[NetBehaviour] The depressing future of the Internet

[marc garrett]

The depressing future of the Internet

Posted by Zack Whittaker.

A brief overview of how the Internet came about: some years ago, some 
military boffs thought it'd be awesome if computers could talk to each 
other, so the US could nuke the hell out of other countries without 
actually being near there. A smart professor from England then came up 
with an idea to plug on top of the original idea, to make text and 
pictures appear on a screen. Some years passed, some boring developments 
and company takeovers, and now we have the Internet.

Since then, crime has moved from the streets of our major cities to our 
houses, criminal masterminds (usually plain idiots actually) started 
stealing credit/debit card details from people, students started 
creating viruses to infect other people's computers - why, I still can't 
work out; child sex offenders used the web to cause even more ongoing 
pain and suffering for children and their families, emails sent out 
without direction promoting Viagra to anyone and everyone, and finally, 
people trying to attack the very heart(s) of the infrastructure to bring 
the whole thing crumbling down.

Over the last few weeks, there's been new research done which could 
manipulate the primary-core DNS servers, so hackers could take you from 
what you thought was www.google.com to www.somebadsite.com instead. 
Thankfully I don't think it's been put into practise yet, but it's still 
a major, if not the most major flaw/security hole to face the web today. 
Whatever you want to call it - it's really bloody bad.

more...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=433