New Breed

Golden Age



Remember when choosing a new ISP was all about who could provide the cheapest and fastest connection? Even a small town could usually field 15-20 different ISPs with different value added services and additional offerings. Because of the relatively slow connections in those times, we often experienced the web much more as a sea of text information than the multimedia rich experience we find ourselves with today, yet information was available equal to all. I mean, we all knew that no ISP would dare interfere with our right to all the content and services the Internet had to offer us and why would they want to?



Isn't it a sad statement of the times we live in that it is becoming quite common for alleged "Internet Service Providers" to block/modify/remove/replace content for their own nefarious purposes without even so much as a by your leave or even a simple statement of intent? These content providers, for that is what they really are the moment they decided to dictate which traffic I can send and receive through my connection. And yet, where is the outrage, where the frustration from the outraged users, decrying the behind the scenes big brother acts of their providers?



America and others continue to allow their service providers greater and greater leeway in the name of "security" and "property rights". Make no mistake, I believe in the benefits of security, at a host, network, state, national and global level. As someone involved in IT security, I am in complete agreement that any entity, organization or individual should be allowed to protect their OWN systems from threats. The problem begins when said organization/individual takes it upon themselves to protect others without their knowledge. To me this is completely analagous to the idea of someone writing a self propogating Love Letter style trojan that is intended to crack vulnerable systems and then fix the vulnerability, before moving on to infect yet further hosts. Inevitably, the benefits of this action would be overwhelmed by the negative impact on hosts/networks around the world, especially once someone else takes that benevelant software and modifies it so that instead of fixing the vulnerability, it creates/modifies/destroys other components of the system.



Let me put it to you all in a different manner. How would you feel if your phone service provider decided that to protect you from scam artists and criminals, it would block any instance of the words "buy, sell, land, stock" from any phone conversation running on your line, without any prior notification to you? Or to take it one step further, what if the provider privately and without any customer notifications decided that since a great many phone scams originate from the 818 (one of the larger Southern California area codes), they will no longer allow any calls to or from that area code? Oh, your parents live in So. Cal? Unfortunate, but we're looking after your best interests, whether you like it or not.



I challenge everyone to think about the real world implications of these issues. Freedoms form the underpinnings of any society, and just like the supports of the Golden Gate bridge, removing a freedom makes our society that much weaker. Who knows which one will be the final blow that causes the bridge to collapse? I hope and pray that our children don't look back on this time as the Good Old Days when we still enjoyed some amount of personal freedom, and every day I fear that this is exactly the path on which we are headed.



Z