JOURNAL: Connectivity and Security

Let's put connectivity into perspective: how many times in your life, before the Internet connected you to the world, were you confronted by people intent on defrauding you of your net worth? For me, that is a couple a dozen times at most (and mostly from venture capitalists and investment bankers, ;->). Since then, we all are approached via our e-mail inbox and through the Web by frauds at least a couple of times a day. Phishing, catapulted by bot networks, worms, spam, keylogging, malware, and other technologies has enabled men from Nigeria, Russia and other garden spots to reach into your home and place of work without restriction. Who provides the bulk of your personal security relative to these threats? You do, with the help of leverage provided corporate software companies. The future is here already, don't look to the government for solutions...

Comments

[NuSapiens]

The connectivity brought by the Internet seems similar to the country-city transition. Personally, I react to phishers and spammers as much as I react to bums on a city street: that is, I barely notice them. The human mind seems very adept at distinguishing signal from noise, with a little practice.

I've heard stories about country folk first coming to a big city, and feeling overwhelmed by the noise, smells, people, and sights. The same thing seems common with older people unfamiliar with the Internet, who often have trouble distinguishing the "content" on a web page from ads and other irrelevant information.

[Cardenio]

My father just started using the net ( which is about as amazing as Godzilla using a toothbrush, but that aside ) and I tired to warn him about how ' you'll come into contact with things and people that you never would in ' real life '

What espically got me a few times when I started using the net was that you can ' run into ' people who are really genuinely insane. Like " ought to be locked up " insane ( and may be locked up in fact and they're getting onto the net from the facillity or prison library or something )

People you'd never ever run across, or you might encounter just once are all ' out there ' on the net. I've seen talk about adding a ' second layer ' to the net to act like a buffer, but it might slow things down a litte and they didn't want to do that because they want to make it as quick possilbe for you to buy something.

I guess it's something Al Gore didn't think of. Everything'll be different when Google becomes sentient or whatever's supposed to happen. Wish they'd hurry up with that.

[TM Lutas]

When crimes are committed, government rightly has a role. I believe that the role of government, especially strong governments in 4GW is in providing a ceiling past which global guerillas cannot progress. As long as the GGs are kept from using the full scope of individually empowering tools by government actions but the good guys are not limited by the government ceiling, we have a bright future ahead of us.

[daCascadian]

Cardenio >"...People you'd never ever run across, or you might encounter just once are all ' out there ' on the net. I've seen talk about adding a ' second layer ' to the net to act like a buffer..."

Back before the net opened up to the public (and on BBSystems) there were always ways to filter out "the crazies"

They were called "kill files", "twit bits", "twit filters" etc & were built into the systems one used to communicate

Net news readers still have such but not blogs or other related tools because the larger system has grown too fast for the technical side to keep up

Think about the "arms race" in the world of spam detection/prevention

It will come

"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[Anon]

A massive part of the problem of online fraud is the assinine and criminal attempt by governments at centralising and controlling identity. This makes individuals unecessarily vulnerable to attack: when this is realised by the _canille_ they will demand the return of sovereignty over their identities with the concomitant diminishing of power and necessity for governments.

[Duncan Kinder]

The situation is more complex than this.

Consider the case of Yugoslavia, of Rawanda, or of the Ukraine in WWII, where people who had been neighbors all their lives suddenly turn upon and kill one another.

For that matter, consider a woman walking on a sidewalk in front of a construction project. The howls and whistles she hears are, essentially, a confrontation with "people intent on defrauding [her] of [her] net worth?".