Monday, February 16, 2009

Do We Need a New Internet?

In yesterday's New York Times, John Markoff writes that maybe we need a brand new Internet.  This time with security...  I allude to this article with the sole intent of bringing into perspective, why HomeATM has chosen to take a hardware-based (outside of the browser space) end-to-end encrypted approach to e-transactions.  

Here are some selected quotes:


  • "Bad enough that 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."

  • 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.

  • “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.”

  • Despite a thriving global computer security industry that is projected to reach $79 billion in revenues next year, and the fact that in 2002 Microsoft itself began an intense corporate-wide effort to improve the security of its software, Internet security has continued to deteriorate globally.

  • Even the most heavily garrisoned military networks have proved vulnerable. Last November, the United States military command in charge of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars discovered that its computer networks had been purposely infected with software that may have permitted a devastating espionage attack.

To read the NYT article in it's entirety, click here


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