So I'm supposed to give up anonymity and expose myself to moral and religious fanatics, corrupt governments, incompetent IT departments, inconsistent international law, predatory industry associations, greedy lawyers and whatnot to gain what exactly?
Less spam? Freedom to choose weak passwords for my ebay account? Avoiding a multi hour internet outage once every few years? Allow the military to save money on computer security? Are these the Pearl Harbors and Maginot Lines the article talks about? Exuse me, but were people not dying in the millions during the second world war?
This coalition of computer security "experts" and sensationalist journalists, both with massive vested interests, has been pounding us with this nonsense for decades now. It's boring and stupid and I wish they would just go away and stop threatening my freedom.
Hear Hear, I'm all for anonymity by default, and allowing the user to opt-in for confirmation of identity.
Possibly it might be nice to have a service where you can get your gpg key connected with your person. Then you have the ability to sign electric documents and such naught. I do believe this type of option needs to be a private industry and completely optional.
"Proving identity is likely to remain remarkably difficult in a world where it is trivial to take over someone’s computer from half a world away and operate it as your own. As long as that remains true, building a completely trustable system will remain virtually impossible."
Conversely, complete identification on the Net won't necessarily slow the spread of worms; if you're absolutely certain that you're getting owned by John Smith's computer... you're still getting owned. Even if Microsoft implements extensive forensic logging, at best you could track a worm back to "patient zero" in a dorm room in Whereverstan.
"'In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,' said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, 'because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.'"
It probably is time to rethink the problem of spammers and worms at a more fundamental level.
I'd gladly do everything I currently do without anonymity... if it gave me access to the viewing and up/downloading I need to do... and made sure that the info/sites with which I need to work stayed available.
But when will enough people come to value such access that all the sites/servers I want to talk to get on that same theme and guarantee that they (or their networks) don't get DoS'd, etc.?
Is it maybe time to change laws that currently make it illegal (even for gov. & gov-sanctioned contractors) to intervene in infected/botted machines? We currently require treatment for carriers of resistant TB to roam freely without treatment. Are not the bot-zombies the technological equivalent?
Part of the problem here is that anonymity provides cover for misbehavior (spam, hacking, etc.) The aggregate cost for this is paid for every site that allows free access.
There already exists systems that authenticate known people - credit cards, for example. So it's at least doable. I wish credit card people opened their infrastructure for authentication as well as payment.
I do think this is largely the browser vendor's fault. Create physical tokens (cert on a usb stick, perhaps) and allow people to have real identity on the web (when you want it.)
NYTime does know how to scare people, that's for sure. I guess someone forgot to tell them that you can not have good without bad. You see we are not in heaven and we do not want heaven, perfection is boring, complete safety is boring.
Less spam? Freedom to choose weak passwords for my ebay account? Avoiding a multi hour internet outage once every few years? Allow the military to save money on computer security? Are these the Pearl Harbors and Maginot Lines the article talks about? Exuse me, but were people not dying in the millions during the second world war?
This coalition of computer security "experts" and sensationalist journalists, both with massive vested interests, has been pounding us with this nonsense for decades now. It's boring and stupid and I wish they would just go away and stop threatening my freedom.