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Do We Need a New Internet?
Richard.Tao and a number of other readers sent in a NYTimes piece by John Markoff asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced. "...[T]here is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over. What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a 'gated community' where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there." A less alarmist reaction to the question was blogged by David Akin: "If you build a new Internet and you want me to get a license to drive on it, sorry. I'm hanging out here in v.1."
And it isnt really an option either.
They don't deserve (and won't get) either.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Build all the "new" Internets you want. As long as you have clueless users on your network, you'll have attack vectors.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
The internet is unfortunately the truest form of Freedom of Speech we have available. We can't even protest in public without fear of arrest or being harmed by police. There are a lot of people with money and power would like to stop the flow of information in its tracks.
To the Editor:
Re "A New Internet? The Old One is Putting Us in Jeopardy," by John Markoff (Week in Review, Feb. 15, 2009):
Mr. Markoff both misstates and overstates the security problems faced by the Internet as currently designed.
He never uses the word "Windows," but the virus outbreaks he describes are almost entirely a Windows phenomenon, and due to the poor design of that operating system. Microsoft's apologists have been saying for years that this was only because Windows' market share made it the more attractive target. But Apple's share of the desktop market has skyrocketed recently to 15% without any outbreaks of viruses targeting the Macintosh. And Microsoft has never commanded more than about half of the server market; the other half runs open-source operating systems such as Linux (used by Google) and FreeBSD (Yahoo), on which viruses are essentially unknown.
Markoff says it's hard to prove your identity on the internet, and proposes government regulation as a solution. But many people have been proving their identities for years now using proven technologies like public-key cryptography. The U.S. government played a negative role in the development of these technologies by attempting to regulate their distribution through export-control regulations originally intended for munitions.
Find free books.
the success of internet is based on its freedom and anonymity.
Read radical news here
More like control freaks who want to take away other people's liberty convincing them that it's for their own good.
This so-called new Internet isn't about privacy as it is criminalizing bad behavior. So, you get to face charges when your machine gets a virus and now you have to prove that it really wasn't your fault.
Are you ready to handle that? When your car or your gun gets stolen, you can report it. Then you're off the hook if someone commits a crime with it after you report the incident. Most folks won't be able to tell when their computer gets owned in a botnet. Most people would rather quit the Internet forever than risk criminal prosecution over something they don't really understand or have any confidence in managing.
> ...asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced.
Yeah, I agree. Anonymity on the internet is completely broken. It is trivial for law enforcement to get a subpoena to force websites to reveal the IP addresses of users, and also trival for law enforcement to get a subpoena to force ISPs to reveal who had that IP address at a given moment in time. Granted, there are ways to make sure that the IP address you are using can't be traced to you, but those methods are kind of a pain in the ass.
> ...where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety
WTF? Any rearchitecting of the internet needs to have subpoena-proof absolute anonymity built in from the beginning. This "proposal" is like suggesting we rearchitect transportation to make sure that vehicle occupants receive no shelter from the weather.
Fuck you, that's why.
THIS scares me more than anything... "create a 'gated community' where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety" Oh yeah right....leave "safety" in charge of some government idiots, or the UN...no thanks!
In places where the best of the haves hide behind gated communities, you know what happens? That's where the really enterprising criminals go. All of that faux security hasn't done a damn thing in countries like Mexico for the richest, who still have to worry about things like their kids getting kidnapped. The military still faces attacks on its secure networks. The fact is, no one and no institution is an island. If you don't participating in purging the world of ne'erdowellers and their ilk, you are just deluding yourself into thinking that your investment into your own safety is helping to get rid of the problem. That's why I advise friends and family to invest in a dog or two and a gun for defending their home, not a security system that can usually be defeated by a serious criminal.
I do think we need a new internet, in that we can then properly use the plural form of internet i.e. as in "give me back my internets you bastard"
Of course no-one will use the new internet due to lack of porn and free warezes and advertisements. Part of the appeal and success of the original internet is largely due to lack of accountability, and the ability to share ones own sick fetishes with the world completely anonymously.
Not to mention the target your painting on your forehead.
I mean seriously if your going to setup a new network simply for the purpose of being secure then why not just use a vpn? assuming you manage to setup a new "secure" internet, and advertise the fact that it's secure. It's a little like posting your ip on a hacker board and saying "bEt YoU CaNt HaCk Mez"
hmm yeah good luck with that
If the only way for you to have liberty is with being anonymous, then obviously you don't live in a free country. Hiding is not freedom.
If we cant make the comparitively tiny step of moving from ipv4 to ipv6 I think its nigh impossible to move to "a new internet".
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
No that is just plain wrong, don't support their lie in any way. They absolutely don't want to trade liberty for security, they want to trade 'your' liberty for 'their' control over you. Control over what you read or see, write or say, in any digital format. They have found that as a result of the internet, our voice is louder than theirs, that the majority view point now creates itself and dominates the minority view point that dominated mass media.
Want a more secure internet, simple step one no more plain modems, all modems should incorporate a hardware fire wall based upon open source software, open source so that the public can see what is going on. Step two, simply use more secure software, that tightens up on internet access and that is a simple as using a better operating system, again open source is forced as the public has a right to know what is going on in a very integral part of their digital lives, what is basically becoming an essential service, no more secrets and no more lies.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Ben Franklin 1775.
If I have a choice between the people who gave us Echelon, Gitmo, Abu Grahib, DCMA, COPA, and failed to stop 9/11 versus virsuses and spyware...Ill take the viruses and spyware. I can protect myself from viruses and spyware much easier than I can protect myself from encroachment upon my liberty.
Privacy is not a freedom?
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The new bourgeois world order demands it.
There is nothing more subversive and abhorrent to the owning/ruling classes than this peer-to-peer network, on which nobody can know you're a dog.
That the smallest pipsqueak running Apache can pass for the largest media conglomerate, oh! the humanity!
What is needs is a strict pay-as-you-go, one way network that will feed what the big media conglomerate want to the masses, in which nothing negative (to the owning classes) can travel. A virtual Disneyland(TM) where everything (appears) nice so that the masses can be fond of the status-quo.
No, the reason you get those ads for fake pills is that someone with antisocial tendencies is sending them to you using hijacked systems.
Let's not blame the wrong people for what is clearly a hostile act on the part of spammers and and the pimply losers who believe they've accomplished something because they've shit on our sidewalk. I'm referring to the botnet assholes, of course.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think the AOL system was pretty much what the op is suggesting--a gated, fee-driven system that is safe for the kids and spam-free.
The problem is that systems like AOL are inherently limited, with a corporate team that decides its content and direction from week to week.
The Internet is amazingly varied and dynamic by comparison and it's little wonder that AOLers eventually left to join the greater outside world.
Comparing a Net 2.0 to a gated community is an intriguing concept, but in reality it would probably be too self-limiting for people.
It's possible today to stay in your own backyard on the wild and woolly Net 1.0. Just don't publish your email address, or else change it whenever you start getting junk mail. A lot of unsophisticated users just use the email assigned to them by their broadband vendors anyway, xxxx@verizon.net for example, and whenever they move or switch services their addresses change, too.
Also, just stick to a few trusted web sites, don't browse promiscuously, and you'll be fine. But life will be boring.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
here it is.
It has long been recognized by the courts that without the ability to "speak" (communicate) to the public anonymously, the whole concept of "freedom of speech" would be a joke.
It is necessary for proper political debate to be able to express one's views without fear of repercussion. If anonymity were outlawed or otherwise prevented, people would NOT be able to express their views without others knowing who they are... and potentially threatening them, or their wellbeing, or their employment, or their families...
It all fits together. But truly, without anonymity, freedom of speech would not last.
Keep in mind that the "Federalist Papers", and other important publications of information about the formation of our country, and the war of independence, were published anonymously or under pseudonyms. If they had not been, surely the people who wrote such things (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, etc.) would have been harassed, arrested, or even killed.
The old power base is attempting to leash and control the new power base to their own ends. The young, creative talent has moved to the Internet; and the previous powerbase is populated with a docile, unproductive herd. And not realizing any functional leash on the Internet populace will again capture only the docile followers.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
The Internet itself isn't broken, not by a long shot. What's broken are certain applications that run across it.
And even then whether they're broken is arguable. Take SMTP for instance. One of the big complaints seems to be that SMTP doesn't make any guarantees that the sender is who they claim to be. My response to that is "And?". The USPS doesn't make any such guarantee about physical mail either, and we get along just fine anyway. It's just acknowledged that the identity of the sender isn't determined by the return address they put on the envelope, but by the claims in the letter inside and even those claims have to be verified independently of the Post Office. And when people are naive enough to believe any important letter just because it claims to be from someone without actually contacting that someone to verify it, we laugh at them. So when people say "I got an e-mail claiming to be from Bank of America and it was fake!", why don't we laugh at them and go "Well, YES! When the e-mail said there was a problem, why didn't you call BoA directly and ask about it?".
Same for Web browsers and web sites, and dozens of other applications. People want the transport layer to substitute for their own judgement and common sense. The Internet doesn't do that, any more than UPS or the USPS do. We don't need a replacement for them, do we?
It was a joke, jackass.
No, the reason you get those ads for fake pills is that someone with antisocial tendencies is sending them to you using hijacked systems.
So you were robbed because a thief stole your stuff, and not because you left the door open?
The blame goes both ways. Of course botnets wouldn't exist without malware authors, but neither would they without that many Windows and IE vulnerabilities.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Hell, we need a new reality because the one we got is full of war, famine, crime, misery and all manner of grief.
Technically, murder-suicide does not violate the golden rule.
By your rationale, my ballot should have my name on it when it is collected in the next election, and I should have to wear a name tag when I'm walking down a public street. If I protest, I must be "hiding".
Privacy is not about hiding. It is about disclosing only what is truly necessary to get the job done. If I can pick up a public phone and call a number anywhere in the world (as long as I have the money), then why shouldn't I be able to access the internet? I have nothing to hide, but I don't TRUST what uses my name might be put to if I were to disclose it (ID theft comes to mind), and it isn't necessary to communicate. People might regard what I say as less significant if I'm anonymous, but I have the choice.
And that is the real point: freedom is about *choice*, not about having only one or the other option (privacy or anonymity).
I predict that if this other internet does come to pass there will be a lucrative market in pseudonyms and anonymizing agents that pretend to have real identification information, but are entirely bogus.
I'm guessing you're from the US. Guess what, there's other countries out there as well.
Imagine if the ISPs in *other countries* didn't give a shit about some *US* law regulation dictating that *US* ISPs stopped supporting TCP/IP *in the US*, and happily continue to use OSs that support them.
Not only that, but you would have to do far more than "just" roll out a software update. How about the ISPs infrastructure? Modems? Routers?
Never gonna happen, and if it does, it's never going to be global.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
The reason why you are bombarded with spam is because IDIOTS BUY IT. If they did not buy from spam, then spam would stop within a month. And the reasons why virus are sent on Windows is because it is an easy system to crack. Once it is no longer dead last on the security trail, then the spam writers will target the easier system. Put the blame where it belongs; BOTH the fools that buy the spammed products and use bad OSs as well as those that send the spam and the virus.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Young creative talent? Yeah maybe in 1996 or so, but today the internet is just another avenue for established business. It might make you feel self-important that the "man" is after you but in reality there's no such thing going on. Also, please turn down your Rage Against the Machine. I can barely hear you.
600 people every year manage to defeat themselves and get killed by gun accidents
Yes, and over 40,000 in car accidents, 3500 in swimming pools. Where are cars and swimming pools mentioned in the constitution? It seems like it would be a lot less work and more useful to ban them first.
Public key cryptography can be used to assert identity in an otherwise anonymous communication medium. Anonymity cannot, however, be layered on top of an attributed communication medium.
Heck, even if it DOES happen somewhere, you think someone won't write some kind of proxy or gateway to establish communication between the two or more "internets"?
As someone who was doing the same thing even before Winsock, I have to correct you.
It's true there were viruses in the wild before Windows. You either got one by downloading warez, or by rebooting with an infected floppy disk in the drive.
However the notion of getting a virus *simply by opening an email* was a ridiculous impossibility before MicroSoft made it reality with Outhouse. I used to get 5 or 6 inquiries about this a week - chain letters went from one clueless user to the next quite regularly - but anyone with a half a clue new at a glance it was BS.
Then came Outhouse and suddenly one of the most hilarious and baseless internet myths of all time was true.
So dont tell me MicroSoft doesnt bear a large portion of the blame for the current virus problem.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Actually the guy at the head office actually knew a thing or two about security and had been reading the news reports about the "Melissa virus spreading like wildfire!" and just looked at the PHB and said "There is no Mellisa. It is an email created by a computer virus. Find a real girlfriend and stop telling an admin that actually knows what he is doing to allow you to infect our network. Dumbass.". According to Glenn he nearly pulled a gut muscle trying to hold in the laughter at the look on the PHBs face. He ended up with a steak dinner for two from the head office for not allowing the PHB to browbeat him into allowing the bug onto the network.
And as for "not" being able to escape the stupid people? That is what GPOs are for. But for single users there is really only so much you can do. Oh, and for those in this thread saying that "It couldn't happen in *NIX?" Sorry, been there, done that, got the lousy T-shirt. As I have said in previous "Its all the fault of the Winblowz" threads, there are THREE kinds of dangerous stupid user to watch for. 1.-the "my (insert BFF,sister,cousin,etc) sent this and wouldn't tell me to do something bad" 2.- the "Offer the hot lesboz and the dumbass will do whatever you say" guy and 3.- The "teenager on Kazaa that will click on crappy_pop_song.mp3.exe" kid.
As it turns out I have a #2 as a customer. Lets call him Doug, short for Doug the Dumbass. Now after cleaning the spyware and dealing with the porn popups for what felt like the 60th time I decided I would try something different with Doug. So I talked Doug into letting me put Linux, specifically Mepis which looked enough like XP I figured it wouldn't be too hard. Problem solved, right? WRONG.He managed to bork it so bad it wouldn't boot in less than a week. How in the fuck did he manage that? I hear you say. Simple. He went to Google and looked for "Linux Programs" and downloaded a bunch of crap off of freshmeat and ended up in dependency hell. So now I have him in a limited account in XP where he has to type his password to elevate privileges and of course I still have to clean it a couple of times a year because of all the crap he gets on it. With Doug Dumbass all you have to say is "hot lesboz passwords inside" and he will happily bypass your security measures every single time.
So you see my friends, as much as you hate Windows, it really isn't Old Bill or the Ballmer monkeys fault. Because Doug the dumbass and the millions just like him will bone your nice and perfect OS no matter how you build it. They see the bunny, they want the bunny, and they will get the bunny no matter how many roadblocks and security measures you put in their way. The reason you guys on Linux or OSX don't have malware coming out your asses is the Dougs of this world aren't using your OS and thus it doesn't have a giant bullseye painted on it. So be glad. Be very fucking glad that evil old Bill and the Ballmer monkey makes an OS that attracts the Dougs of this world like flies to shit. Because mark my words: The day you actually DO get "the year of the Linux desktop" will immediately be followed by "the year of the Linux virus" and "the year of the Linux spambot" and so on and so forth. Just be glad that the stupid people have an OS that isn't yours and there are guys like me to clean up after them. Because trust me guys, you REALLY don't want them on your OS.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.