RSS
Twitter
How Would You Save The Internet?
from the choices,-choices,-choices... dept
CIO is taking the assumption that all the various security, malware, spam, etc. issues are leading to the eventual collapse of the internet, and asking what big ideas should be implemented to save the internet. Some of the ideas people come up with seem rather pointless (have the government hire an InfoSecurity General), though some are interesting (start a "virtual big dig" where a better internet is created in parallel). With every idea listed in the article it's not hard to come up with plenty of reasons why it won't work. None of them seem all that practical. Some of the just seem silly, such as saying that any machine that access the internet can't be programmable. Only licensed programmers would be allowed to touch machines that would program -- which, of course, sounds like a recipe for rapidly killing off most software innovation. If anything, it's a bit worrisome that the best answers to security issues all seem pretty weak themselves. It certainly sounds like there's a long way to go before this problem is really dealt with -- so we'll just have to believe the internet is going to be able to survive the onslaught.
Reader Comments (rss)
(Flattened / Threaded)
The Anti-Information Revolution
While people in the computer field celebrate the liberation of information, people in the health care field have been celebrating the opposite. It used to be easy for medical researchers to comb through the medical records of patients at hospitals or health insurance companies in order to e.g. find people with a rare disease, interview their families, and track their progress. The new HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability And Accountability) guidelines severely restrict the freedom of researchers to do so; they have to find such patients on their own accord, and then get the consent of one family member at a time.
If a researcher wanted to find better ways to treat female bladder infections, he could just discreetly go through the records in the urology clinic and contact patients by mail, to find out if they want to participate in a study. Now he has to be at the clinic and ask the women in person... good luck with that.
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Self serving
Gee, a publication geared to CIO's who love articles that will help them sell new projects... assumes that the Internet won't survive if we don't do something. No surprise there.
Minus government interference, the free market will usually drive solutions that are proportional to the problem. Current problems are still mostly a nuisance. If problems started prompting people to abandon the net in large numbers, a lot more ISPs would offer combo modem/firewalls to broadband customers and free software firewall/anti-spyware software to all customers. Microsoft's nod to give away their spyware solution is a prime example of this. MS finally saw security as a threat to the bottom line, and is acting... though too little too late for almost everyone's liking.
As for the 'net infrastructure, the base technology was engineered to survive destruction of entire cities that hosted parts of the network. As long as there is money in it, companies will be able to keep it running despite uninformed users, and poor and malicious software. Sheesh!
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
No Subject Given
To save the internet, stop software patents and overreaching copyright laws (DMCA etc).
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Re: No Subject Given
Agreed. I think the governmental/legal involvement is nothing short of clueless, the vast majority of the time.
Net.Life was good back in 1995 or so: Usenet worked (well, it still does, but people are so disparaging about it compared to phpBB-clone websites, pah!); there was no DMCA, in fact, there was no lack of sense of proportion about copyright as compared to any other crime one could choose to commit. The problems lie when you try to take a DIY/a-political system such as the 'Net as a whole (by which I do *not* mean just the bloomin' Web!) and make it exist in a world with political boundaries.
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
How to save the Internet:
Immediately arrest the CEOs of 5,000 top companies in the U.S. that use the Internet as an integral part of their business. Summarily execute them on national television.
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Add Your Comment