I have what many of you will consider to be bad news: The only way to stop unsolicited commercial e-mail and the viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other scourges of the Internet will be to get a new one. A new Internet, that is. Oh, and while we're at it, we'll need new computers and operating systems, too.
We'll also have to learn the difference between privacy and anonymity. Repeat after me: Privacy good, anonymity bad. That doesn't mean it should be easy for someone else to read your e-mail. It's just that we should be able to trace things like viruses and spam back to their original senders. People should know that bad deeds on the Internet will eventually catch up to them, just as in real life.
| What
you can do now The best we can do, while we wait for more systemic solutions to spam and viruses, is make sure we have defensive software--such as SpamKiller and ZoneAlarm--installed. |
Unfortunately, the only people who seem to agree with my privacy vs. anonymity argument are the John Ashcrofts of the world, whose support I barely welcome.
I have another trick up my sleeve: For-pay e-mail. One of the tragedies of spam and e-mail generating worms is that they eat bandwidth that someone else is paying for. Requiring some sort of a payment to be included with each e-mail sent might make spamming uneconomical and would certainly make spammers subject to theft charges for sending unpaid e-mail.
There have even been suggestions that senders should pay recipients to read their commercial messages. I don't relish a world in which a person becomes known by their specific dollar value (cents and fractional cents, more likely) to e-mail advertisers. I mean, talk about profiling. But I could see this as a way for people to provide money for their favourite causes: Sure, I'll read your ad, just send a dime to my animal shelter or the Red Cross.
While it is tragic that we can't count on others to behave respectfully and responsibly, the changes taking place on the Internet only mirror what has already happened in the real world.
Over the past decade the Internet has grown from being a friendly small town where everyone left their doors unlocked and the keys in their cars into being a global cesspool where you have to assume the people you run into are just as likely to hurt you as to be your friend--more likely, actually, based on the kinds of spam I receive and some of the people I meet online.
The people who built the Internet were idealists who, if they imagined their network might someday change the world, certainly didn't design it with that in mind. Sure, the Internet might be able to survive a nuclear attack by rerouting itself. But it still hasn't handled bogus Nigerian government officials seeking cash and willing, sometimes, to kill if they don't get it.
One of the wonderful things about the Internet--well, it was wonderful 20 years ago when I started using it--was how people trusted one another. Not only people but also the machines they controlled. It was just assumed that the Internet wouldn't be used for anything worse than an occasional prank.
That was during a time when one's Internet access was tied to one's status as a student or employee. Screw up too badly and you'd be expelled or fired
All this really changed the day people with AOL e-mail addresses started showing up, and it's gone downhill as the entire world has gained anonymous access to a system that was never designed to fight off a determined attack.
That's not to ignore the people who work hard to solve the Internet's problems. But they are also hampered by people connecting using hardware--PCs mostly--that isn't inherently secure.
After considerable thought over the years, I've come to the conclusion that we'll need a new hardware and software architecture if we're to retake the Internet and turn it back into a safe neighbourhood. Microsoft is already on this mission. But I'm concerned that the company's forthcoming "secure" OS, and the hardware required to run it--scheduled for 2005 or so--will only meet business needs.
At the same time that we need more trustworthy networks and computers, we also need them to be dramatically easier to use, something I don't see Microsoft addressing.
The privacy/anonymity and paid e-mail issues are related to how Internet traffic is authenticated and secured--both technical issues. How we deal with people who circumvent these is an international politico-legal issue.
I used to tell people that I believed we'd end up with national routers serving as points of entry and "immigration control" for foreign data. While I haven't spoken much about this lately, it's a thought I return to again and again. Just as we control--or try to control--our physical borders, likewise we must protect our national network frontiers as well.
Like I said, this is bad news for people--including myself--who'd like the Internet to return to the way it used to be, back when people used to volunteer their time to do the wiring for Internet trade shows and conferences. But as the Internet has grown up, it has necessarily become more like the world in which it exists. This makes it important for those of us who care about the Internet to find new and better ways to protect it.
What do you think? How should we get rid of spam and viruses? Should we abandon online anonymity to do so? Let us know at edit@zdnet.com.au.
It may sound simplistc,but: Stop using M$ & install Linux or BSD. Both are much more stable, more secure and are FREE !!!!
Ulitmately tho, the law relating to the EULA, has to be scrapped & rewritten so that software companies cannot sell poorly written software without accepting responsibility for it's product.When the responsibility for a failure of its product, becomes enforcable in law, the companies involved will build a better mousetrap !!! Until then nothing will change and more power will be handed to the companies who generate the problem by virtue of their monopoly.