so entrenched in groupthink it's incredible that the government can get anything done at all.
Who would have thinked it: that a two-party system leads to a greater concentration of an us-or-them, with-us-or-against-us mentality?
"It had to be destroyed to be saved."
Save Humanity NOW!
Decode: Another hint to the proposition that technological progress has to be accompanied with (say) 'social evolution' in order to be fruitful. Mankind has failed (epically) ever since.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
... sure, we REALLY do need a massive government agency to babysit the internet. They'll guarantee security and do it for pennies. Right!? Right?? Even better, let the army do it. THEY really know efficiency ... What a joke!
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
And I'm not seeing how this international security issue is much different from any other which pretty much as long as theres been human history has involved patchwork alliances and federations to stipulate, review, and enforce.
There's nothing to lament here folks, move along please.
The "Internet" has become something of a quandry. It's humble beginnings were brilliantly designed to propogate information, provide a powerful environment for collaboration, and provide an extensible virtual universe for spreading and preserving human thought, and projects of discovery. It's one weakness was that it was designed by intelligent, responsible, and compassionate people expecting that in the vein of collaboration and workability, that future users would be likewise intelligent, responsible, and compassionate.
Much to the chagrin of humanity, a vast hoard of virtual Mongols (or equally apropos "mongrels"), have used the internet as their personal toilet, slim-jim, bludgeon, and/or weapon of mass destruction. Sadly in a free environment, you have to cope with the worst in people, to support and empower that which is best.
The first problem is to get crystal clear about what doesn't work with the current system. Whether the available cures are(n't) worse than the disease, and how we might implement meaningful solutions without breaking, impeding, or prevent those things which are best about the internet. Security means different things to different people. Protecting people from stupidity, laziness, or the worst in their own natures might well render the broad networks by which people collaborate and invent the future, functionally unusable. Making the worst of what people do very difficult, while preserving the general freedom, and clear capacity for people to share ideas, impart mutual wisdom, and promote what Shakespeare referred to as "Our better natures", demands vision, foresight, and a profound commitment to integrity.
The first and most essential thing we can and must do, is create an environment that promotes human enterprise, without selling off the very things than make the internet valuable to people.
" Who Protects the Internet?" No one yet. And thank God for that.
And the opposition to it is led by those companies who want to be the looters instead. However, as commonly known, the government is inefficient; so it is also inefficient in censoring the Internet. Thus, government control is preferable to corporate control, because it is less likely to be effective.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Who protects us? 'Basically no one. At most, a number of loose confederations of computer scientists and engineers who seek to devise better protocols and practices
I.e. the talented people who developed the technology in the first place, and their successors.
â" unincorporated groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force
You mean the people who managed one of the most staggeringly successful collection of interoperability standards that, post-OOXML, makes the ISO look like a bunch of clowns?
I think we're in safe hands - we'd be in even safer hands if the gubment got on with its job of enforcing the anti-trust laws and fixing the patent system leaving the IETF et. al. to get on with thiers.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Next thing he'll say it's "wasteful" to have security checkpoints at every airport in the US. "Why don't we just have them at the border?"
Welcome to the real world. Communities everywhere have realized that we can't count on law enforcement or the military so we HAVE gated communities, closed golf courses, private neighborhoods, etc.
There's no magic panacea where you can declare "The US" to be a secure network "and all the baddies keep out" and no more need for firewalls. We still have corporate espionage, neighbors who want to avoid being persecuted for kiddie porn using other people's connections, and those evil p2p people downloading F10 or U8.10 or something on that evil "Bittorrent" thing.
Firewall granularity has spread IN, not OUT of the end system. We've gone from no filtering, to corporate filtering, to per-system filtering. It's not going to magically disappear because "the government has a plan" (which it doesn't, and couldn't.)
If the military prickyshits* said "The US is safe" the meth-heads are still going to want to come steal the copper off the A/C compressor. If they said "Your city is safe" the meth-heads are still... If they said "Your neighborhood is safe" gated communities would still want to keep the riff-raff** out.
"I'm from the government, I'm here to help."
Yeah, and I'm the plumber. I've come to fix the sink. Move aside, let the man go through.***
Ehud
* Credit Joseph Heller, Catch-22
** Riff-raff defined as that micro-community's undesirables of the moment (in my non-gated neighborhood it's meth-heads)
*** Credit Super BonBon
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is trying to save the world from itself and protect us from all those horrible, nasty hackers, while padding his resume and justifying his budget and possible budget expansion.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
if its not broke...... fix it so that it is.
Did they ever find WMD in Iraq?
Same deal here.... its not about security of the "internet" anymore then it is security of any other media, such as paper.
http://www.realultimatepower.net/ninja/ninja2.htm
Now in the Military Edition! See our other product, Ninja.
Sincerely,
Nature Enterprises.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Which way does that control go?
Does Bill Gates (& successors) control the barbarians, or do the barbarians control Bill Gates (& successors)?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
After reading the article, it is quite clear that these folks are getting caught up in their own metaphors. The only reason you need more power is if you need to defend your self from more powerful forces. On the internet, power, while not equally distributed, is far less disparate than in the 'real world'. Why do I need an Army? In case another tribe decides they want to secure a resource I want, or decides to infringe on my territory. What is the equivalent online? Who is this 'defense' supposed to be against? This reminds me of the 'the poor don't have enough on ramps to the internet' argument. Politicians hear that are start crying how we need 'more money for on ramps to the internet for the poor! we need to build more on ramps!' [facepalm] The Internet community does not need an organization to take responsibility for access security. Where would you draw 'the border'? are we gong to build Great Firewall 2.0 for the US? Maybe we are going to start including commercial data as 'in the national interest' and start sending out fighter planes and smart bombs when someone steals a few million credit cards from a data base in the states? The net result of such policies would mean a lot of money for a few people, less flexibility for the day to day users, and less freedom to do as one sees fit online.
Gated. Breakin? BOOM. . Very efficient.
you are making Big Brother in George Orwell's "1984" because they will watch your Internet usage to make sure you don't break any laws.
We need to innovate our way out and block virus like code from being transmitted and make better encryption for business transactions.
Also companies cannot leave hard drives with unencrypted credit card and bank account numbers on it so people can steal them and do identity theft with them or sell the list. They should encrypt the list and not leave the decryption key on the hard drive.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
To truly secure any data stream you have to be able to control it at all points from start to end. If people think that government or large group based security is not going to involve a crapload of lobbied for add-ons and censorship they don't understand the nature of lobbyists.
The best kind of Security for an open and free(as in rights) internet is individual security. Our computers are something we (or the local network admin) have control over.
Or any other agency effort.
just examine how linux, despite being totally decentralized effort, is able to make gains into the total monopoly a corporation like microsoft had, and you'll see the superiority of communal defense.
note that microsoft has much more budget than many government agencies. and even many countries.
so this article is practically a blatant attempt to make people believe into letting some jerky government control the internet. whomever wrote and propagated this article should be beaten with a thick stick - only that can beat sense into them.
Read radical news here
No one, it is to be hoped.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Who can slap down Chuck Norris with one hand and out-code Bruce Schneir with the other?
It's PAUL VIXIE of Vixie Labs!
Paul is unbeatable because, unlike Chuck and Bruce, he is MEAN. Meaner than a rabid wolverine!
Paul is my hero.
... but porn keep it healthy :D
No, they wouldn't have to. Microsoft's request to allow the Xbox to use the "officially secured" internet would have been denied. So...no problem.
Unless, of course, you consider destroying all future novel uses of the internet a problem.
People who carry guns for protection get shot
If this were true (it is not, in my own personal experience) it would most likely be because people who need to carry guns are more likely to be in situations where they are in danger. I have plenty of friends who carry and only one of them has ever been shot; he was shot on two separate occasions while completely unarmed, which is why he carries now.
Blue Screen of Death, et cetera, censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Yess, its very waitsfuls for uss to do its for ourselves. The governments should protects us and handles our internets safeties. Lets the governments do its. ( not sure what I was channeling right there )
Besides, they are soo good at it. I mean, hes got medals to prove it ( not that I am detracting from his awards, I just doubt many of them are in man-in-the-middle warfare ).
My personal favorite part:
Such an attack has the potential to turn the US âoefrom being a superpower to a third-world nation practically overnight.â
Like the east coast blackout caused it to be Thailand for three days.
Get a grip.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Yeah, like STRATCOM is going to make the world safer by locking down the Internet, as if they could. As is "safety" is correlated to how tightly information flow is controlled. Let's see, do we have any other examples of societies that based "security" on information control? China, the former Soviet Union, ... oh yeah! Totalitarian regimes!!
STRATCOM should go back into the hole from which it emerged. And tightly enforce information flow to and from its tiny, wretched, paranoid little domain.
Internet Man, help, I'm being flooded with spam!
Fear not young web surfer, I'll save you!
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
This is a good thing. The "protection" is decentralized, just like the greater internet. As such, you can't attack any one entity to compromise the protection. It's working as designed.
What hogwash. Who protects the internet in the datacenters around here? The employees, the customers who own the devices in question, etc.
Apparently the gov thinks that doing what is akin to putting military soldiers and tanks into every home and business location to "protect us".
How silly.
Is the classic model. It works. I have my private network, and it provides SOME services, including email exchange.
But, the security of my "community" is my own concern. After all -- who should I trust? The government? My upstream provider? No thanks.
Now, I (as many other operators) do share information on security. But that is a voluntary activity. The buck still stops here.
The current set of laws support this attitude as well. There is a considerable base of law around "unauthorized computer access", but really nothing around "unauthorized network access". When the net was young, we all strove to deliver packets as best as we were able. Now, we are pickier about packets flowing through our systems (blocking outgoing port 25 for example, or not allowing mail relaying).
I am against a central authority. I don't see how it would work (be authoritative) and still give me the flexibility to control my own network. There are only two "commons" services that I consider mandatory; DNS and email. Email is already under attack, and we have survived (although I would like to hold in reserve the right to beat spammers to a pulp). This leaves DNS (specifically the root servers) as the most important and vulnerable common resource (from my perspective). I (my community) *could* get by with hosts lists in a pinch, though, which mitigates the risk somewhat (considering web: google/slashdot/etc. access not immediately critical to my network use).
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Well, I'm actually in the ISP business. The people who "protect" the internet do it with strict views which can help weed out the bad guys, but usually ends up hurting lots of innocent users along the way. Spamhaus is a great example. Spam Nazis. You can have 1 bad customer using 1 IP and they'll blacklist an entire /20. Some others... NSA (collect, monitor, trace all communication), RIAA (enforce copyright DMCA throughout the world), DIA (coordinates all US intelligence agencies), ARIN (actually assigns, allocates, and manages all the IP's). These are just some of the agencies out there. Then you got security companies like RSA that'll take down your company with a law suit in minutes if you don't bow down to them. It's a bunch of different companies managing different aspects of security, usually overlapping. I can tell you though, the best protection is some routing statements, a firewall, and linux :)
-Whatever happened to the freedom of and from religion?
The Internet was designed to be almost completely decentralized. That's part of the reason for the urban myth that it was designed to survive a nuclear war; quite literally, it *can* continue to work even were multiple hubs vaporized.
As a result of this extreme decentralization, it is just as impossible to protect the entire Internet as it is do destroy it. That being said, (relatively) small parts of it *can* be protected, at least in part, by technologies with which we're all familiar: firewalls, etc. This is, of course, very much partial protection, but in a system as wide open- by design- as the Internet, that's about the best you're going to get.
-Z
Yeah, because corporate control of the Internet has been incredibly successful so far.
Oh wait...
...the Protectmen?
Nobody needs to protect "the internet", you just have to protect "your computer". If there are any security flaws they should be fixed in software. Regulation won't stop crackers/phishers, they already operate without regards to the law.
Twinstiq, game news
I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Help gather data on our citizens, without those pesky court documents.
Help capture data into a central location to be easily hacked for foreign countries and/or the teenager around the corner.
Help use share this data for the common "good" of the country - not necessarily the good of the individual being harassed.
Yes, we should trust our governments to protect us ... regardless of which privacy rights we give up. Protection is more important, right?
"Military intelligence" is a known oxymoron. So is "military security."
Dick Marcinko and his RED CELL SEAL Team proved that years ago. They penetrated US Navy nuclear sub bases, Naval Intelligence HQ, US embassies around the world, Air Force One, and got several SEALS with several pounds of C4 within twenty yards of the President's cottage at Camp David.
There is no such think as "military security". Putting these numbnuts in charge of the Internet would be a disaster.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I'm glad my spurious capitalization-based joke was noticed. It would have been more literally accurate to capitalize the second occurrence of the string "gates" in that sentence but traditionally a punch line comes closer to the end. Sorry for the confusion. To answer your question, I'd say Gates is an enabler of the barbarians more than either their controller or puppet.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
my first reaction was as most of the posts I've read, disdaining the fencing in of my beloved wild west. not quite with the vitrol i saw, but still.
but i also remember sharing disdain with writers here when i read about banking systems and such being connected to the net. and even not going so dramatic, a LOT of business is done on the net, and i've wondered just when in the future it will become a primary military target in war. and for all the money we throw at defense, i wonder whether the net has become a valuable enough asset to warrant a significantly larger consideration than i imagine it to currently receive.
i hope they have the wisdom to perpetuate the decentralized approach to network security that founded it in the first place.
which leads to gated communities with firewalls â" a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security.
This has to be the most ignorant & moronic statement I've heard today, & I worked 10 hours in an inbound call center at an ISP.
I'm really at a loss at how absolutely DUMB this statement is, but here goes....
This is like saying that it is more efficient and cost-effective to pay enough cops so that we don't have to use locks any more. Just have the cops protect everything that needs locking, then you don't have to use a lock!
The MOST cost-effective AND efficient security mechanism is to force traffic (or attackers, etc.) to funnel through a SINGLE CHOKEPOINT, which can then be defended, thereby defending everything that leads to it... JUST like the way we use firewalls to create gates.
Utter, Epic, FAIL.
SSL should protect Internet and its users.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Gov. Sarah Palin becomes the first female to serve as the US President. As the unprotected Internet reminds her dearly of a particular un-wedded pregnant 18 year old Alaskan girl, Sarah has come up with a magnificent solution.
:)
The appointment of Joe the Plumber as the Secretary of the Series-of-Tubes. His first mission is to fix all the vulnerabilities the tubes face. Once that is done, he can reinstall the existing tubes and make it more efficient.
Now, that's killing 2 birds with 1 stone... I mean 2 mooses with 1 bullet. Sarah finally gets her moment to represent the Hockey Moms league, Joe can earn a living (because earning 250k a year is NOTHING), and good old Teddy can now enjoy streaming 10 movies on his personal Internet while receiving Internets immediately - unlike the days when his staff would send him an Internet on a Friday and it wasn't received til the following Tuesday.
Sounds like a good plan to me...?
What about locking the front door to your home?
First of all i agree with the fact that the internet doesn't need protection. Secondly the article at techcrunch is kinda funny: "The Chinese military has openly stated that it plans to be able to win an âoeinformationized warâ by the middle of this century. Russia, Israel and Romania are also alleged to have high-level cyber warfare capabilities." Actually i am from Romania and here we all plan to "own" the entire internet and boost our falling economy with the ransom money ! The attack will comence on 1st of January. The internet is doomed! You have been warned! Si vom introduce obligatoriu limba romana pe toate forumurile :)
Now seriously, how come Romania does have "cyber warfare capabilities" ?!?!? I live here for crying out loud! The trough is different. Here 70% of PCs run pirated windoze, many of them with updates turned off, no firewall, no antivirus. Lots of these machinese are part of botnets created by people from other countrys. That is why a lot of attacks originate from Romania. The fact is that the average computer user here is an idiot, just like anywhere in the world. Of course there are also cyber criminals here, but to imply that the Romanian Army has "cyber warfare capabilities" is just plain stupid.