The internet and the social media sites have become a place where you should never share photos of your kids, your travel plans, your address. If you think about social media and what they are trying to do, connect us, those are very typical of the things one would want to share. They are also the same things that sexual predators, identity thieves, and burglars want to know about us. That contradiction is one of the roots of the problem. As the police officer is quoted as saying, “What you say can and will be used against you. ”
The internet was once a very congenial place, one that seemed very safe, like the place immortalized in the Music Man, where the biggest danger was the chance that someone might introduce a pool hall. As John Levine points out, the internet was born of such places: the Arpanet where everyone was a student or a researcher and the worst we did was play Adventure or talk to Eliza, the business LAN where we were mainly worried if we could get our TPS reports done, or the community bulletin board where we could share free software and our latest clever hacks to make something work. All of those were small communities where any miscreants could easily be spotted and exiled.
However, the internet grew because it was easy to leverage those small groups and join them together. As an entrepreneur I recall when joining Usenet required buying just a Telebit modem, or when AOL users became a mass influx onto the internet, or Starbucks first gave away wifi access with coffee. Those events precipitated a tragedy of the commons--an analogy to how the Pilgrims overused their shared pastures (known as commons) and ruined them in the process. We found ways to over utilize the shared internet resource until it has become almost useless for everyone, like the other day when someone was unsuccessfully attempting to use the wifi at the gym to broadcast his daughter’s ballet lesson over Skype and made it impossible for the rest of us to even get our email, because the bandwidth wasn’t there.
Still, the internet is a major part of enabling the global economy and making the world a smaller place. It helped drive the cost of distributing software to zero, which drove the price of software itself to zero. Not the cost of writing the software, that is still expensive, but the amount one could sell the resulting software for. That is not something we could or would actually want to reverse, at least not as consumers. It is really nice that I can get updates of my software from major vendors automatically and with no extra cost. This globally connected, hard-to-charge-above-cost world is here to stay.
There was an interesting side-effect of that revolution though. Just as one could download a new version of flash to display ever more complicated animated web pages, one could also (accidentally) download malware such as viruses, Trojans, and phishing software. Every silver lining came with a corresponding cloud.
The malware evolved with the network. The first malware spread on floppy disks when that was how hobbyists shared software. As email and the web became dominant, we got email messages that tried to get us to sites that were fake copies of our favorite banks. Now, we get tweets that suggest some sites where we need to download some new viewer software, which is actually a virus that install bots on our PC’s which then watch twitter pages to know what nefarious deeds their masters want them to commit.
What does that mean to us end-users? (That's in the next section.)
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