Anti-Virus creator frustrated by ‘net anonymity
When asked about the real problem with the internet Eugene Kaspersky had this to say:
“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.
Kaspersky, creator of the leading anti-virus software company in Russia, Kaspersky Lab, is quoting as saying in a ZDnet interview, found here and it has left this blogger speechless.
You expect to hear this sort of drivel from politicians, people who have never touched a computer, and people who just like to anger the internet by poking it with idle threats, but not from one of the largest anti-virus software companies in the world and certainly not from someone who was visionary enough to streamline his product for Windows 95 when other competitors felt no need to- thereby giving him the edge over the Russian market, according to ZDNet
He is right about one thing, the internet was developed out of the the U.S. Government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, not to be confused with DARPA), and was originally called the ARPANET. But by his logic we should give up memory foam because it was invented by NASA through space exploration and not “properly” distributed to the public. Just out of curiosity, what is the proper way to “give” something like the internet to the public, Mr. Kaspersky? I think he forgets that while the government provided the backbone and initial concept and working model of the internet, it was the world, end-users, other goverments, businesses, corporations, and criminals, etc who actually fleshed out, evolved and made the internet what it is today. It is a far cry from the ARPANET, my friend.
To control the internet would be to destroy it at it’s nature and what it is is due to freedom, not regulation and yet he is quoted as saying this:
I’d like to change the design of the Internet by introducing regulation–Internet passports, Internet Police and international agreement–about following Internet standards.\
Is it not true that if you love something, you should let it go? Maybe you and the internet have had your run and it’s time to break up, because clearly you don’t know each other anymore. I bet you don’t even talk over breakfast, like strangers in your own router.
Of course there’s always the George Orwell 1984 bit, government monitoring and thought-control, conspiracy theories and generalized fear which I would wholeheartedly subscribe to. If I had to register and get an internet license as Kaspersky suggests, I think that I would probably simply quit using the internet. And his hardline policy toward nations who may not be keen on the idea:
…if some countries don’t agree with or don’t pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off.
How do you really stop a country from accessing the internet? Ask nicely? Go there and physically cut the communications lines?
If this were attempted, methinks another, free internet would most likely just crop up and gain in popularity, the same way freeware crops when companies charge too much for software, or regulate software too much. It would also create an entire new generation of underground users, hackers, crackers, and people who simply become outlaws like in the old American west. I daresay that it would cause an open digital revolt that would be the downfall of whatever ruling body was trying to govern it… It would certainly do nothing good whatsoever.
In the end, something like this never would or could come to pass, it’s absolute madness even to suggest, Mr. Kaspersky is simply too easy to pick on.
Perhaps best put by The Register:
…to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who sacrifice net liberty for incremental increases in security no doubt will get neither.
lol.
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In some ways, we already DO have internet identities, and we have had these for a very long time: your IP address. This little bit of information is the only thing that can correlate physical people to “handles” or personas on-line. It’s how police is able to mark people in the real world to a sex-predator alias on a chat-board, or how hackers get marked by trying to breach Pentagon security.
But this also has its faults and workarounds. As a member of the IT community, I am all too aware of the hacks and vulnerabilities of masquerading your IP(re-directing, web-hopping, “ghosting”, “spoofing”, etc). It is too simple and ineffective to rely on a 1:1 map between users and on-line aliases.
I guess we are somewhere in between having complete IDs / passports on-line and 100% anonymity.
A couple of comments about your article, though:
“If I had to register and get an internet license as Kaspersky suggests, I think that I would probably simply quit using the internet.”
Kudos to you for suggesting this, but I would say: give it a week. I don’t mean take some time to re-think your position, this is more of a challenge: try going one whole week without using the internet. No surfing the internet, no instant messaging, no twitter, no iPhone apps (surprise! Cell phones access satellites which use the internet – so cell phones are out as well). It’s a lot more of a challenge in our society today to stay “un-connected”, and still remain currant and functioning in the world. Maybe not so for stay-at-home moms, retirees, or college students … in my industry, however, its almost essential to stay in instant contact with anyone.
“How do you really stop a country from accessing the internet? Ask nicely? Go there and physically cut the communications lines?”
Just ask China …
“If this were attempted, methinks another, free internet would most likely just crop up and gain in popularity, the same way freeware crops when companies charge too much for software, or regulate software too much.”
I was just looking over last month’s Linux Journal, when the last article of the magazine suggested exactly this same thing: a user-owned-and-operated internet. Sounds Sexy, but would never work in practice. For the most part – to put it bluntly – the majority of users are just too in-experienced and un-equipped to be able to make it all work. Its part of the same reason why, even though the Linux Operating-system is 100% FREE (and modifiable!) to its users, it is still being dwarfed by the usership percentages of the costly (and fully regulated and un-modifiable) versions of Windows and OS-X.