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Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet:
Opinion The tech sector is failing at cybersecurity. Global spending on the stuff is at $190 billion a year, a quarter of the US defense budget. That hasn't stemmed an estimated $7 trillion in annual cybercriminal damages. People are fond of saying that the Wild West days of the internet are over, but on those numbers an 1875 Dodge City bank vault looks like Fort Knox.
So where's the sheriff? There are plenty of posses; no end of companies both small and large selling security by the bushel. Firewalls, scanners, heuristic, intrinsic, behavioral, managed, managerial, in-cloud, on-prem, you can mix and match the buzzwords and buy into every new idea. What you can't do is make your systems safe.
If you do want a safe bet in cybersecurity, it's that things aren't going to change any time soon without some fundamental shift in how the market works – if 40 years of constant failure can be called working.
We have so little reason to trust what's on offer or those offering it. Several stories last week show this: Apple, which makes a big play of intrinsic platform security, is heading to court for ignoring user consent and silently gathering app data anyway. Microsoft, even as it announces the extension of its security platform into Linux, reveals it fumbled its switches on its service infrastructure and took business-critical access away from its customers. These are the big shots in town, but they can't shoot straight.
It's almost as if we can't rely on the private sector to protect us against crime. Guess what: we never could and we never will. The state has to take on that role – usually late, usually badly, and usually against the wishes of those who like their crimes kept in the private sector, but usually to better effect than the alternatives.
Public governance and policing of cybercrime is a mixed bag. After a decade or so of mischief, most legislatures got around in the 1990s to defining and outlawing computer misuse by unauthorized parties. If you get caught, there's at least a book to throw at you. It's the catching that's the problem.
State agencies concentrate on areas where IT is used to further more traditional crimes – drugs, extortion, organized theft and international money laundering, all those fun things. Less so the cybercrime that depends on the characteristic ability of the internet to let small groups operate at scale to commit data-centric badness and move on quickly from target to target. Effective policing here needs to replicate what works in the physical world: inhabit the places where the crimes take place, work with the consent of the general population, and become proficient with the tools, thought processes, and human networks of the criminals.
Would you trust the police – by extension, the state – with your data, personal or corporate? Bit of a problem there, especially with so many governments constantly banging on about forcing open encryption standards whether you like it or not. Yet that's the accommodation we've reached with the state over hundreds of years of postal services and old school telecommunications. We even consent to the massive increase in our legal vulnerability surface that comes when we buy a car.
[...] Criminality didn't end when the Wild West got its rule of law, and we never get the police we really want, just those we can put up with. We know we can't put up with cybersecurity that demands a defense budget-sized investment in return for a global crimewave. We need a better sheriff: let's draw up the job description.
(Score: 0, Spam) by crafoo on Tuesday February 07, @12:06PM (3 children)
Yeah that's what we need: 300,000 DMV workers (and all the administration that goes with that) providing cyber-security and enforcement payed with printed money, hopes, and dreams.
We can't even repair our physical infrastructure. Our quantifiable, objective educations scores are falling fast.
Do we really need to artificially force privacy and security into the internet using a bottomless budget of inflation-money? Privacy and security are two properties diametrically opposed to the very concept of the internet. Just because your inbred jew overlords only understand personal interaction and business through a very narrow, exploitive, neurotic lens doesn't mean that's the only way to utilize the internet. It doesn't mean the internet must become cable news + hot tub streams + gay grooming porn.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday February 08, @11:49PM (2 children)
It's amazing to me how many noisy people on the internet think they're just one sales pitch away from their porn habits dramatically changing.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 09, @01:32AM (1 child)
The strongest bit of evidence that people don't and can't change their sexual orientation is that 98+% of women are straight or bisexual, despite how men have historically treated us. If "hurr hurr the queers are recruiting" every single woman on the face of the earth would be a lesbian. I am beginning to think I actually got lucky...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday February 09, @01:56AM
On another note: The reason I believe sexual orientation doesn't change is because of how categorized porn sites are. You know how guys are known for always being on the prowl for someone new? But guys aren't known for expanding their tastes/fetishes just so they'd have more new porn available? Eh, maybe I'm wrong about that. But I'll offer this at the risk of giving away too much- I can't make myself interested in feet. It's like looking at my keyboard and trying to motivate myself to consider it tasty. There's just no connection there and I cannot imagine that being changed by characters in a TV show.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday February 07, @12:16PM (6 children)
At least if it's impossible to apprehend them.
So we know that the culprit for the ID theft is in Generistan. Great. Call the police in Generistan and get laughed out the call. Please call again when you have some REAL crimes to report, we're dealing with people murdering and pillaging, and he's calling about someone ordering crap from Amazon with a stolen credit card. Cute.
Yes, you can get the kids that play foul that live around town. They aren't the ones that cause the damages here. The damage is caused by criminals that hide in countries where they know they won't have to face a reasonable chance for prosecution. Mostly because the state gets a cut of the deal. Or in some cases it's even likely that the state IS the criminal, stealing from what they consider an "unfriendly nation".
Before you try to get "more laws", solve that problem first. If you can't execute the laws you have, you don't need stricter ones. Because even if you threaten the death penalty for portscanning, it means jack shit when the person doing it is impossible to get a hold of.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Tuesday February 07, @12:24PM (5 children)
Criminalising things within your own jurisdiction gives you a ground to balkanize the Internet. Many regimes, to a greater or lesser extent, control/filter/block the Internet traffic within their own jurisdiction, and at its borders. The freedom to send traffic to and from anywhere with little to no scrutiny may well be seen as an historical anomaly in the not too distant future.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday February 07, @02:27PM (3 children)
But we are not talking about outlawing content here, this is about something that already IS illegal in most jurisdictions: Stealing.
And concerning sending something from and to everywhere: That cat is out of the bag. Yes, it might be possible to disallow this for many, but stopping those that know how to do it will be virtually impossible, unless you plan to implement North Korean restrictions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 08, @12:54AM (2 children)
That's like saying that border control is impossible because there will always be those who manage to pass the border illegally, and you'll never be able to completely prevent that. Or saying that crime investigation is impossible because there will always be criminals that can't be found.
The point is: To work, a measure doesn't need to be 100% effective. It suffices if for the vast majority of people the expected cost of circumvention is larger than the expected benefit.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday February 08, @09:52AM
And that's exactly what does NOT happen. For the vast majority of people (more accurately, for the vast majority of criminals), it has zero impact.
It's like living in a really bad neighborhood and issuing really strict laws for your own apartment. Sure, nobody in your apartment will steal anything from the apartment, you're safe from your roommates. But generally, they are not exactly the problem, are they?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 11, @05:10AM
But it needs to be effective enough. This reminds me of a California trial I was a juror for. The judge asked a set of questions to every prospective juror to weed out those with overly strong feelings for and against the police. One of the questions was whether the prospective juror had been a victim of a crime. They went through about 70 people to build that jury and quite a few people had answered that they had been victims of petty crime.
With my poor recollection, I would guess around 10 interviewees mentioned such crimes, mostly car break-ins with a couple of burglaries and a mugging. Only one criminal was ever caught by the police. That was the mugging where someone had been brandishing a firearm. I guess that bit of violence was enough to get the police interested. Apparently, the guy cleaned up nice in court and the victim couldn't identify them (and was honest enough to state so). Several of the rest, the police didn't even bother investigating the crime. All the narratives except that one had a depressing familiarity: "Were you ever the victim of a crime?" "My car was broken into once." "Was anyone ever apprehended for the crime?" "No."
Imagine if those odds reflected the real odds of getting caught (which honestly I think were even lower, some of the people had multiple cases of such crimes where no one was caught) - 1 in 10 that the police catch you and even then you might get off. Will that provide a disincentive to commit crime? Only to people who never would commit the crime in the first place.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Tuesday February 07, @08:17PM
The question tends to be where the crime is committed. Is it where the victim is or where the thief is. Or possibly where the servers it company are located.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Rich on Tuesday February 07, @01:08PM (5 children)
We got another piece of news here recently about impending regulations for a safer internet, and both may (*) be part of a campaign to achieve the opposite. Assuming we'd get regulation, how would it look? Would it say "you need a system with binaries reproducible from available sources, you keep your software reasonably close to the base of that system rather than piling up containers of virtual machines full of proprietary crap --- and you NEVER EVER phone home?". Or would it say "You need to have proof of purchase of a certified anti-virus program and you need to be registered with a cloud service that does remote DRM-attestation of your installed system."?
See? There's your corruption (**). Government wouldn't even have to regulate anything. They'd just have to write tenders that they want the (properly) safe stuff from now on, and that it has to be purchaseable from public outlets, and with 10 years of spare part supply.
(*) "twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action" (attributed to Patton)
(**) paraphrasing Clarke "Any sufficiently advanced corruption is indistinguishable from legal lobbying."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday February 07, @02:02PM
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday February 07, @04:57PM (3 children)
I'd like a citation for that second footnote, as I intend to start requoting it.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rich on Tuesday February 07, @05:39PM (2 children)
Heh. I just made it up. You can cite the post where it first appears in. Turns out, it's rather popular to make variations of that third law (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws#Variants_of_the_third_law [wikipedia.org] ). But I wasn't sure which way round to put corruption and lobbying. Both work. ;)
Another language quip: I was of course implying that people would start to buy the publicly available government equipment too, if just because they're fed up with ink prices. In Germany, this gear would be "amtlich" ("government official"), which is slightly amusing, because musicians in Germany already (ab)use that word for really solid or proven gear (e.g. a genuine SM57 as amp mike would be "amtlich"), and the meaning would finally make sense. :)
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday February 07, @06:33PM
Ahh Hewlett-Packard, the solution to [printertechs.com] and cause of [newsweek.com] printer longevity concerns.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07, @08:42PM
> In Germany, this gear would be "amtlich" ("government official")
Years ago I spent some time with a commercial sound reinforcement company--they did installations in big theaters and also had a rental system for rock concerts. From memory, it was agreed that "Mil Spec" wasn't good enough for touring bands and instead they needed something even more robust. That might have been called rock & roll spec, or maybe roadie spec?
For example, speaker cabinets with bumped-out metal corners screwed on were OK, but didn't last all that long. When the cabinets were first wrapped with fiberglass cloth, soaked with boat building epoxy (slightly flexible for impact resistance) and then had metal corners screwed on...then they would last a reasonable time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07, @05:11PM
s/t
(Score: 5, Insightful) by istartedi on Tuesday February 07, @07:14PM
Trust is holding back a safer Internet like physics is holding back safer driving.
Every car is a multi-ton piece of hurtling metal driven by an amateur. Every packet on the Internet is a postcard.
Driving is inherently dangerous. The Internet is inherently insecure.
Even if you're the best driver in the world, some idiot can still slide in to you. Even if all your traffic is encrypted, your activity can still be profiled.
I can see your license plate. I can see your IP.
I know when you leave the house. I know what sites you're hitting and when.
Want zero risk of crashing? Stay in. Want 100% Internet security? Stay off.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07, @11:08PM (21 children)
All the corruption is closer than most will admit...
The same old cliches still hold up:
The love of money (power) is the root, babe.. it's still part of our biological heritage
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 08, @12:58AM (20 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08, @05:36AM (19 children)
Silly goose.. The system is people!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 08, @01:26PM (18 children)
Just like a brick wall is dirt? When you ignore the details (such as the structure and dynamics of a society and government), then the world must look quite mysterious. I'll just note that blaming generic "people" won't give you insight into what went wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08, @08:02PM (17 children)
All built and maintained by people. The world does not look mysterious at all. You, along with most everybody here, are just in denial of the part you play. You see "mystery" where there is only clarity. You ignore your sameness, such is the human ego.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 08, @11:26PM (16 children)
Think about what that means. Every society is built and maintained. But outcomes aren't the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09, @03:44AM (15 children)
Yes they are. You are witness to it, and still remain in denial. Differences are measured in degree
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 09, @05:38AM (14 children)
In other words, outcomes aren't the same!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09, @07:47PM (13 children)
Yes they are! It's just a matter of time. The outcome is always the same. Stop making excuses, accept responsibility for what you do
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 09, @09:35PM (12 children)
Now we've gone beyond faith-based argument to the absolutely silly. Here's a car analogy.
A used car salesman is trying sell you a genuine wreck. You can't even push it off the lot because it's completely stripped. They pulled the tires and rims. And his sell story? The same model and year of this used car that actually works will break down in a decade, 50 years tops. So you might as well buy this. Are you going to buy this pile of junk for a hundred times what it's worth?
I can hear the whining already. That's just the stupidity talking. It's an analogy. It doesn't have to be a perfect rendition in order for us to see the utter folly of your argument. A society doesn't need to be perfect until the heat death of the universe in order to be a better deal.
Here, the huge thing missing here is that any complex system like the internet or modern human societies is not just people. It's people and infrastructure. Without that we're just helpless apes in a tree, just waiting for a neighboring tribe with the slightest organization and mediocre stick skills to chase us off.
The concept of corruption doesn't even make sense without the reference frame of cooperative infrastructure!
So anyway, the TL;DR of this thread is that while we can't make a perfect system for all time, we can make a good enough system for us today. It's time to think about what works. Not complain that people aren't angels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10, @03:41AM (11 children)
Yes, your dribble is "TL;..." You totally refuse to accept your own responsibility for the people (sheriff) you elect. You're just trying to pass blame on ethereal bullshit. Your attempt to rationalize is noted...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 10, @05:01AM (10 children)
This garbage again?
First, mileposts have moved. We're no longer talking about bad humans. Instead we've moved on to khallow as punching bag for everything wrong in the world. Well, khallow just isn't interested. Second, no I'm not going to take this hypothetical responsibility for people I never voted for. Elections have a process for how they work. I did my duty and bad things happened anyway. *Shrug*
Moving on:
"Etheral bullshit"? Would that happen to be fake bullshit? I think it does. Because I don't even have to "try". Nobody cares about your fake bullshit, your phony blame game, or your immature nihilism. Give it up and grow a brain.
Can't say I didn't try to give you a clue. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Your rejection of reason and thought is not my problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10, @04:41PM (9 children)
Only by you, in the effort to distract from the header that says, "Takes a better people to elect a better sheriff", in direct response to the summary. It's very straight up, but apparently not to people who deny the part they play. Didn't know you were so sensitive, a subconscious feeling of guilt, perhaps? You shouldn't suppress those things
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 11, @12:41AM (8 children)
Even here, you implicitly acknowledge what you refuse to explicitly acknowledge. A sheriff is infrastructure as are elections. And you can't even get that far without cultural infrastructure.
And similarly, you've already implicitly acknowledged that all societies aren't equally corrupt (or whatever negative attribute you think you're talking about), when you protested "Differences are measured in degree". Corruption is measured in degree. The health of a society is measured in degree. Freedom is measured in degree.
Finally, there's a complete lack of reason to care about your arguments. We have no idea what you think a better people or a better sheriff would be. You willfully ignore differences between societies and such indicating that something is at play other than the quality of the people. When I brought up the obvious ways we get better sheriffs: better infrastructure, we got your silly narratives of denial and such. Some societies are way less corrupt than others, and often that difference has lasted for generations (for example, Switzerland versus Turkey). If the people aren't any better (and well, why would they be), then what caused that?
Basically, you've just provided an original sin argument without the possibility of salvation. There's no more reason I could be responsible for that than I can be responsible for gravity or thermodynamics. It's an initial condition you claim we can't do anything about because we're not this magic better people. Yet another reason your argument is worthless.
Once again, if your utopia requires better people, then you're doing it wrong. Create the infrastructure not whine stupidly about how mean people are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11, @05:19AM (7 children)
You go through a lot of effort to say absolutely nothing. You are simply in denial of your responsibility for the choices you make. You like to blame "systems" and "infrastructure" for your own failures, like those religious wackos that say, "It's god's will", or make some other excuse. Don't look to me for absolution. Like it or not, deny all you want, you are the system. You are responsible for how it functions
I am not making an "argument", I am merely stating a fundamental fact. Not my fault if that offends you personally
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 11, @05:34AM (6 children)
I said quite a bit. Your ignorance is not my content.
The obvious rebuttal is that you have zero knowledge of my choices nor have you made even the slightest effort to fix that. Thus, your criticism was clearly made without even the slightest consideration of or relevance to the choices I made.
In other words, you're another idiot on the internet. We get that. What bugs me here is the huge number of people who can't think for themselves or construct even a rudimentary moral/ethical argument, but they're so sure everyone else is bad. Well, get that huge beam out of your own eyes first before you start bitching about the mote in mine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11, @07:37PM (5 children)
Go see a psychiatrist, clearly you are nuts..
See? You just proved it. You're talking about your own self
If you want a better sheriff, you (collectively) merely have to vote for one, and/or more carefully vote for the people that appoint them. Either way it's up to you, not some wispy "system". Time to stop making excuses
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 12, @01:43AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12, @03:38AM (3 children)
There is nothing else to add. Everything is quite simple. You are just in denial of the self evident.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 12, @05:57AM (2 children)
I quite agree. You've been adding nothing to this conversation the whole time.
Like your inability to grasp the concept of infrastructure?
That you are an idiot? No, I'm not denying that in the least.
What I find weird about all this is that you're not the first internet gunslinger to babble about "self-evident" things that you can't even describe coherently. There's a bit of the self-evident argument in philosophy such as the "I think therefore I am" or "the basis of economics is human choice", but I see no evidence you've ever heard of those guys much less are aping them.
So where does this narrative come from? Someone publish a book recently? I hope you didn't pay much for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12, @11:16PM (1 child)
There you go again, blaming your demon "infrastructure" instead of accepting responsibility for your choices. "Always somebody else's fault"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 13, @03:52AM
I'm not interested in blame or imaginary demons. I'm interested in fixing things. You can't begin to understand how to fix problems like corruption or a poorly functioning society, if you don't understand the huge role infrastructure plays in that (here, legal, economic, and cultural). Your posts throughout this thread underline that statement! You talk about how simple everything is while both implicitly acknowledging the very role infrastructure plays and being completely helpless at solving the problems you complain about.