Earlier this month, Brett Wentworth took Level 3 Communications Inc. into territory that most rivals have been reluctant to enter. The director of global security at the largest carrier of Internet traffic cut off data from reaching a group of servers in China that his company believed was involved in an active hacking attack.
The Broomfield, Colo., company handles roughly 40% of internet traffic and is taking an aggressive—and some say risky approach—to battling criminal activity. Risky because hackers often hijack legitimate machines to do their dirty work, raising the risk of collateral damage by sidelining a business using the same group of servers. Such tactics also run against a widely held belief that large carriers should be facilitating traffic, not halting it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TLA on Tuesday June 02 2015, @12:47PM
is this the death of the world wide web, where information is collated in a non-linear fashion in such a way that you can find whatever you want at random and any time of the day or night, to be replaced with linear "programming" (they call it that for a reason - it's entirely shaped and controlled to manipulate your mind) a la terrestrial broadcast television? Isn't that a step backwards?
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Tuesday June 02 2015, @01:49PM
In the DS9 episode "Past Tense", written in 1994, and set in 2024, one of the characters was a rich mogul, and ran "Channel 90" on "The Net".
I always thought how dated that episode was. As we move backwards to linear programming, I now realise that it may well turn out to be accurate.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday June 02 2015, @03:38PM
Only in the sense of what we believe the www should have been.
Your question, however, brings up an interesting thing I've been mulling around. The www and web browsers are but a small slice of the potential of the Internet. There is nothing to stop any of us from making new protocols and sticking that on the Internet. One day, we could be using a foo browser to look at things on the world wide foo and it doesn't have be built using the house-of-cards programming languages that the www uses. It wouldn't be easy, but it is possible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday June 02 2015, @09:08PM
Relying on http servers and clients is damn sensitive setup. I think the time is long overdue for a reliable P2P solution. That should eliminate some of the most obvious DoS, "nice server you got there" and infrastructure failure issues.