Slashdot Mirror
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.
A World without Anonymous Cowards? I thought I'd never see the day!
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.
A "gated community" with fewer abilities for users? Why not call it "Access Owned by Large corporations" or AOL for short?
This comment was thought up very late at night and does not necessarily reflect my views at a more reasonable hour.
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!
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.
What neither of you seem to understand is that the physical infrastructure is irrelevant, and always has been, by design. Internet2 is a part of the Internet. The Internet runs on fibre, serial, cable, wireless, whatever, just fine. TFA talks about (actually, only sort of scrapes the surface of) architectural changes to the Internet. IPv6 (which is only tangentially related to the security issue), DNSSEC, BGPSEC, encryption by default, and so on-- these are the things that need to happen to make the Internet a safer place. But even those aren't "a new Internet". They're the same old Internet with some improvements.
The people working on core Internet protocols have known that these things have problems for a long time. This article doesn't contribute anything to the conversation. Microsoft themselves could contribute a lot to the problem of an "insecure Internet" if they just fixed their f'ing OS.
The option to be anonymous is liberty.
Closed ballots and open democracy go hand in hand.
Azural - instrumentals
Whenever I read this kind of stuff I really don't think any of these people get what an "internet" is... Once more with feeling the internet is not a network; it is a network of networks.
Last time your home windows computer went down with a virus, my computer worked fine. Even with the incompetents we have in outsourced IT support, last time your corporate network collapsed under attack, mine didn't. The internet is the cess pool^W^W happy village square where we all meet together. Your own network is not the "internet" and you can run it any way you want; it won't influence the rest of the world. If you cut off the internet it by declaring "a gated community" as the article (you did read the article didn't you?) suggests, you are no longer part of the internet.
Anyone trying to build a "new" internet should be encouraged at the same time as given a gentle education in basic network theory. If it's any good, then enough people will join it that when other particular bits of the internet collapse, they can still continue with their own useful lives. We need this kind of thing. If someone could build a network for their own country which could be relied on for emergency calls and at the same time let me read slashdot that would make a real difference (no BT's "all IP" network doesn't count). Definitely it would have to have some priority mechanism so that my slashdot couldn't get in the way of your emergency stuff; however, there's no way that such a new network can be successful if it can't cope with being connected to the current internet. That would just be security through obscurity and uselessness. Like claiming a computer is secure because it's had concrete poured into it.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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?