Criminals controlling millions of personal computers are threatening
> the internet's future, experts have warned. Up to a quarter of
> computers on the net may be used by cyber criminals in so-called
> botnets, said Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet.
What is frustrating to me, as an end user, is that none of the many articles on this subject say anything about stopping the "botnets". How does a computer become that way? Who owns such computers? What is being done to notify or discipline the owners of such unprotected computers? Why are there so many of them?
What is being done to prosecute the criminals who exploit these things? For example, it appears money fraud uses credit cards, not cash. Such items are trackable, even to foreign countries. If some foreign bank isn't cooperating, simply cut them off from the rest of the banking world. That'll bring them into compliance real fast. U.S. credit card companies and banks could be doing more control checks as well, but perhaps they don't want to discourage business.
Despite all that, the net is still working, which is pretty amazing.
> "It's pretty resilient," noted Vint Cerf
Perhaps because people have been brainwashed to spend far more money than necessary for high horsepower equipment to handle all the crap. The computer industry is just like the auto industry with its planned obsolescence model years: this year's model has so many new hot exciting features your last year's computer is old and shabby!
But its members were unsure about feasible solutions, even though they
> identified operating systems and authentication as key issues.
Bull----! If they can develop fancy protocols that cross connect everything from giant mainframes to handheld music boxes, they can come with security solutions.
It was still too easy for net criminals to hide their tracks, several
> panel members said, although they acknowledged that it was probably
> not desirable that every individual was definitively identifiable.
> "Anonymity has its value, and it has its risk," said Jonathan
> Zittrain, professor for internet governance at the University of > Oxford.
This is hypocritical nonsense. Grow up. The 1960s are long gone. Yes, personal privacy is a big problem. But requiring true authetification on computer networks will ease identity theft and fraud, which are big problems.
But already pirated copies of Vista were circulating in China, even
> though the consumer launch of Vista has only been a few days ago.
> Experience showed that about 50% of all pirated Windows programs came
> with Trojans pre-installed on them, Mr Markoff said.
Nothing about what lay consumers can do and should do to protect themselves. The techies live in a world unto their own and don't want to share it (nothing new there, the techies 30 years ago were just as obnoxious). When a lay person asks a techie a question, the reply is a stream of acronyms and buzzwords that mean nothing.
When I was in college I had a comp sci prof who deducted points for every buzzword used in a paper. Standard English was required. Hard specifics, not vague promises, were required. Too bad more teachers weren't like that.
Mr. Toure said that whatever the solution, the fight against botnets was
> a "war" that could only be won if all parties -- regulators, governments,
> telecoms firms, computer users and hardware and software makers -- worked > together.
But all of those people have their own selfish agendas, sadly. The computer makers want to sell more and powerful computers to make more profit. The telecoms don't want any restrictions or tracking to disrupt their profits or make their job harder. The governments want to track things outside of computer security (i.e. drug runners, tax cheats). The tech users want to safeguard their priviledged world where people must pay dearly for their services. The end users are too lazy to learn and use even basic computer concepts and technology; they want everything fully automated.
[public replies, please]
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Its everyone with their own agenda which has created most of the problems we see these days with the tons of spam and truckloads of bots ruining things. And most system admins are far too busy to examine every piece of outgoing mail to try and detirmine any (spam) patterns prevalant in them. That is, if the system admins even care. Many of them do not. In the 1980's and early 1990's, system admins were always known as generally good guys. We could _trust_ them ... not so any longer, regretably. PAT]