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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.
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.
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.
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
Privacy is not a freedom?
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
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 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?