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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."
Dear Eugene,
Go fuck yourself.
Sincerely,
Anonymous.
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!
They can call it the Kaspersky Guardian Bureau.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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