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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Dr Andy Farnell at The Cyber Show [cybershow.uk] writes about the effects of the "splinternet" and division in standards in general [cybershow.uk] on overall computing security [wustl.edu]. He sees the Internet, as it was less than ten years ago, as an ideal, but one which has been intentionally divided and made captive. While governments talk out of one side of their mouth about cybersecurity they are rushing breathlessly to actually make systems and services less secure or outright insecure.

What I fear we are now seeing is a fault line between informed, professional computer users with access to knowledge and secure computer software - a breed educated in the 1970s who are slowly dying out - and a separate low-grade "consumer" group for whom digital mastery, security, privacy and autonomy have been completely surrendered.

The latter have no expectation of security or correctness. They've grown up in a world where the high ideals of computing that my generation held, ideas that launched the Voyager probe to go into deep space using 1970's technology, are gone.

They will be used as farm animals, as products by companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft. For them, warm feelings, conformance and assurances of safety and correctness, albeit false but comforting, are the only real offering, and there will be apparently "no alternatives".

These victims are becoming ever-less aware of how their cybersecurity is being taken from them, as data theft, manipulation, lock-in, price fixing, lost opportunity and so on. If security were a currency, we're amidst the greatest invisible transfer of wealth to the powerful in human history.

In lieu of actual security, several whole industries have sprung up around ensuring and maintaining computer insecurity. On the technical side of things it's maybe time for more of us to (re-)read the late Ross Anderson's Security Engineering [cam.ac.uk], third edition. However, as Dr Farnell reminds us, most of these problems have non-technical origins and thus non-technical solutions.

Previously:
(2024) Windows Co-Pilot "Recall" Feature Privacy Nightmare [soylentnews.org]
(2024) Reasons for Manual Image Editing over Generative AI [soylentnews.org]
(2019) Chapters of Security Engineering, Third Edition, Begin to Arrive Online for Review [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission