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Kaspersky CEO Wants End To Online Anonymity
Andorin writes "Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of well-known computer security company Kaspersky Labs, is calling for an end to the anonymity of the Internet, and for the creation of mandatory 'Internet passports' for anyone who wishes to browse the Web. Says Kaspersky, 'Everyone should and must have an identification, or internet passport ... the internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public, and it was wrong ... to introduce it in the same way.' He calls anonymity 'the Internet's biggest security vulnerability' and thinks any country that doesn't follow this regime should be 'cut off.' The EFF objects, and it's likely that they won't be the only ones."
Yes, because requiring passports to entry countries stops all terrorism and crime.
Then he can just start his own network and only let people use it if they identify themselves.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How difficult will be getting the passport for spammers? And how about dissidents?
He must be kidding :)
Whenever you now know perfectly well somebody does something wrong, even if you know his identity, there is not much you can do if that person is at the other side of the globe. Yes you can call police, but they will seldom do something.
It is the same thing as asking someones identity everywhere, but that does nog help finding out the intentions of a person.
when I have to log on using my biometrical passport. And every web page owner will know exactly who I am and what I do online.
Sir, we have a special offer JUST for you.
Good times are ahead.
Oh, and the other way also "sorry, this part of the internet is JUST for women in Southern Italy aged 40-44. NO ACCESS."
Dear Eugene,
Go fuck yourself.
Sincerely,
Anonymous.
... if and only if all computers in the network were fully secure and unhackable. Else it's a layer of hassle for the normal citizen without benefits for fighting crime.
The irony is that Kaspersky business is based on the opposite of the premise.
But what about the trolls and griefers? Please think about them! o noes! D:
http://www.object404.com
It should also not be possible to anonymously put mail in mailboxes. The harm that is done through postal mail is incredible!
Yeah, I'm sarcastic here.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
This guy apparently doesn't understand that for many, anonymity is a security feature.
Anonymity is prone to abuse, sure, but it is vital for free exchange of ideas. People who are identifiable are less likely to make risky statements, and this is detrimental to culture. Repression and oppression should not be the goal of Security.
Beyond that, not everything on the internet is a person.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
After Microsoft has released free anti-virus, Eugene Kaspersky needs to find out other ways how to make money online
So he wants it to be like nazi germany?
say something bad about the gov and get sent to a camp.
They can call it the Kaspersky Guardian Bureau.
Eugene Kaspersky once told a competitor to his face: "I will eat you." The co-founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab was certainly not into cannibalism,[...]
He only wanted to eat him. Then eat him Eugene!
He may be correct that the internet shouldn't have been opened up like it was. I've been online long enough to remember when you could assume (perhaps wishfully) that nearly anyone obviously misbehaving badly on it could be identified with a couple e-mails or phone calls to the right sysadmins, and the notion of banning a user or cutting off a rogue node was plausible. I kind of miss the relative safety and decorum of that internet. But the ship of general unrestricted access set sail a couple decades ago, and that horse has long since left the barn. If you want an internet with the kind of accountability that Kaspersky is taking about... it can't be the internet that everyone's already hooked up to. That bell can't be unrung... and if you need any more metaphors for this, I can supply them. :)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I agree!
Well, if that was the case you would be out of a job, ya hypocrite. Sounds like yet another company to boycott due to the lunacy of its management..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Who is the CEO of Kaspersky to claim authority on these issues? Why does he feel entitled to to be in a position to even make suggestions, affecting basically the entire human population?
First they came for the internet trolls selling people, but I was not a troll selling people. ...
Then they came for me.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm pretty sure this would be a huge blow to the adult website industry. How many people would willingly visit those sites if they knew their name and identification was being taken down every time? It wouldn't eliminate every visitor, obviously, since a lot of people pay for those things with credit cards, but it would be enough to cause some serious damage.
they'll still respond to "download this crap and win $100" offers on websites, and still infect themselves with trojans, worms, viruses, impossible to remove software and other nasties. Just because the website owner has a passport (and who would be empowered to revoke these?) or a forged passport, won't stop most of the malpractices we see on the internet today.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
But most of the people it is a threat to, frankly deserve to live with being threatened.
Anonymity can enable online bullying or petty fraud, but those are nuisances on the grand scale of things. The people for whom anonymity is an actual threat are governments who want to monitor and control their citizens, unsavory groups such as the church of Scientology who want to harass their critics, and businesses that want to force consumption of their products in the way they demand they are consumed.
Let them be threatened. They deserve to live in fear.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Truer words have never been spoken.
Watch out - not only will you have to enter ID but also means of payment. That way you can be charged and it will facilitate the inevitable tracking that will occur. That way you can be charged for anything copyrighted you happen to view, hear or download. For instance, Google won't have to take down a huge number of videos anymore - it will just flag them as copyrighted and you will pay to see them. (I'm only guessing on this but don't you suppose this and other internet busting rules are in Obama's Secret Copyright Treaty?) But is you cannot pay you will have no internet access. Unless you live in some Scandinavian countries.
Since passwords can be stolen and id's faked, the following groups want the following requirements for internet users: RIAA: a mandatory microphone and hard drive scanner to assure internet users are not pirating music and are paying for the rights to the music they listen to. MPAA: a webcam focused on your screen and hard drive scanner to assure your not pirating movies. Microsoft: mandatory use of Windows to surf the internet since it would be more secure. The only search engine would be Bling. Only approved software could be used. The Chinese: Webcams all around the room, keylogger and hard drive scanner to assure compliance with government policy. The Republicans: (see Chinese) Al Gore: a mandatory firewall that blocks all searches related to research that attempts to debunk "An Inconvenient Truth". The NSA/FBI/CIA/etc: a webcam focused on the user, login requiring eye scan, fingerprint scan, and DNA verification. Add and additional to the reply.
Around where i live, a drivers license just says you have paid your tax ( ok, and taken the 'competency test'.. but that's a different discussion ) and gives you the right to drive around at will, anonymously. We don't have checkpoints where we have to produce ID.
Perhaps its different where he lives, which is a shame.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The guy obviously never lived under the Stasi but instead, wants to become one
Considering the amount of computer-based identity fraud in the world, all this would accomplish is to get millions of people unjustly pegged for crimes they didn't commit. Suppose that identity is conferred via X.509 certificates. What is to stop a garden-variety rootkit/botnet from using these certificates for their own purposes? My spam trap is filled with hundreds of messages each day from unsuspecting victims; why would it make a difference if these messages were digitally signed?
The problems are
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
The CEO of Russia's No. 1 anti-virus package has said that the internet's biggest security vulnerability is anonymity, calling for mandatory internet passports that would work much like driver licenses do in the offline world.
"The internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong...to introduce it in the same way.
I wold like to point out that a Russian company wouldn't have any place either with a US Military controlled piece of technology. It sounds like what he's saying is the existence of his company is wrong.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Indeed, this could be a serious PR blunder for Kaspersky. His statements single-handedly changed my perception of the brand "Kaspersky" from "respected maker of Windows antivirus software" to "worse than Microsoft AIDS" (a hypothetical product with the combined potential of causing sever harm to both your computer and your own personal well-being).
Then again, I wasn't really in his potential customer pool to begin with, so it might not matter.
OK, so this would make everything nice and safe... but it would ruin all the fun!
Half the charm of the Internet is that it's a jungle out there. If it were to be regulated in this way it just wouldn't the Internet anymore. You use the web at your own risk. It's like riding a motorbike - not as safe as the train but way cooler.
Cool. I just figured out how to put newlines in. Story: "Slashdot teaches young C coder HTML by accident"
They why are you not posting as the Anonymous Coward Junior? Eh? Anonymous is for the peasants and plebs right? And Your Exalted Highness would like to be known as Junior J Junior III...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Bullshit.
The only thing you really need for free exchange of ideas is a society where that its respected, and a government that protects it rather than prosecutes it. Oh... and the courage to speak up and own your own words. Anonymity is a fallback tactic for use in oppressive societies, needed only in extreme circumstances. We managed to freely exchange ideas long before the internet gave everyone an anonymous soapbox, kids.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
quote: any country that doesn't follow this regime should be 'cut off.' Shouldn't this rather read: 'any country that follows this regime will cut itself off' ?
Reminds of two things, RMS's parapble and one of my favorite depressing but funny movies.
Between this and reading that Microsoft is assisting Lockheed-Martin with the "new" internet I've decided it's best
I just go back to bed for a few years...
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Ipv6 anyone?
Absolutely! Nothing important was ever published anonymously before the Internet! Anonymity is a brand new thing that only exists on the Internet and is clearly not important there because it's not important anywhere else.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Considering that Kaspersky grew up and lived under Soviet Russia Communist rule, his statement is surprising - unless he is part of the old boy apparatchiki network. But, yeah, he can go bugger himself sideways with a stiff wire brush.
Dear Mr. Kaspersky, What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.
The former head of 'cyber' for the communist Soviet KGB doesn't believe in people right to privacy. I for one am shocked.
nah nah, nah nah, nah nah!
the internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military.
My Dearest Kaspersky,
While that may be what the Internet was designed for, you seem to be forgetting what America was designed for. Please take a few moments to re-familiarize yourself with the objectives that motivated my contemporaries and I to create this country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Papers
Sincerely,
Publius.
I don't buy the Wikipedia claim that Kaspersky "worked at a multi-discipline scientific research institute", unless you consider KGB's R&D organization to meet that criterion (well OK, it probably does). This appears to be a person dedicated to advancing a political agenda that does not permit dissent.
thinks hes wrong
Eugene Kaspersky does not understand the Internet.
You'd think that a socially challenged reject like the moron who wrote this grade-school-style piece of sh!t would at the very least get his spelling and grammar right. I mean, if you're going to write a racist essay (and attempt rather vainly at humour) one would assume that at the very least you would represent the superiority of whatever race you were touting by at least knowing basic-sh!t-all-grade-9's-know, like "hoe is a garden tool".
What's most interesting about this isn't even the lack of literacy on the part of the idiot who wrote it, it's the lack of imagination on the part of the idiot who was so captivated by it's "wit" that he just couldn't wait to share it with all his pals on Slashdot, albeit anonymously.
I'd like to think if I had such strong convictions on anything I wouldn't hide behind anonymity like a 14 year old pimple-faced little boy who gets his best friend to ask out a girl he likes because he's too much of a vagina to do it himself. Just sayin.
Ah....HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA....HA .....HA HA......HAAAAAAAAAAA.
No.
In other news, governmental organizations like "Bring back Feudalism Now." and "The Dark Age Was Cool" have given their unconditional support to Kasperski.
-Hack
Security expert wants a more secure system. Freedom experts want a free system. Unsurprisingly these two views clash - because they are designing things for different use cases.
My Journal
You say that like it was easier to achieve than anonymity.
Hopefully this will happen, so my a-hole neighbour can finally be responsible for what I do online.
U+F8FF
I actually agree with the sentiment, but requiring ID is moronic. I think that OpenID and similar services should and will become more pervasive, attaching a unique ID to everything public that you on the internet. As for everything private, just don't attach your OpenID to it. News site comment boards could reject non-authenticated comments, file transfer sites could require authentication for upload and torrent clients could refuse connections from untrusted sources and, most importantly, e-mail accounts themselves could get flagged as not worth listening to and be forwarded directly to a spam folder.
Essentially, attach a karma number to OpenID accounts and extend the tracking of it to more services. It would, in the lingo of /., increase the signal to noise ratio of the internet just a little.
The trick would be to hit the balance of what data is stored and by whom. Undoubtedly there would be significant privacy concerns and the threat of targeted advertising but I think that it would be possible to address that. The problem of multiple accounts would self regulate as people just stopped paying attention to spam accounts (like how we all ignore Anonymous Coward).
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
In russian internet we know who you are when you scream.
...only criminals will be anonymous.
Junior J. Junior III is not actually printed on my birth certificate, just to clear up any confusion.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Uh, OK. How do you propose to bring about a society in which everyone respects the free exchange of ideas, and a government that can perfectly protect everyone who expresses an unpopular opinion?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
People like this need to understand who is actually making the purchasing decisions for software such as what Kaspersky makes.
It's people like us. And we tend to be very libertarian when it comes to free speech and anonymity. The guys in the suits who sign the PO's don't make these kinds of decisions in reality because they don't want to get the blame for a bad decision made out of ignorance.
I, too, will make sure his product doesn't grace the door where I work. And we, in fact, just happen to be looking for a new Corporate antivirus/spyware/spam suite now that our McAfee contract has (thank God) ended. They were on our list to evaluate. They won't be on Monday when I get to work.
As others have said, physical passports in the REAL world did nothing to stop terrorists from coming in. They also do nothing to stop millions of Mexican peasants who can't even speak English from crossing the border, getting driver's licenses, and getting jobs despite the fact that all THAT is supposed to require passports and documentation.
Considering how much easier it is to forge stuff that is in 1's and 0's than paper, do the math. All this "Internet Passport" idea is going to do is make it easy for oppressive countries like China, Russia, and yes, add the United States to that list too with that wannabe Hugo Chavez in the white house. His people also want to regulate speech on the internet and have a goon in the FCC already proposing it. This will only punish the honest, criminals will never submit to it. Suggesting that ending anonymity for web surfing is going to end whatever problem he is proposing it as a solution for is going to be as effective as gun bans have been at ending crime. Zip, Zero, Nada effect.
Fact of the matter is, the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The only way to change that is to tear it down and redesign it from scratch to be the KGB controlled streets of the Soviet Union. Thank God it was designed in the 1970's in this case.
Corporatism != Free Market
The little (and often incorrect) information that we provide companies on the internet is already sold and distributed widely. Lets have some proof of trust before we suddenly start verifying our identities on the internet. What Eugene actually wants is to remove the uncertainty for when stealing identities or sending UCE.
Of course he'd have to live there for 15 or so years before they give him a useful Resident Registration Number (the foreigner/non-citizen ones aren't accepted by everyone), but then he can enjoy the Korean internet where there is no anonymity and everyone uses their Resident Registration Number to identify themselves on every big popular web site.
Yes, because requiring passports to entry countries stops all terrorism and crime.
It is never all or nothing.
Which is why the geek tends to lose more in the political arena then he wins.
This guy apparently doesn't understand that for many, anonymity is a security feature
It's not a feature, it's a bug...
Uh, OK. How do you propose to bring about a society in which everyone respects the free exchange of ideas, and a government that can perfectly protect everyone who expresses an unpopular opinion?
The First Amendment's free speech clause is very misunderstood these days, thanks to decades of piss poor civics and history education in the government schools. Thankfully I wasn't mis-educated in one of them.
The First Amendment isn't in there to protect popular speech. It's in there to protect UNPOPULAR speech, so that people who say something that the government or even a large majority of the people CAN say it without being thrown in jail.
Does anyone want to live in a society where I can't say "Bush was an idiot and Barak Obama is too" without being thrown in the gulag? Well, that day is coming. They already want to restrict blogs.
Corporatism != Free Market
Out of morbid curiosity, I googled the first paragraph, and got 294 hits, meaning it almost certainly was not composed by the troll who posted it. It is a copy/paste from any number of racist sites. I wish slashcode would allow minimizing any particular comment by clicking the subject line, but leave the thread below intact...
I am Spartacus.
Great the honest guy who goes through the process of being a legit passported internet user is going to get screwed as everything he does skimmed by 20 people for cash.
The bad guy on the other hand with 5k forged identities makes out like a bandit.
Anonymity is the only thing that makes the internet work.
We live in an interesting time when the power of information that has far exceeded proper checks and balances, but a great protection people have from the ignorant ideas of the past--is anonymity.
Send a message to Kapersky that access to the Internet has become more a right then a privilege--by ending his company from whatever legal means possible.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
If he believes this then what privacy violations will he do to users of his software. I can be certain that his software is now blacklisted from my company network. Who knows what self righteous use he might make of being behind my firewalls?
Just this one thing and now I really don't like the guy.
Certainly there is a lot of fraud and theft on the Internet, and people who do bad things. But the anonymity aspect to the Internet is one of its greatest assets. I prefer my identity to not be known when I post, read news stories, research things, and known only to those where I buy things.
As it is, if someone really wants to know who I am, they can find out. Link up IP address with logs from my ISP and I'm no longer anonymous.
Already, and it is just the nature of the beast, everything people do online can be sifted, sorted, mined, etc. People can be identified by their browsing habits. They can be profiled by their search histories. Governments everywhere have their unblinking robot minions scanning for any key words and actions that might indicate someone is a malcontent and worthy of monitoring more closely. There is no need to make it any easier to monitor people or to allow others to join in the fun.
His Slashdot handle is probably "Anonymous_Eugene2000"
As I read this post about Kaspersky's opinion, I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if "opinion" posts had an "agree/disagree" button that users could click if they were logged in, and after a few hundred votes had been collected, a little graphical indicator would appear on the story to indicate how Slashdot users felt about something.
That would add an easy interactive component that I think would both be informative and fun.
Anonymous Wants End to Online Kaspersky CEO.
Anonymous Coward writes "Anonymous, from the well-known Internets, is calling for an end to the Kaspersky CEO on the Internet, and for the creation of mandatory 'Brains and common sense' for any CEO who wishes to browse the Web. Says Anonymous, 'Every CEO should and must have a brain, or common sense ... the internet was designed not for retard Nazis, but for porn and free thought. Then it was introduced to the commerce, and it was wrong ... to introduce it in the same way.' He calls the Kaspersky CEO 'the Internet's biggest freedom vulnerability' and thinks any community that wants to limit this freedom should be 'cut off.' The PMF (Political Marionettes Foundation) objects, and it's likely that they won't be the only ones."
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm thinking Eugene Kaspersky has found a way to build a bigger profit margin in fighting identity-theft than in anti-virus software. Other than that possible rationale, he has really not just closed his eyes to reality, but glued, taped and stapled them shut.
Really? I'm Brian.
Ah well. We were going to buy an enterprise licence for his product (Been evaluating for a few months). Not now. With renewals it would have been a nice chunk of change. To stop idiots such as this, we need to vote with our pockets.
On a larger scale, without internet anonymity, we wouldn't have wikileaks. We wouldn't have free and open speach. We can and do critize bad laws, bad companies.
It wouldn't be lonf until its a "pay to play" scenario.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
If you had the power to change up to three things in the world today that are related to IT security, what would they be?
.. :)
Internet design--that's enough.
That's it? What's wrong with the design of the Internet?
There's anonymity. Everyone should and must have an identification, or Internet passport. The Internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the U.S. military. That was just a limited group of people--hundreds, or maybe thousands. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong...to introduce it in the same way.
-- unquote --
That's total BS, what's wrong with the Internet is the vast networks of compromised desktop computers co-opted to be used as botnets to provide spamming and phishing services to the criminal sector. The vast majority of which run on Microsoft Windows. And people like you making a good living out of selling 'security' solutions. If everyone on the planet switched off their office 'computer' when they went home from work, the amount of spam/malware on the Internet would drop by over a half.
There is nothing wrong with the Internet, it performs as designed. It delivers packets to-and-from IP addresses. It doesn't know or care what's in 'em. Nor should it, that would break the design. Security should be handled at the end connections. What would cure the current smam/phishing/malware infestation is to design a desktop 'computer' that don't get infected by opening an email attachment or clicking on a URL.
"If I were Bill Gates, I'd run another company--100 percent owned by Microsoft--that produces the antivirus under a different brand"
It's never occured to Kaspersky to suggest that Bill Gates design an Operating System that don't rely on AV to protect. As Marcus Ranum once said enumerating badness is a bad idea since, ' the amount of Badness in the Internet began to vastly outweigh the amount of Goodness '.
So basically because people like Kaspersky have failed at security, and want to implement an Internet Stasi (Staatssicherheit). I don't think so. There are enough people out there that'll see it don't ever happen. --
'Kaspersky Lab UK provides the leading antivirus and spyware software'
please by more of my bogus 'security' solutions - nuff said
There are two parts to free speech. First is the ability to speak without any explicit or implicit restrictions. Explicit restrictions are outright bans or legal restraints. Implicit restrictions are what they call "chilling effect". Intimidation in the form of threats or simply having a law enforcement official standing nearby while you are speaking.
The second is the ability to listen without any explicit or implicit restrictions. It does you no good to speak if nobody feels free to listen to what you're saying. If the cost of me hearing someone speak on some topic is being identified, I'm probably not going to do it thereby denying the speakers free speech right.
We have had anonymous speech in the United States for over 200 years. the most common form of anonymous speech prior to the electronics era has been pamphlets and posters. Law enforcement agencies have routinely violated anonymity and speech rights by photographing people in crowds and then publishing those photos trying to identify the "perpetrators"
Anonymity has nothing to do with cowardice or irresponsibility. It has everything to do with being able to speak against the more powerful foe and hopefully survive any retribution for speaking out.
anonymity can be abused by many people ranging from sociopaths, /. Users, and those in power but used appropriately, it's a wonderful tool
This will be 150 licenses not being renewed next year. I am tired of their crappy AV programs anyway.
Yes, I know this too. The problem is that the First Amendment's scope is really only limited to the Federal government. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from the Mafia. It doesn't protect you from a lynch mob. It doesn't protect you from the court of public opinion. It doesn't protect you from being ostracized by your peers. All it means is that the Federal government isn't supposed to pass any laws that abridge your freedom to speak your mind, and to assemble into groups, and to freely practice the religion of your choice. And by and large, State and Local levels of government tend to fall in line with this as well. Of course, the government does try to pass these sorts of laws all the time. Usually because they're "thinking of the children" or have prioritized national security over everything, including common sense. Often without recognizing that some law they're passing will have just these sorts of consequences.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
public officials are anonymous?
Remember how western countries were mocking eastern block for having ID cards?
Guess what, now UK, Netherlands, and others are closer to "eastern block" then you think. US is practically there.
Issuing such passports will only promote identity theft. More than that, freedom for all will be gone.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." B. Franklin
I'd like a web that had both anonymity and identification. If a web site requires that people be willing to identify themselves, it says as much. My identification would be supplied and I would have access. Other web sites would not require identification and folks could continue anonymously.
I'm of the opinion that even identification should have various levels of security, including the one where the web site operator can know that I am user 9238759 and should be visually presented as a certain text or graphic on the web site, but not know anything other than that. If they have a problem with me, they can reference that user number to begin actions against me.
A major challenge that others have alluded to is that of ensuring a one-to-one relationship between people and web ids.
I am an Anonymous Coward right now because I don't feel like creating Yet Another Account.
Let's think about this for a second. For the most part, it's trivial to find someone responsible for content on the internet - in any country.
The anon.penet.fi remailer was an early attempt at true email privacy, but even that experiment was terribly flawed because, among other things, it was beholden to the legal system of the Finnish government (and most famously attacked by the Church of Scientology. Weird, but true.) But why was anon.penet.fi required? It certainly wasn't because the internet was anonymous. In short - the very fact that anonymizers exist at all is basic - users are easy to identify on the internet without some fairly complex systems to allow anonymity.
Given that the internet isn't anonymous in the first place, it makes very little sense to force a lack of anonymity on the internet. It's inherently wasteful and doesn't solve any of the real problems (lack of internet access to the world's poor/rural people, running out of namespace, lack of bandwidth, last mile)
Here's an idea for you Kaspersky, go sell your worthless crap in China. They'd love it.
“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security” Benjamin Franklin
I knew this was coming, i've posted about it here before, that one day the powers that be are going to want people to have a virtual, verifiable online ID that traces everything you do online back to your real identity that everyone who wants to go online will be forced to have. .
This absolutely has to be stopped, it obviously won't work, any system can be gamed or hacked p but the real issue (even if you believe something like this would help) is that it will stifle free speech - so many people go online to learn, to anonymously get info and talk to people about health issues and personal things that should always be anonymous if the person involved wants it this way.
Just think about political speech and organizing...Say goodbye to that - with the way the US federal government now behaves, just look at Pittsburg - tons of innocent people ]bombarded with LRADs (which can cause permanent hearing damage) for just coming out of their hosue to see what was going on...Police or agent provocateurs dressed up in black and knocking over trash cans - then riot police (and even hired military contractors like blackwater drressed as police) brtualizing innocent people... - SO with all of that sort of behavior, if this sort of thing gets mandated it will be the end of the last truly free medium of communication we have.
I believe that this is the biggest threat to freedom and to the internet, bigger even than network neutrality (which, in some respects can cause similar problems, with certain types of information being "downgraded" or even not served).
If this becomes a reality it will destroy the culture of the internet - digital culture will be dealt a death blow - and I expect now that it's been mentioned every organization from the RIAA and similar groups to the national security organizations to the financial sector will hop on board.
Can fuck himself
there is not much you can do if that person is at the other side of the globe. Yes you can call police, but they will seldom do something.
Don't count on it:
The federal government can extradite a man to face a first-degree murder trial in the United States on charges of killing his wife, even though the evidence presented against him does not meet the test for the same charge in Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled. Top court okays U.S. extradition [Oct 16]
A Briton accused of hacking into secret military and Nasa computers has had his extradition to the US put on hold as new psychiatric evidence is considered. Hacker's extradition put on hold
This is Gary McKinnon pitching his last-ditch "Asperger's defense" to the Home Office.
The Swiss Justice Ministry rejected on Tuesday film director Roman Polanski's appeal for an immediate release from custody. Polanski was arrested September 26 upon arriving in Zürich, Switzerland, to attend a film festival and has remained in prison ever since, awaiting possible extradition to the United States. Roman Polanski denied bail in Switzerland
Comedian and talk-show host Whoopi Goldberg had on The View on September 29 tried to defend his actions.
"It wasn't rape-rape," she had said.
The next day, Debra Tate, sister of Polanski's murdered wife, Sharon, argued on the Today show that it was consensual sex even though the victim was 13.
"There's rape, and then there's rape," she said.
Shannon Gilreath, Wake Forest University Law Professor for Interdisciplinary Study and a nationally recognized scholar on issues of equality, sexual minorities, and constitutional interpretation, believes there are really two perspectives involved in the case. "One is the perspective of people who look for any reason imaginable to excuse the victimization of women and girls that is rampant: it happened long ago, she was mature for her age-she wanted it," he explained. On the other side of this are those of us who are saying that every victim matters, even those victimized by people rich enough to evade jurisdiction for many years."
But Gilreath says that statutory rape is a clear offense under the law, and at the age of 13, the girl was underage. Polanski defenders 'define' rape
Another reason to not buy his software, fwiw, is that it injects DLLs into Firefox that slow down DOM manipulation by 100x or so. And those DLLs are injected even if the antivirus software is disabled, as long as it's installed.
I don't exactly agree, but I know where he is coming from ..
Ever found out your favorite website was hacked, you looked at the logs and find out that the attackers cannot be tracked down becaused they used tor or anonymizing proxies?
That is when a network where people are resonsible for their actions would be useful. I wouldn't even mind if the culprits stayed anonymous, as long as I would know the proxy would not accept any more traffic from them.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Ha! Take that!
He does understand: he understands that his job is to control intrusions and abuse, and anonymity makes it that much harder. Like many other security minded people, he has overruled the protection of social anonymity and free speech.
It's an extremely bad choice, because social anonymity is vital to the ability to depose dangerous people who have already attained power. But it's understandable.
We Are One People
We Are Borg
Resistance is Futile as you will be assimulated
Total Transparency of thought and Action. Anything not according to the Group mind will be punished. Any Deviation from accepted behaviour or function will be corrected.
Seems that this is exactly what he wants. Well I want full transparency of all of his email, including corporate as there is nothing to fear except fear itself. Step up and accept the fate you demand and become one with the Collective.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
When you pry my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard.
In order to actually enforce what he is suggesting you would have to effectively ban or censor all private individuals and companies from using protocols not endorsed by the government, all countries would have to agree on the bans and rules, and you would have to block traffic from non-cooperating countries.
However that is not enough, because some of the countries from which you want to allow traffic may be allowing proxies used by countries that don't cooperate. So if Switzerland were to allow the Swedish to use Swiss proxies, and if the US didn't like Sweden's way to do things, then not only would they have to refuse all traffic from Sweden, they would have to refuse all traffic from Switzerland too. And if the UK allowed the Swiss to use UK proxies, you'd have to ban the UK too.
Then there is the practical problems. How do you stop people from stealing each others "passports"?. How do you stop people peeking over each others back when they type in passwords ? How do you stop man in the middle attacks? Are you going to encrypt every single transmission ? And all countries will agree to encrypt all their traffic too? How do you manage the keys across international boundaries? What happens when I go on vacation in a country that doesn't agree with your rules ?
Now what about compromised systems? What do you do when you get packages from Russia, Nigeria and China flooding your key servers with false requests? What do you do when the attacks come from compromised systems in Australia, Norway, Israel and France? Do you block all those countries, do you disconnect all your citizens that can't access your key servers? Do you allow everybody access if the key-servers are flooded? Do you cut foreign countries off from your citizens thereby screwing over all your international trade?
Somebody didn't think this through...
No, it's not as bad as Microsoft Palladium, later renamed "Trusted Computing". Not only was every box supposed to be hardware identified by the CPU, but the keys and the central key-signing keys would be held by Microsoft, with no clear legal procedure for their release to the government or even the janitor, and with direct control over the features of your software and hardware. It was designed primarily for DRM, and could be used to block the BIOS from being able to load other operating systems.
The list of built-in, abusible aspects of this is stunning. Check out http://epic.org/privacy/consumer/microsoft/palladium.html for details.
Such a program would need to be administered, of course, and who's better qualified to do so than "security" companies? A billion or so Internet licenses at maybe $5/year with a buck or two in "adminstrative expenses": do we see a financial interest here? Naw. I'm sure he has only the best interests of the Internet community at heart. No CEO would ever be influenced by the prospect of increased revenue for his company.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yes, I know this too. The problem is that the First Amendment's scope is really only limited to the Federal government. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from the Mafia. It doesn't protect you from a lynch mob. It doesn't protect you from the court of public opinion. It doesn't protect you from being ostracized by your peers.
Hence, the importance of anonymous free speech.
Corporatism != Free Market
Ah well. We were going to buy an enterprise licence for his product (Been evaluating for a few months). Not now. With renewals it would have been a nice chunk of change. To stop idiots such as this, we need to vote with our pockets.
Are you voting your employer's wallet or your wallet?
If the security his product offers is the best available for his enterprise needs, what then?
You only strengthen Kaspersky's argument if you suffer a breach.
"the internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military."
IMHO, the internet was not designed as someone designs a wheel or a building. The internet grew out of an idea of interconnectivity between people. As such, the internet has grown because people choose to use it. Had the internet not been anonymous, its growth and prosperity would not have necessarily been the same. In any case, the internet is not a network. The internet is people. The moment you put restrictions on the internet, you will see people stop its use. I for one welcome the return of a sneaker net.
For this individual, who happens to be from the higher class of the world economy, to feel he has the right to dictate policy on something which is everyone's business, is presumptuous at best. As most IT professionals know, the security of a system does not depend on how well the system recognizes the person, but on how secure the system itself is built. For as long as companies feel they have something to hide, people will continue trying to break down walls. Knowing the identity of those individuals will not help the cause, mostly because ghosting your identity is common practice anyways.
In the end, nobody is any safer with the internet knowing my name or not. My ip address can be traced to my identity just as easily by "government" security agencies (since we the people should be the government, I don't necessarily deny this as a good thing for national security), which he fails to mention.
Eugene, you're welcome to create your own network with controlled access and tight protocol control. It will fail horribly, but you're welcome to try.
There were dozens of network in the '80s, competing with the Internet. The Internet won because it was open. If the Internet hadn't been open, something else that *was* would have won instead.
There also is the fact that if everyone had an identity (say there were some metadata in place to tag every packet with a username and social security number), then the blackhats will just compromise user accounts and send their spam and malware, but under someone else's ID.
Result: Spammers, malware writers, and other Internet scum keep their business going, while some unwary person ends up taking the fall for it. Of course with no anonymity, *a* suspect can be found and nailed, but it won't be *the* suspect.
Denying anonymity is not about security; it is about control, pure and simple.
Posting this anon while the ability still lasts.
Just a heads up:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=c672eaa4e4033419f46d07837fcdbe79&tab=core&_cview=0
And yes, it will be commercialized.
So people complain about him wanting to remove anonymity but I get smashed into the ground for posting as Anonymous Coward?
Hypocritical much?
Yeah.. not the same thing (I have the option to post anon) but it was the first thing that popped into my mind after reading the standard cut-n-paste /. crowd responses.
Where did you get the idea that the government has to perfectly protect everyone?
(You also seem to be a bit confused about the bill of rights and the constitution. The limits on government powers apply to state and local governments. It's not a limit of only federal government power).
AccountKiller
Thank you for showing us your true colors sir. I will never buy a Kaspersky product now.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
First of, I'd like to say to Kaspersky:
HAhhahahahha HAhhahahahha HAhhahahahha HAhhahahahha hahahh hahahh hhahahh hhahahhahahahhah HAhhahahahha hahahha hhahah hhaha Aaaahahahah hahaha hahaha hahah HAhhahahahha HAhhahahahha HAhhahahahha hhahahhahahahhah
Then I'd like to follow up with:
Fuck off, you tool.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Anonymity, a security threat? Uh, how about "lack of computer education", "laziness", or plain old "stupidity"?
Keep your computer updated, don't click on every single link you see on screen, no you HAVEN'T WON 1 million, etc etc.
"Then it was introduced to the public, and it was wrong" - I kind of agree with him here but not for the reasons he gives. Get rid of user incompetence instead. Good luck asking computer manufacturers, OEMs and retailers to think beyond the bottom line though.
On the other hands, there are times you wish you could easily get hold of some random retarded comment's author... (And yes, I have considered the possibility of shooting myself in the foot here heh)
With winning ideas like that he should be Hillary Clintons fluffer.
Comrade Kapersky had best stay out of my arms reach.
F**king moron.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Welcome to the internet, please don't feed the trolls.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Where did you get the idea that the government has to perfectly protect everyone?
I don't. I'm saying that if someone were to propose that I give up anonymous speech because the government protects free speech, then I want absolute assurance that I will be protected perfectly when exercising my right to free speech. Since this is impossible, I'm unwilling to give up anonymnity.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Clearly Mr Kaspersky does not understand what the internet is today. He clearly does not understand how people want to use it today.
That, in and of itself is not a bad thing. However, combine it with the fact that he wants to sell software to help internet users do so securely, and you've got a problem. I won't be using his software for two reasons:
1. I do not wish to support his viewpoint.
2. Since he clearly does not understand the internet as it stands today, I do not believe he is competent to help secure my computers.
linquendum tondere
I stopped using their Anti Virus software after i realized it turns your pc into a Kaspersky computer that runs everything else like crap due to its terrible resource usage.
NO! I AM SPARTACUS!
Great. Everybody must have an Internet Passport. Just great. The spammers will have an incentive to steal those. It's bad enough now when somebody steals your identity. Takes years, sometimes, to clean up after that. Imagine what it will be like when somebody steals your Identity and the next step is for your Internet Passport to get shut off, for months, while a retrained electrician cum Internet Passport Agent from Xe (née Blackwater), Haliburton, or KBR sorts it out.
Next, some genius will get the bright idea to bring biometrics to the Internet Passport, surely *that* will stop The Bad Guys. At that point, spammers have an incentive to kill you and cut off your hand, which they'll attach to a little machine to keep it at the right temperature and perspiration level, so they can send V1@gra spam.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
And I am sure, just like real identities, these can't be falsified or spoofed...righhhtt. Kaspersky, of all companies, should know this. Sad...their virus scanners blow anyways...NOD32 ftw.
In this way virus writers would be accountable for their activities and be arrested, provided that non-anonymity is enforced rigorously and the amount of work needed to bypass the system is prohibitive for someone who just wants to spread some virus. There are an outrageous number of viruses in the wild but millions of criminal programmers escape punishment.
When anonymity is outlawed... Anonymous will be outlaws.
Seriously though, does he actually think that the criminals, fraudsters, libelers, and the worst of the worst, the copyright breakers will not find a way to get around his passport system? Assuming every country in the world would even go for this, the best they could do is find a way to sue everyone who says a bad word about Kaspersky or his clients.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
All y'all are making this more difficult than it need be. They bought tickets. To fly. On a plane. Using a name.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Well, UK has been just a step away from being the 52th state of USA for the past fifty years of so anyhow, so that hardly counts as a good example.
.
His company is probably going to get a nice contract from Kremlin in exchange for his beautifully "patriotic" words (disclaimer: I personally consider the actions of the likes of him - the network, as you called it - as unpatriotic and harmful to the future of Russia). China is a another potential customer, which would appreciate these kinds of suppressive words. In fact, I think the target customer is quite likely China in this case.
Kaspersky Lab is a privately held company headquartered in Moscow, Russia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspersky_Lab
Thank you for protecting our freedom.
...I want that too!
So, he wants AOL?
Well now Mr. tverbeek, why don't you post your real name and address here, just to show us how it's done? Unless, of course, you have less than complete faith in this society and its government or your own courage?
Exactly. Anonymity is guaranteed to work even in imperfect societies made of and led by imperfect people. Relying on the niceness and tolerance of people isn't.
And quite a few of those ideas were signed by pseudonyms, or not signed at all.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Don't be a dolt; that's not what I said. I was rebutting the clueless assertion that free speech can't exist without anonymity. There's a reason for the term "anonymous coward": anonymity is the coward's favorite approach to free speech.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
My company's anti-spam firewall has Kaspersky and it constantly misses all those new virus, which are all picked up by the anti-virus software from another vendor on the e-mail server. The contract for the Kaspersky will end soon and certainly I will not renew it. Even his best product gives this kind of result and I would not expect the "passport" system he suggested will work anything better.
When you're walking down the street or in a shop you do not announce who you are to everyone so why would you do it online?
Secondly, computers are no where near being secure. I don't want to have everything I do effectively tagged with my name on it. It's not just a case of whether I keep my computer secure but if all those servers I'm using keep their hardware secure.
Knowing someone's name has never stopped them from committing a crime. This won't either. What it will do is allow companies, like Kaspersky, to offer online ID protection.
Their CEO has proven to be a dickhead so I'm going to ensure I never use their products.
Obviously someone who has links to the Russian mafia and left an backdoor for the kgb on the kaspersky security suites, would want such thing to happen.
Thank you all who bought this company security software and made it relevant
Hey Eugene, I think you need to quit worrying about shut the internet down because your products can screw a computer up in an instant! A CEO HAS NO AUTHORITY TO TELL A USER WHAT THEY CAN AND CANT DO ON THE INTERNET! YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS PERIOD TO SAY IT! Why don't you go back to your office and run you f****** company and leave the internet to the GOVERNMENT! OKAY!!!!! Get Lost!
If you take his software off the list because you don't like an idea he's proposing, what if his software is actually the better choice for your company? Now you are simply doing your company a disservice. Just because he's proposing this, doesn't mean its going to every happen..
From the wiki (if it's still accurate):
He may be good at solving individual problems, but I wouldn't trust him to make policy.
Money is the root of all evil?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Totally off-topic here, but I just noticed your sig.
LOL! Total win.
[End Of Line]
The problem is that people buy security products from jerks who have absolutely NO understanding of what the internet is all about, how it works and why it is a success.
Cut them off!!! Cut them ALL off!! The bastards!
Can we just cut Kaspersky off? Put him in a tightly sealed room where he can be safe and happy, and securely identified, free to send authenticated packets to himself.
Now I know where I won't be buying antivirus software from.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
After all, why should the Internet be any different than every other communications network that we have or have ever had?
Take the telephone network... oh, wait.
Mail... oh, wait.
Pony express? Runners?
Face-to-face oral communication? Hey! There's one! (Finally)
Finaly !
Im going to move to Cambodia, Azerbaijan, or Russia and I will be selling ID passwords to the people in police states, which wants to control each keystroke of their tax payers. I mean, I will be selling it to You.
And I will be rich !
I think Kaspersky's response through inverse advertizing is valid. He is advertizing that he cares and that through altruism uses rationality and produces security tools that help. As opposed to exploit. I think he has valid reasons to communicate this to the general public and considered marketing to some extent. He should also as a vendor of security products be asymmetrically on the side of the user, as I am, in representing good decisions.
Specifically there is a balance that must be struck and why the internet came to exist, survived and expanded so far. The part about scientists and military - thats a distraction and artifact of intention and now fairy tale. The beast has evolved and contains many more things and simultaneous intentions.
His proposal for trusted computing and human authentication is worthwhile and maybe will cause more people to compute with responsibility and not always be sheep.
But shifting the balance to this more strict authentication of humans on computer systems would bring about the dire consequence of token theft or compromise. The damage and exploitation possible with this permanent token will be expanded and made more irreversible for the owner. This is in direct contrast to dynamic authentication and a citizens right to alias as a self protective measure.
Citizens must alias.
To remove the condition of anonymity across all possible transactions is absurd and in itself a weakening of security principle. I myself would like a system like this but its a classical or primordial arrangement for few participants. At higher social order the system must accommodate election and the desire for members to establish trust through their actions rather than their tokens.
Security is no ones' problem but your own.
Time to put the wallet away, customers.
"We have had anonymous speech in the United States for over 200 years."
Of course we have, and it's a valuable tool to keep. But the notion I was answering, that it's the essential foundation on which free speech was built is the kind of idiocy that only a child who grew up hiding his identity on the internet would believe. I've been using my real name to express unpopular opinions both offline and online since the 1980s, and the mewling cowards who claim they can only do that when hiding behind the anonymity of the internet ought to grow a spine. At least Kaspersky has the courage to express his laughable ideas with his name attached. That's why he's influential, and they aren't.
"Anonymity has nothing to do with cowardice or irresponsibility. It has everything to do with being able to speak against the more powerful foe and hopefully survive any retribution for speaking out."
That's what "courage" means, AC. Change doesn't happen because anonymous people call for it. Change happens because people put their identities - and sometimes their safety - on the line for it. I'm against police surveillance, internet licenses, or any chilling restraint like that. Anonymity is a worthwhile option. But if the only way someone is willing to express himself is anonymously, yeah... that's cowardice.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
No one offers absolute guarantees of anything. Grow up and get over it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
There are three issues with "online anonymity". One is anonymous businesses, the second is the ability to create an unlimited number of new identities at very low cost, and the third is actual identification of end users.
Anonymous businesses, that is, web sites with commercial intent which don't identify their ownership, are already illegal in many jurisdictions. At SiteTruth, we treat anonymous businesses (where there's no postal mailing address on the web site) as "bottom feeders", and move them to the bottom of search results. Google has a bias against "private registration" domains, but that only kicks in if the site otherwise looks like a junk site. There's not much controversy about this; it's accepted law that a business has to identify itself properly.
The ability to create an unlimited number of new identities causes various forms of trouble. The ability to get vast numbers of free Gmail accounts ("automatically create Gmail Accounts in seconds flat without breaking a sweat") is a windfall for spammers and has destroyed vast sections of Craigslist. The ability to register large numbers of domains with phony domain registration has created a well-known range of problems. Gradually, that's being tightened down. "Domain Tasting" is now dead, now that registrars have to eat the loss if they register and release a domain within 5 days. Phony WHOIS information remains a problem, but could be fixed. When you register a domain, you should get a postal mail piece with the code that enables the domain.
End user identification is the controversial issue. The music industry would like it, but, after all, the music industry is a dinky business compared to the Internet. IBM, HP, Dell, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are each bigger than the entire music industry. Other than for email sending, there's other big interest behind end user identification.
>> McAfee contract has (thank God) ended
I envy you. If there is ever a reason to down a cold beer after work, this is one of them.
(you know what's coming next) ... only outlaws will have anonymity.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Considering the Internet is IP based you could use a look up system based on... IP numbers like this thing called "whois". Then you could actually list information on the user in the whois database. Seems simple to me, no need to do mess with protocols and such. ISPs would likely just be mandated to link account information to whois records and I don't see that being a problem, even dynamically.
I figure a more interesting question is what information should be displayed? The login name the person uses on the ISP? Real name? etc.
Technically a login name isn't anonymous.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
and I for one accept the risk freedom brings..
We now know that Kaspersky never speaks out against authority, and would never say anything in public that anyone would ever disagree with years from now. If he did, he would have respect for anonymity. Can you imagine doing something simple, like trying to get an interview for a job while you're on public record on the internet saying bad things about that company? So Kaspersky is above all that now, he has all the money he needs.
So who is Kaspersky speaking on behalf of? Is he just speaking for himself? Or does he have a sponsor that wants him to represent them in public appearances and before government committees?
Is that sponsor...anonymous? Who might it be? A Communist government, under which free speech is regulated? A dictatorship, under which freedom is a dream? A corporate partner, whose executives really have no idea whose playing field they're on, or perhaps they're a proxy for a government with no respect for unpopular speech?
Don't forget that because of the ratification of the fourteenth amendment, it also applies to lower levels of government. States and local governments are restricted from taking away your first amendment rights as well.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Kaspersky has lost his credibility. All of it. Among friends, family, colleagues, and netizens the world over. He has lost all sense of reason, thought and logic. The ability to protest something in anonymity ensures atrocities carried out in the name of the leader or the state or anyone or anything else is vital to free speech, democracy and absolute corruption of the state. Better to have the truth out and deal with it, rather than living in fear/hatred oblivion. Anonymous protest allows this. The beauty, the power of the internet is in protesting in anonymity. What happens when Iranian protesters post what they think and the state knows exactly where they are? DEAD IRANIAN PROTESTERS! Is this a positive thing? Only if you live in and love the POLICE STATE! NO! The United States under George W. Bush got closer to Soviet Russia than most Americans would like to admit, but at least they could protest stupidity on the internet. The Great Firewall of China is a bad thing. The Onion Router is a good thing. Kaspersky is either really trying to play devils advocate, or has gone utter mental.
ya, ya, Comrad YuGene! Und vee vill azk everyovone to receive a Propiska(in the glroious Country Comrad Eugene happened to born, EVERYONE was required to have a permission to live in any place, called propiska) UND we vill vant everyone to request for premision to look for information outside of ze Mazerland (in the glorious Fraterland of the named Comrad one needed special permission to visit anything outside of the country AND it was a felony to read wat is not permitted to read by some organization one can describe as pre-Intenet anti-virus+anti-spam agency). This company is ready to join Revolutionary Guard (or, probably, they already?) Hope to see the clawns in Guy Fawks masks visiting KgbSPERSKY offices rather than riding the (curious) fame of the Hubbard and Cruise.
"The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. "
Errr, yes it does?
IINAL, but I have to say that you should check up on this one. Plenty a wrongful dismissal suit has been won along such grounds.
"I believe you have an e-mail for me" "Okay Mr Burns, what's your first name?" "I don't know"
or it might be a child's dream to become a militioner.
Kaspersky. See the name? He's a Slovak - I would say Polish, but Slovak for sure. He lives in Russia. He's no young puppy. The man grew up under the old Soviet. His values are not the values of the western world. I don't mean to be judgemental, per se, but I recognize that he ain't like me.
While most of us in the western world tend to deny it, there is comfort to be had inside of a totalitarian regime. You know your place, you know everyone else's place, you do your job and keep your nose to yourself, and everyone gets along. It's easy to sell to the masses, and Joe Sixpack manages alright unless and until some silly sumbitch decides to sacrifice Joe for the "good of the party".
So, Mr. Kaspersky has a touch of nostalgia for the good things from the Soviet, and forgets about the bad things. People tend to do that. Right here in the US, we have all kinds of people who remember the '50's (or whichever decade they were teenagers in) as Utopia. Life was simpler then - mostly because they were kids with no responsibilities.
For that matter, I can probably find a few million people right here in the US why would fall right in line with Mr. Kaspersky's ideas, because it just makes sense. No one needs to be anonymous, unless they are up to no good. Hell, with my own relatively open mind, I think kids are goofy for wearing hoodies. Why cover your face, and try to hide your features, if you're not ashamed of what you are doing? But, I don't make a big deal of the hoodies, because I know the cops aren't always right, or even always honest.
Yeah, I could easily find several million people in the US who will agree with Mr. Kasperski. Some kind of a psychological analysis would be nice to look at. Or, the conclusions drawn by the psych people, anyway.
Any takers?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Anonymity is essential!
Declare your sovereign rite to anonymity.
Governments are illusionary - reject Government IDs.
PGP Rings of trust can be useful for Identification.
-Joe Baker
it is too late anyhow - even if at tier 1 they would be willing to do identification checks,
most traffic is already routed at tier 2 and below!
I trust that people needing connectivity will even use the moon as their relay.
I switched my company from CA to Kaspersky. I consider it a mistake. We will not be renewing our Kaspersky licenses - partly because of what the CEO said, partly because Kaspersky antivirus likes to screw with your network protocols even if you turn off those 'features.'
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Pro tip: Never trust an former-USSR company for computer security. They're the ones creating the viruses.
Look at these recent poll results and you may be less surprised — not everyone in Russia thinks the old Soviet system was a bad thing, evidently!
add the United States to that list too with that wannabe Hugo Chavez in the white house. His people also want to regulate speech on the internet and have a goon in the FCC already proposing it.
You seem to be (deliberately?) confusing issues here...
Our Russian friends had lots of freedom returned for a few years, then started giving some of those freedoms back to Putin. Freedom to criticize the state in the press is mostly gone once again. The elections process had been corrupted now.
The Russian people did little to fight to keep Putin from taking those new freedoms away.
Kaspersky chooses to live in a nation that has gone from a corrupt police state to an even more corrupt anarchy, and now he recommends Russian-style policies for the rest of the world. Sorry, I don't think I want to take advice from him about communication in a democracy.
In the US, the ability to communicate anonymously is a fundamental right, and for good reason.
That's what "courage" means
That's a funny misspelling of stupidity.
history shows that revealing identity is is a surefire way to silence or discredit a critic.
one possible tool might be the use of pseudo-anonymity. A two-way untraceable path between you and the anonymous party. think of it as a disposable identity. The trick then becomes how do I remove any association between me and the pseudo-identity so it can't be traced back to me.
The reason I suggest this tool is because true anonymity is a one-way communications path. Useful for broadcasting information but not interacting with any investigative authority. For example, I was working at a major film producer company that went bankrupt and we were working on a imaging device for nuclear medicine. since it was used a diagnostic setting, it had to pass certain FDA compliance regulations before could be used in a diagnostic setting.
They shipped beta code to sites using the image printer for diagnostics with real patients. A few people complained including not one but two FDA compliance officers within the organization. these people, including the compliance officers are either marginalized or pushed out. If I had a good anonymous channel to the FDA, I would've handed them documentation in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, this company was really good at sniffing out leaks so I didn't dare.
So for lack of true anonymity, a bunch of criminal behavior, or at least unethical behavior went unpunished.
I am not so foolish as to extend a single case to the entire net but, it is a good example, and an extremely common example of not reporting corporate malfeasance because people are not willing to have their careers and financial well-being savaged. Good anonymity support could help that.
He names all his software after himself, so just avoid anything with a big "K".
That's right, I'm anonymous, bitch.
What are you wont from ex(?)agent of KGB?
If only there was a way to flag entire press releases as flamebait... I have a hard time seeing this as anything more than a desperate cry for attention.
Boycott Kaspersky!
It is time for you to leave us by creating your own little internet with your own little passports and sit there and gopher stuff.
It is an army of pencil necked pricks like you that created this horrible mess.
Fuckyousky Kaspersky.
How about telling the telecom's to do their jobs and secure the Internet on their end. And who cares what Kapersky thinks, they do good one year, and then bad the next on protecting computers. Another booooo point is that this would be another way identities can be stolen.........Why don't we improve the security and then start discussing a passport system. Because even SSL Certificates are not safe anymore.
In order to access the internet with true anonymity you must have both a high level of technical sophistication, and you must carefully plan your access path.
It is difficult to conceive of any system that could be put in place where individuals with the determination and technical sophistication to access the internet anonymously now could not also bypass the access controls in a supposedly less anonymous system.
As mentioned, dude is probably just trying to score some contracts with oppressive governments by offering them the pipe dream of being able to lock down their citizens online.
The proposal is ridiculously impractical, and grossly contrary to the established rights and norms in civilized countries.
Eugene Kaspersky sure picked a nice and easy way for tons of people to hate him and his Big Brother Utopian Dreams!
Arrest him Eugene Kaspersky and charge him with attempting to implement a Big Brother Control System!
Eugene Kaspersky = MCP!
Lets face it, advertisers are getting completely lazy. Instead of trying to make an effort to figure out which groups of people respond to which types of ads, they want to go per person, and shove their ads down peoples throats. Targetted advertising is only a door to a much scarier world.
What will end up as a result of the complete and total loss of privacy is that every company on the planet will want to charge you more based on buying habits. For instance, when you go shopping at your local supermarket, that information will be sold to your insurance company (at a profit to the supermarket) where the insurance company will jack up your insurance rates based on this information. The idea will be sold to the everyday consumer as being "best for you". After all, why should you have to pay for your neighbor to have a heart attack when he buys too much bacon? Now lets not mention the fact that he never even ate the bacon, it was for his family that was visiting, it will be used as an excuse to increase his rates. Does it actually save you any money? Nope. All it will do is increase insurance companies profit margins exponentially by completely taking any free will of the consumer out of the equation.
Note that the main crime for which McKinnon faces life in a US prison is not illegal outside the US. Embarassing the US government is not actually a crime in the UK.
Mind you, there are countries that do not extradite people to the US. Norway is one of them - under our "no extradition to countries with capital punishment"-policy, I believe.
Imagine what might happen if his company provided your firewall. If Kaspersky's firewall wasn't already a piece of toxic junk, his comments have just turned it into one.
This does little to slow any problems, it slightly raises the ante.
However such a requirement would open us to stalkers, vexatious lawsuits, petty bureaucrats and serious authoritarian types.
Imagine simply saying, "Hitler is an ass" loudly to the German public 65-70 years ago... Anons only please. Oh, and don't buy Kaperasky software.
After people wise up. I would stop supporting all these one world government anti freedom and rights totalitarian banker groups.
Kaspersky is the most awlful product. If you do any form of benchmark you can see it clear as day having it on with default settings eats 50% of your total internet bandwidth. Turn 99% of features off drops that to 30% but why install a product that lets you use only 70% of what you pay for?
Never buying their shits and please don't be fooled into supporting dystopia. Only utopia for a million of worlds elites. If I'm on the top of the ponzi primid scheme I would be supporting it but thats evil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia
Free assembly today means you have the right to go stand in some official cage miles away (called the "free speech zone") from the real protest point you want to be at, and then if you decline to relocate to the "official" area or decline to provide ID or refuse to do either on demand, trying to remain both anonymous and to have your assemblage actually mean anything, you get arrested anyway, err, I mean "detained", if not also physically assaulted and punished on the spot, using a variety of blunt force trauma or chemical or electrical or sonic weapons and techniques.
The bill of rights, the alleged born with freedoms that can't be abridged, are a very nice theory, but in practice, the state and their mercenary enforcers routinely violate any and all of those rights, and have, as far back as I can remember going back to racial civil rights protest days, also including the state insisting you need their "permission", a permit of some kind, for what should clearly be a born with right..
slashdot has been erasing every comment I make over the pass couple years. Why is that? I'll be emailing their admins.
Citation needed.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm well aware of that. So, since there can be no guarantees, why should I voluntarily give up protections afforded by anonymity which cannot be replaced by anything else?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
in the name of "Anonymous Coward"...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
and I will never re-install it now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
What's most interesting about this isn't even the lack of literacy on the part of the idiot who wrote it, it's the lack of imagination on the part of the idiot who was so captivated by it's "wit" that he just couldn't wait to share it with all his pals on Slashdot, albeit anonymously.
It's mister_playboy.... he forgot to hit the AC box once: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1391719&cid=29633239
If you see their crap installed, remove it. Tell your clients anything from this company is an ineffective ripoff.
Funny how he calls lack of anonymity the "biggest security vulnerability of Internet" Who's security? It is that very anonymity that protects thousands of Internet users from being identified and dealt with by whoever has most interest in them - a much graver danger than simply getting a computer virus. People blogging anonymously from conflict areas under threat of government prosecution, hired media journalists exposing stuff that should be exposed for benefit of all - that kind of anonymity can mean the difference between living and dying.
You're a festering pustule on a donkey's donger!
No one offers absolute guarantees of anything. Grow up and get over it.
Perhaps you should grow up and get some reading comprehension lessons. Or did you not understand what the admission "Since this is impossible" means in the context of asking for absolute assurance of perfect protection?
So Kaspersky is KGB, Panda Antivirus is Scientology, who are you going with?
And then I use SSH to my friend in Korea and connect from his computer to a mail server (using SSL and TLS ) in Norway, from which I send Kapersky an e-mail saying "Fuck you bastard!". Now what?
"worse than Microsoft AIDS" (a hypothetical product with the combined potential of causing sever harm to both your computer and your own personal well-being).
It's not hypothetical, it's just that they release it under pseudonyms.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I piss off bigots.
But he makes one helluva mean commercial.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Can't you see I'm /. ID 42 !?
Don't you realize it means something? I'm no Anonymous Coward!!!
There is no such thing as being "anonymous" on the web. Exchanging information requires the IP addresses, which are managed at the highest level and tracked at each level as they are leased. If someone is "anonymous", it is only because nobody has put forth the effort to identify them. The effort is worth it to track down criminals, but lowering the bar will only make it easier for marketers (and those that Kaspersky implies trying to identify to deny access) to individually identify the rest of us.
Kaspersky? So many idiots, so few comets.
kill and rape this nigger.
and make it mandatory
"He calls anonymity 'the Internet's biggest security vulnerability' and thinks any country that doesn't follow this regime should be 'cut off.'"
I view it as the opposite -- any country or locality that decides to "cut off" everyone else will simply be cutting THEMSELVES off. Everyone else will have a free, open, and vibrant internet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Citation for credit.
Though I doubt it's close to original work, that's where I got it and fair's fair.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They introduce the problem.
They await your reaction.
They come up with their own solution which fits THEM.
Enjoy your new world order.
The First Amendment doesn't protect you from the Mafia. It doesn't protect you from a lynch mob.
Nope, that's where the second ammendment comes in.
No one offers absolute guarantees of anything. Grow up and get over it.
Can you abosultely guarantee that?
..our 125 licenses of kaspersky... I'll have to find another desktop antivirus... damnit...
His statements single-handedly changed my perception of the brand "Kaspersky" from "respected maker of Windows antivirus software" to "worse than Microsoft AIDS"
Agreed. Way to screw your business up good and proper. I'm sure Kaspersky is still effective antivirus, but I sure as hell won't be evaluating it now. Remarkable how few corporate antivirus programs combine not creepy, effective, and reasonably resource-friendly. Now I'm down to F-Prot, Sophos, ESET and Avira. Clam's not bad (I use it at home and on mailservers) but I need something with realtime scanning, backed by a company that's been doing it for a few years.
Then again, I wasn't really in his potential customer pool to begin with
I am, I specify my company's antivirus solution. Kaspersky got crossed off my list to replace the McAfee crap we're dumping. I think I'm probably going to choose F-Prot, it's a highly competent product and I think my government screwed over the lovely little country of Iceland unnecessarily last year: I'd like to make some kind of amends for that.
The real meat of the matter here is this Kaspersky guy's business is kind of in the dumps. He's being eaten alive by AVG and Clam, so a bit of trolling gets his name around the e-rags and a few people go "WOW they're still around ? ZOMG I'll try their A/V again".
If Kaspersky "ends online anonymity", they will end their revenue stream. It would seem logical that a company thriving off the constant threat of malware, would not want to see that malware willed away via draconian ID mandates and exclusionary tactics. Then we'll all know the Kaspersky guys were the ones writing viruses all along...
-Billco, Fnarg.com
They want this because they would be one of the companies profiting off of selling them to people. It's a revenue stream to them and nothing more.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
So a question for you IT professionals. You all only have guest accounts set up your network and allow anonymous logins for anyone, right?
The e-mail is automatically filtered into the junk folder by Bayesian filtering?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Amazing how stupid people can be in the pursuit of one idea, forgetting all the problems that this will cause.
There are plenty of places to get products which are equivalent or better than anything that company sells.
IMO, the company just went from security protection to security risk.
I'm sure that Kaspersky would love to sell the technology for an "Internet Passport" to governments. If that's where their CEO wants to get its cash flow, they can have at it. They don't deserve a cent from the rest of us, either via product sale or via taxes.
If you or your company uses their products, it's time to look for alternative vendors.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Keep pushing the agenda and it will happen stupid governments it's all going to backfire on you.
I don't. I'm saying that if someone were to propose that I give up anonymous speech because the government protects free speech
Actually many people have argued that the first amendment protects anonymous speech remaining anonymous for the very reasons you give.
AccountKiller
We are Anonymous, Resistance is Futile
that's the right answer.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Well it's the same as with "security" software. Most people don't care. The large majority don't know what it is and does. A minority cares and knows that it's a bad idea.
However there's a small, but powerful minority able to convince large parts of the society about something. He only needs to convince them to reach the big market.
Applied to the AV industry it looks like that. Most people don't know that that kind of software is doing. The ones that do understand what it's doing and are slightly into security know that it's mostly snake-oil. However there are a few powerfull people like authors who can be convinced that AV software does anything useful. And those people will act as multipliers for your idea.
On the Internet this looks a bit differently. Here we have ISPs which can simply force any kind of policy onto their users. And those are easily convinced that anonymity is a bad thing. Especially when you tell them that your system also allows billing for content. So he'd only have to convince them to get his system through. As in many places there is no competition on Internet access, the ISPs have little reason to not do that.
That's right, I hope he really pushes his plan as far as he can.
Because I've got a shit-ton of popcorn and a lot of time to kill. This should be a really fukking entertaining train wreck to watch.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
From: Kaspersky Labs
Date: The Future
Governments of the World,
Anonymity on the Internet is a problem. It has been linked to obesity, cancer, global warming, and other really bad things.* That is why Kaspersky Labs is pleased to announce a new product for the citizens of your country: the Internet Passport! No more do you or your citizens have to fear the terrible ills of anonymous Internet browsing. Now, you might be thinking, what will this incredible new technology cost me? For such an important application, a trillion dollars is not an outlandish price. However, given the critical importance of this technology in today's world, Kaspersky Labs is offering it for the low, low price of a billion dollars.** Sign up today and you'll also receive an offer for free antivirus software for you and a million of your citizens!*** Don't let this incredible opportunity pass you by!
Sincerely,
Kasperky Labs Marketing Dept.
* In that the Internet and the various terrible things listed and hinted at have existed together, at some point in their histories.
** Cost of software only; installation, management, and troubleshooting costs extra. Does not include annual per-user Internet passport licensing fees, which will be very high.
*** Contingent on the purchase of Kaspersky Labs antivirus software for the rest of your citizenry.
Your ISP account is the "passport" to the internet.
Sure, you can use a mobile with a contract free SIM to go online, but you're hardly likely to spam or hack the world from a mobile, even if you connect your laptop to it.
The numbers are skewed for one simple reason: in Russia, the very word "democracy" became strongly associated with right-wing "let loose and it'll all work out" approach to the market as practiced by our newly-found "democrats" in early 90s - often guided by financial advisors from U.S. The resulting economic collapse, and the sharp decrease in the quality of life that followed, are therefore often blamed broadly at democracy.
a few people are nostalgic about the days of USSR, when an average person might not have had his freedom of speech and such - which is mostly theoretical even today, anyway - but would have a guaranteed place to live, and a job with a salary that's enough to feed oneself and the family - even if not much was left for the few luxuries that were available.
Simply put, when transition from Soviet-style socialism to Western democracy coincides with very tough times for the population, perceived as directly following from the changes being made, you shouldn't be surprised if the people turn hostile towards those changes.
The First Amendment isn't in there to protect popular speech. It's in there to protect UNPOPULAR speech, so that people who say something that the government or even a large majority of the people CAN say it without being thrown in jail.
As an illustration to this point, here's another political joke of late Soviet period.
A Russian and an American are discussing politics. The American proudly proclaims, "Unlike the USSR, my country has true freedom of speech!"
"What's that?", asks the Russian.
"Well," explains the American, "it means that I could stand right in front of the White House and shout 'Reagan is an asshole!', and no-one would stop me or punish me for that!"
The Russian shrugs. "If that's what it is, then surely we have it too - I can just as well go stand in the middle of Red Square, and shout `Reagan is an asshole!` - and guess what, no-one would stop or punish me either!
We are to earn our money on the market. How to do this, how to work productively if every day we have got tons of messages from "banks" offering us big money, "lotteries" informing of wins? The work-flow is being constantly interrupted.
Let alone attacks on our websites.
It seems that the dissidents in exotic lands use the IP obfuscation software not in a way that it was generally hoped. Because regimes in those parts are not changing a bit, but the volume of spam and malware is only increasing.
Internet should remain anonymous and global, and the same time the fight against malware and spam should get global and also grassroots. Everyone should take part: patching an OS of a relative, installing anti-virus software, updating browsers and other programs, providing consultation on Internet security. There is a lot everyone of us can do.
If we do not do it ourselves, someone may start doing it "on our behalf" with an unpredictable outcome.
How to lose credibility in a day or less.
to be frank, I am tired of kaspersky.
the AV is getting so much slower, lag and lag.
Plus with this comment, i am not sure if kaspersky will be compromising my anonymousity anything for their big plan ahead.
If there are passports, the next natural thing would be the creation of "customs"... A gigantic firewall/nids in each ISP enforced by law, monitoring any incoming and outgoing connection, not necessarily sniffing all the traffic but at least logging the ip addresses. So if you connected to my computer to send a threatening email, an "enforced" ISP could investigate and realize that actually there was a certain IP address making an unsolicited connection to certain IP address, the protocol and the time. Depending on the sophistication level, it could even detect syn scans. Now the question would be how to prevent spoofs, well a spoofing attempt could be detected by your ISP and the upgrades to ipv6 and ipsec would definitely eliminate current spoofing methods, and make it really really hard to make spoofing a practical method in the future.
All I can say is "LOL".
No "In Soviet Russia" jokes?, c'mon isn't that ironic in a Russian / Soviet / Kasperskian article? ;)
Heh, here I go: "In Soviet Russia, passports browse you!"
Remember that? Nagware on every fresh XP install telling you to hand over your details to Microsoft so they can target the ads embedded in their IM client.
This is no different. Windows Shitware Deleter Company here only want to spam you more accurately.
The sad thing about this is that the majority of people who have no clue how anything on the internet works are going to jump on what he says like flies and stink on shit.
Boredom is bliss.
It's also the freethinker's favourite approach to free speech. The US is a prime example - your employer can fire you for anything you say outside of their purview, like a 'blog or an article. What if you work for a company that doesn't support marijuana legalization or gay marriage or the separation of church and state or criticizing the government - because you're either with us, or with the terrorists? Well, clearly you're free to seek another job, you coward!
Some places and some times, maybe. But even the Founding Fathers of the USA found it necessary to use psuedonyms.
The question is how stable is a system that does not allow for anonymity or private conversation? How easy is it for that kind of a system to be misused?
Maybe you should review this List of journalists killed in Russia for a list of folks who could have used the protection of anonymity.
its even more disturbing when someone smart utters stupid shit.
Read radical news here
I'm kind of bummed out I just switched our company to Kaspersky AV, and *might* not have done so if I read this article first. BUT, there's also the problem of finding a Windows corporate anti-virus product that provides a central administration console. That's pretty much a requirement, as far as I'm concerned. Currently, McAfee (our previously used software) has one, as does Symantec (which I greatly dislike as a product and won't consider). Kaspersky does too, and I actually found their central admin. console a little easier to use and less buggy than McAfee's. Additionally, Kaspersky cost us about $750 less than renewing McAfee.
As far as I'm aware, you can't centrally deploy and administer products like Avast or AVG, can you?
Freedom of speech is a great thing, nobody's arguing with that. Just try to look on Kaspersky's statement at a different angle. As I see it, internet passport is meant to be more like a driver's license.
Everything has its price, and so does the freedom. The freedom of riding a bike without getting a license first has its price in accidents involving people who aren't good at riding bikes. Fortunately, those usually aren't serious, so the society prefers to pay that price, allowing everyone to ride a bike at will.
The same reasoning goes for cars. As accidents with cars sometimes turn out to be really ugly, peolple decided that the price for license-free car driving is too high. If you think about it, it would still be a nice thing to be allowed to hit the road after a few of dad's driving lessons instead of the official thing. If only we could give people new bodies after the accidents, I'd vote for license-free driving.
The question really comes to this - are users ready to pay for the anonymity on the net with all the bad things coming out of it, like spam, bullying etc. Kaspersky probably isn't, other people might be.
PS. It's actually funny to see how you folks (not especially WCMI92) are demonizing Mr. Kaspersky because of his soviet/KGB past. Understanding other people is difficult, isn't it? =)
Hey Kaspersky...
FUCK YOU !
Singned,
Anonymous
And he browsed these porn sites yesterday. Then he applied to those jobs. All of which his new potential employers were able to look up through the new "WhatDidYouDoToday" database.
(You also seem to be a bit confused about the bill of rights and the constitution. The limits on government powers apply to state and local governments. It's not a limit of only federal government power).
IANAL but it's a little more complicated than that. In essence certain amendments and constitutional rights are applied to the states, while several are not. This came about through the interpretation of the 14th amendment, and is referred to as incorporation.
Not at all.
Obama has already supported a Chavez puppet, Zelaya, in Honduras who illegall sought another term as President. He was outsted because of it. Obama turned on Honduras and refuses to recognize the election to replace Zelaya...
This makes the current US regime very hostile to Democracy vs dictators...
Corporatism != Free Market
Heh. I read the interview, and no where does he say Why he'd like to end anonymity.
That seems pretty astounding at first, until you realize that if he actually were to give a reason why it might possibly be desirable, people would start poking holes in his logic.
There's no argument here. Pure flamebait.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I really would hate for my interweb identification number to be logged on the servers of websites for which the "clear private data" browser function was invented.
Throw in a link to the government interweb police department, a few unscrupulous government employees taking money for a few database searches and there go all your non-illigal but seriously embarrassing secrets.
The solution is simple , dont' buy kaspersky ever !!!
His business model is also based 100% around the insecurities from Windowws' bad design. He'd go out of business the same day Windows was brought up to Linux or BSD, even assuming Microsoft executives could or would fix the design. So it is no surprise that he throws out this enormous pile of troll bait.
So, one the one hand we have these nasty Middle-Eastern terrorists who are contemptuous of our personal freedoms and want to destroy our democratic way of life, and to have us all living in a totalitarian system of their choosing ...
... who wants to eliminate personal freedoms and implement a more totalitarian state ... in order to save us from the terrorist threat.
... and on the other side we have champions like Kaspersky
We have the threat of Russian criminal gangs who want to take our personal information and milk money from the system, and embed themselves so deeply that they get a cut of everything that happens, without people being able to opt out ...
... And then we have Kaspersky, who wants to be able to take our personal infomation, embed his software so deeply in the networks that it makes money from everybody else's business, and persuade regulators to make the use of these systems has to be made compulsory on public networks.
Hm.
Eric Baird
I already have my account with sprint, so they have my account info, if I am logging unto the web to go look for info on tigers, what the f*ck do YOU need my info for, stop trying to put your incompetence as AV designers aside, and look at the big picture, not everyone needs to be known, especially if they are just using the web for information purposes. What they propose is sort of like a big brother system for the web, and I think we already have too much of that.
Instead, why don't you just worry about coming up with a better way to fight the viruses...and leave the internet for the rest of us.
I remember a speech by Bill Gates some years back at a developer conference, where he said that people had had enough of the chaos of the internet, what they wanted was proper, reliable, source-certified information, and MS was hooking up with major vendors to create a proper, secure, safe replacement that would finally give people what they wanted.
The internet had maybe two or three years left in it, said Bill, after that, everybody would be using Microsoft Network instead. So if we were planning ahead more than a few years, he was kindly giving us the inside dope, that we shouldn't expect the internet to still exist as a major force by then.
This was some time back in the 1990's.
Eric Baird
Yes, and one of the traditional ways that we used to freely exchange those ideas without the fear of reprisals before the internet came along was the "nom de plume".
People invented separate personae for the purposes of their writing. A lot of the great political and religious pamphleteering that helped reform Europe and bring about the French and American revolutions was published under pen-names. Anything vaguely political published by someone working for a country's civil service tended to be under an n-d-p. Hell, even Gulliver's Travels was published without the real author's name on it, so that he wouldn't lose his day job over it. George Orwell's real name wasn't George Orwell. Voltaire's supposed to have had more than 170 different pen-names.
It doesn't always mean that the author is spineless. Sometimes it just means that the author reckons that their work and "author's persona" is good enough to stand up by itself without the reader needing to know the exact details of who created the arguments, and sometimes it means that the writer finds it easier to continue with their work without having to risk being sacked from their mundane job that pays the rent and keeps a roof over their head, because their employer feels that having the name of a controversial writer on their public list of employees, representing the company, is asking for trouble.
If you demand of your employer that they take no notice at all of your extracurricular activities, because those are none of the employer's business ("What I do in my own time is up to me"), then it's sensible to use different identifiers for your work persona and your other activities. If you use the same linkable identifier for both, and your work involves introducing yourself as an employee of the company and giving out your full legal name, then your employer is liable to reckon that if that name is attached to some "cause" that might alienate some of their important customers, they don't want you as an employee.
They can say, "Look, we don't give a damn what you do in your own time as long as it doesn't reflect on us. We don't care what religious or sexual views you hold as long as you leave them behind when you walk through our door in the morning. But if we're promoting you as our named representative, and you're using that same name to promote other things that we don't want to be associated with, then we have a legitimate reason to sack you."
Taking away people's ability to create separate "brands" for their work and personal online activities means that unless people have very understanding employers, they're liable to self-censor pretty much anything they write for fear of upsetting their work situation.
It also means that if an employer knows that ==anything== their employee does online from home is linked to all the employee's other personal details, including their place of work – including what forums they visit and what iffy websites they view, no matter what computer they use to view it – then it means that the employer can argue that it's now their legitimate right to spend more time tracking what their employees are doing out of work hours, since it could impact on their business.
If you can't decouple your work identity from your recreational web use, it means that you no longer have a personal life (for web-related stuff) that's separate from work.
Eric Baird
all this guy wants is some where to point his finger on who was responsible, .. this is crap what about identity theft, .. security is an illusion,
update your system on a regular basis
don't trust email
don't trust websites
only install what you need don't run services you don't know or don't need
these are the most common rules to keep a system safe, being able to identify who is connecting where will not and won't ever contribute to security, .. computers could be abused, .. the only thing this is going to do is create a way to accuse people who might be ignorant to the fact that they are being abused, ..
Security experts/administrators/.. already can contact an ISP and report abuse from specific IP, but they are to lazy to do so, they rather block the IP or even an entire netblock before they contact an ISP, .. would one think this would be any different when it comes to identity, ..
I think that this CEO who claims to be an security expert is as ignorant as the average internet user, .. the only message i can give him is to educate himself before he himself gets infected, because to me this sounds very likely, otherwise he wouldn't make such ignorant claims.
Because anonymity doesn't give you any guarantees of protection either. Hiding behind it gives you a false sense of security... while undercutting your ability to effect change. Susan B. Anthony, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr accomplished so much more than MassSuffragette, NonViolentMahatma, and NegroDreamer ever could have. The Anonymous Coward dies many times before his death; the valiant never tastes of death but once.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It could be worse. At least Kaspersky has dedicated update servers!
You're missing the point... I'm not saying that anything can provide a person with a guarantee of perfect protection. I'm saying that anonymity is a tool which people may choose to use as they see fit as one measure to protect themselves while exercising their right to free speech. Giving up anonymity necessarily exposes people to more risk. It's up to the individual to decide if they want to take on that risk. Gandhi and King were assassinated, many people would prefer not to have to die for their causes if they can avoid it. Whatever outspoken public figures may accomplish, not everyone may aspire to be such a person. And that is OK; that is their right.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!