Re: O/T Ummm...am I being paranoid again?

Several people wrote stuff that have edited out.

They still own their words and the personalities involved are not
interesting to me.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10320096-38.html
Oh please. Will you frickin read the damn thing and understand
what it says? The bill gives the President the authority to shut
down internet connections within the US Government offices only.
Not the entire US.

From the article above come the words:

which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary
control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity
emergency.

What do you reckon those words mean?

I was listening to a bit on NPR a couple of weeks ago about the
future of the Internet, what it might look like, etc. They mentioned
that one idea to prevent against thumb-drive viruses (which the
Russians have already implemented and hit Pentagon thumb-drives on
the secure network),

I don't think the thumb-drive thing involved networks at all--it involved scattering drives around the parking lot so people could take them inside, read them (while the malware did its thing) to see who owned them.

for instance, would be to have a secured,
classified government "Web" that is essentially barricaded from the
rest of the Web (that is, there is absolutely NEVER any connection
between computers on GovWeb and the unwashed WWW). It seems to me
like this is a no-brainer, and I'm surprised it wasn't implemented a
long time ago.

The problem is--where do you draw the boundaries between vendors, ordering agencies, collaborators, etc etc etc?


As for major defense companies and agencies, perhaps they would want to have at least a mirror site on a segregated network of their own, in case their public site would come under attack, or if classified information needed to be stored for GovWeb-only access.

Again, "interoperability" is an import part of the usefulness of networks.

Frankly, while we're at it, there probably also needs to be a secured
commerce Web, for banking transactions, credit card transmissions, auto registration renewals, etc. Again, the computers on this
network never come in contact with the unwashed Web.

Where do the orders and transactions initiators come from?

Of course,
there would have to be a firewall at some point, as the average user
still needs to be able to access these sites at some point, via the
dirty Web.

And firewalls are error-free? I don't think so.

Of course, the even more pressing issue is how easy it is for a
single hacker or three to totally and indefinitely screw up the
electric power transmission system in large portions of the country.
That to me deserves more attention than even the Internet, but we're
too busy laughing our a$$es off fudging economic numbers by seizing
perfectly useful engines, and calculating how many points Grandpa has
to have before we consider letting him live. (Sorry for the rant,
but this administration has been pulling some stupid $hit, and
playing fast and loose with the futures of my yet-unborn children and
grandchildren).

All of this presumes that you know why the president wants to silence everybody.

I worry that the motivations migh have been demonstrated in Tienanmen Square a while back. Or Reston Virginia a few days ago.

It will be interesting to see how the Internet evolves over the next decade. There are many elements of it that still seem to resemble
the Wild West, for better or worse.

I prefer to hope for a Free West, actually.

The salvation here is that it might not be possible to do what the President and his czars what to do.



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of System Administrators:
Ex turpi causa non oritur actio Infallibility, and the ability to
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