Selling Lobotomy to the Lobeless

Shorter New York Pravda: Net Neutrality Must End to Protect the Children

...there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there...

My little blog is feeling better by the moment. I'll be getting all the slummers.

...“If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon,” Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently.

The Internet’s original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world’s communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect...

...scientists armed with federal research dollars and working in collaboration with the industry are trying to figure out the best way to start over. At Stanford, where the software protocols for original Internet were designed, researchers are creating a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today’s Internet...

...The Stanford Clean Slate project won’t by itself solve all the main security issues of the Internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace. That alone may provide a deterrent...

Idiots. More backdoors and spygates for the cops really means more hideyholes and entry points for spooks and crooks. It's not going to work any better, it would just make the consumers feel more comfy while they're eating tapeworm eggs to stay slim.

... The Internet’s current design virtually guarantees anonymity to its users. (As a New Yorker cartoon noted some years ago, “On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog.”) But that anonymity is now the most vexing challenge for law enforcement. An Internet attacker can route a connection through many countries to hide his location, which may be from an account in an Internet cafe purchased with a stolen credit card.

“As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego.

A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network...

Of course, licenses never get stolen. Or faked. And people never drive without a license. Why, even the thought of requiring an identification mechanism on the internet would certainly drive all the criminals away.

Right.

The free internet must end to protect those who shouldn't be on it in the first place, one supposes. If you're weak minded enough to buy this.

Nobody brings up the point that most viruses take advantage of back doors written into operating systems so the producers (that would usually be Microsoft working for its own profit and the NSA) can snoop on your business. Don't believe it? Then you obviously don't own an older Mac, which is pretty much impervious to all of these issues.

Lacking the backdoors into your hard drive does the trick. Not creating more for the good of the Empire.