FEEDING THE FRENZY (Autumn, 2003)
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This summer has seen a virtual plethora of nonsensical threats on the net. It's
easy from our perspective to laugh at the utter stupidity of so much of it. But
oftentimes in our holier than thou smugness, we fail to realize that the
absurdity has become the reality.

Such change always occurs gradually. Were it to happen all at once, it would be
a lot easier to see the faults. When people have a chance to get used to
changes and, more importantly, when people begin to forget what it was like
before the changes, the reality landscape change is complete. It's essential to
recognize this, even if it seems to be impossible to change it.

What happens online frequently mirrors events in "real life." And on the
Internet, we're being encouraged to become paranoid about our safety, hostile
to outsiders, and dependent on things we really don't need to survive. And if
we're not careful, we'll soon forget just how ridiculous this is.

The Summer of 2003 will be remembered as the summer of worms and viruses, where
names like "LoveSan" and "Blaster" became synonymous with online terrorism. The
net became clogged, commerce was affected (the claims of billions of lost
dollars quickly became accepted as undisputed fact), and our very way of life
was once again being threatened.

So instead of dealing with the fact that we've become hooked on operating
systems with large security holes that any idiot with a basic knowledge of
programming can exploit, we handle it as if it were some sort of "cyberwar"
complete with enemy combatants, spies, and a terrified populace. It's a
not-so-distant cousin of the Y2K hysteria when many became convinced that the
world would be plunged into anarchy when the calendar changed. In such cases we
need to remember some rational thoughts: Don't become entirely dependent on any
single system because failures and flaws are inevitable; Keep regular backups;
Put the whole picture into perspective and realize that an occasional glitch in
your e-mail or a temporary outage for amazon.com is simply one of the growing
pains of the net, not the end of the world; Always have a different way of
achieving the same ends so that if a piece of software or hardware becomes
unreliable, you won't be completely stuck. This latter point can apply to
individual applications or entire networks - even the concept of bypassing
computers and networks altogether should that become necessary.

When a massive power outage hit some major cities in the United States in
August, speculation quickly pointed to hackers possibly being somehow
responsible. The mere suggestion that computers involved in keeping the nation
s electrical grid online could be affected by an errant piece of e-mail on the
public Internet seems, once again, absurd. Yet it seems to be growing ever
closer to reality. This gap in logic is possibly the easiest way to achieve
this world of eternal crisis that so many in the media, government, and
populace seem to crave.

But before we get to the stage where a denial of service attack by some idiot
somewhere causes the lights to go out in a major city or a surge of
pornographic spam clogs the life support systems in hospitals, we ought to
change our way of dealing with these issues. If a critical system is
vulnerable, covering up that fact is every bit as bad as attacking it. We don't
advocate the crippling of any system or network, critical or non. We're
certainly not in favor of imprisoning people who do something stupid and simple
without thinking  as if they did something requiring detailed planning with a
clear intent of malice. What we do support is the full disclosure of any wide
open security holes that could result in either a royal pain in the ass for
people trying to surf the web or something a bit more life threatening. Such
disclosure needs to be encouraged and even rewarded. It's clear there's a lot
we're not being told and that there are many in power who would like to keep it
that way.