- Internet
- The dark side of the Internet: Attacks, costs and responses Available at: http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/the-dark-side-of-the-internet-attacks-costs-and-responses-SaqSoGfsuq
- The Internet and Web technologies have originally been developed assuming an ideal world where all users are honorable; however, the dark side has emerged and bedeviled the world.
- What are the bright and dark sides of Internet?
According to the Internet Society, Internet has the capability to improve the livelihood of people, communities, organizations and communities. This dream can be achieved by employing a collaborative approach involving partners, Chapters and individual contributors. A collaborative approach can come up with policies that sustain an open and accessible internet environment capable of delivering a platform for innovation, creativity, interaction and economic prosperity.
According to the society, Internet can improve the lives of people by focusing on infrastructure for delivery, user experience and costs. With the infrastructure, the way internet is delivered matters alone. For instance, if the infrastructure that is accessible for local communities, towns, villages and communities is developed, Internet will be a great utility. The infrastructure involves everything from the way cities is built to finer features such as computers, modems, telephone lines, networking hardware and other supporting type of materials.
An internet difficult to use is not productive. There is a need to improve the user experience to make it simplified and favorable to everyone regardless of their language, social status, physical abilities, metal status and age. It means that users can access applications that run on the Internet such as the www and derive the same experience irrespective of their satiations.
Finally, the costs of internet are instrumental to its availability and delivery. The ability to access the internet has economic facets. The cost of infrastructure, services and equipment all determines the level of access among communities, individuals and social groups.
The Internet is the foundation of innovation in a dynamic world with unparalleled challenges. There are increased demands for energy, ageing populations, and changing global economy. Technology has played a major role in developing solutions to suit these problems. With dedicated efforts from government, business and communities, decision makers have been empowered to reaching beyond the normal and shaping new ideas and innovations. Internet is a unique capability in which technology is founded on. Together with policies, networking, communication and partnerships, lead decision makers in government, private and social society sector get to explore possibilities.They then build awareness around them upon which the world’s greatest challenges can be solved. The society envisions a world where Internet will form a huge framework for people in all walks of life.It will improve their quality of life in a standardized manner using technologies, business functions, government policies and open and universal access framework.
There is increased innovation and growth facilitated by Internet. Internet is highly sustainable, facilitating continued growth while meeting new and emerging challenges. There have been numerous questions raised over the sustainability of Internet. The first was the growth of the World Wide Web followed by the growth in video. Today’s concerns lie in the growth of mobile broadband access in developing countries. These two case studies illustrate these concerns. First, there was a catastrophic collapse foreseen in 1995 by Bob Metcalfe after the launch of the first commercial web browser. According to Bob, the internet was to collapse by 1996, and if that did not happen, he promised “he would eat his words.” The second was the extra flood commencing in 2007 as a series of industry experts mulled over the ability of Interne to keep pace with expanding traffic originating from primary sites such as YouTube. The term exaflood was invented by one Bret Swanson and was used for the first time in 2007 in the Wall Street Journal editorial.
As of today, the collapse never happened and as a matter of fact; the internet has continued to support increased traffic. The internet, as of today, is capable of carrying increased videos, whether home-made or high definition content and even live broadcasts. YouTube, for instance, streamed live video of 2012 World Olympics to US and other African and Asian countries. The estimated number of streams was 231 million with half a million streams being simultaneous. The predicted collapse was avoided through a number of technologies, innovations and investments.
Internet sustainability is possible currently or in the future. The history of the internet presents numerous examples of emerging technologies and applications that can be quickly adopted by users and providers to lead to a repeated cycle of growth and innovation. July 2012 marked the 20th anniversary of the debut instance of known photograph uploading to the www framework by Sir Tim Berners Lee 18 years after. The picture was uploaded to a picture sharing site Instagram and by 2010; the pictures were in the magnitude of 1 billion uploaded by 50 million users. It demonstrates the magnitude of innovation taking place in areas of video, pictures, music and websites.
Similarly, comparison can be drawn from the time internet was being invented and the recent times. At the time, Internet was solely through dial-up connections, and the backbone of networking was T1 connections. Most of the users were located in the United States at the time. Shortly after, new websites were created which significantly demanded internet access leading to speculations of an imminent collapse. The shift of web content to multimedia form involving video expanded the demand for internet and further deepened the speculations about Internet capability to cope with it.
Rather than a collapse, the new demands paved the way for an anew technological innovation. There emerged an overlapping response in the form of advanced technology, investment, innovation. Developed countries responded to past challenges by developing new concepts that facilitated the unfolding of new, better and promising trends. In general, the new demands have been countered by increasing their capacity or innovatively finding ways of reducing the required capacities. It has been achieved in the following three ways: new core technologies have emerged that have expanded existing network capacity deployments making new investments more efficient. Second, investments made to existing networks with supporting technology were found to meet the demands. The scalability of the networks implies that the increased network capacities can be sustained. Because the source of content such as video is always static, it can be stored in more than one location, significantly reducing the cost of delivering the content to end users. According to Cisco, 98%v of consumer traffic is made of data, video, web pages, and files.
In order to convey this traffic from the source to the end user, significant capacity is required which will ultimately lead to congestion. However, the emergence of Internet Exchange Points where ISPs and enterprises get to find servers and caches for exchanging traffic among themselves reduces costs of sharing at low latency. The significant investments that have been made to improve internet infrastructure include submarine cables connecting coastal countries and continents, terrestrial fibers, traffic exchange frameworks, last mile access. Finally, innovations and development of new technologies and business models facilitate distribution of content to numerous users and locations so that it is cheap to deliver to end users.
Internet has unparalleled bright sides for anyone willing to utilize it. The enormous amounts of information, as well as communication frameworks, present the most outstanding tool in various dimensions in human life. According to , internet has revolutionized major segments of human life. It has become a great tool to cut the hassles of banking offering and reducing transaction times, improved shopping and creating a way to order and buy a commodity. This is done without being physically present at the store, created job opportunities and added a pool of knowledge to educators and students. All this processes were tedious, time-consuming and costly without it. The electronic libraries located in universities and educational; facilities are utilized by those within it and those miles away thanks to the internet. The availability of programs, websites, and other services delivered over the internet has made life far much better. The greatest characteristic about internet is the exponential growth and the evolution that makes it easy to use and transform people’s lives every day. The specific areas where internet has derived immense value include trade- where internet is utilized to save precious time. It is said that time is money, and today’s needs and demands makes time a limited resource. Internet in its offering has made storage of materials, calculation of almost everything and retrieval of information instant. Without the internet, some professions such as web designing, computer maintenance and repair, programming and others would be unheard of. Almost every company in the recent age requires a website to communicate effectively with its stakeholder. The website requires professionals to build, deploy and manage it. There is a great deal of job opportunities created by using this framework. It is especially beneficial for special interest groups such as disables, housewives and others who can work from home.
Privacy is not only restricted to email communication. The proliferation of Smartphone’s has introduced many privacy issues on individual data. Smartphone is a persona device with two in one integrated device; a cell phone and personal computers. It has the capability to track and share locations as they are used. American law enforcement appetite for personal information has increased than never before and investigators requests for more than 1 million phone records from mobile carriers yearly. Thus, information includes text messages and location metrics. Though the courts are salvaging residents by requiting warrants to be issued before such information can be divulges, there is still contrasting regulations. The Supreme Court ruled out that it was against the constitution to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect car to determine its location. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the Fourth Amendment protect email, but it emerged that law enforcement agencies are obtaining numerous information from carriers concerning suspects without their authorization. It will continue until Congress enact a law that applies to 21st century society.
Similarly, surveillance backdoors on the Internet are an issue. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) mandates that telephone and VoIP networks should have backdoors to permit law enforcement agencies to wiretap access when there is a need to do so. Currently, FBI requires the same law to be expanded to affect the Internet so that applications and internet services can have similar back doors. Apparently, internet surveillance can play a crucial role in solving crime issues of national interest but presents a dark side for cherished freedoms and increased innovation. CALEA mandates will dramatically increase government surveillance at an instance where wiretapping is going beyond the roof. Human right activists are employing peer-to-peer communication to resist surveillance, and this would create vulnerability issues for those who will leverage the backdoor to launch malicious attacks and abuse sensitive information. There is also the risk of stifling innovation where all apps will have to be designed in a manner that is wiretap-proof. It will lead to untenable costs for companies and businesses.
The other two issues highlighted by include the FCC open internet safeguards and a dangerous broad computer crime law. The stakes for the former are empowered ISPs who will dictate what is offered on the Internet framework. Traditionally, this is a bad move since internet has enabled upstarts to launch their applications without the need to gain authorization from any network operator. FCC rules will facilitate ISP to be new kingmakers who will dictate websites, content and services.
For the later, CFAA is a dangerous law that will see to it that actions such as simply lying about age on social media platforms or websites will be judged as a federal crime. There have emerged debates on what constitutes a computer crime and how the crimes should be punished. The ability to connect freely over the internet without fear of being targeted by an overzealous prosecutor and eventual decades of imprisonment for innovative activities or hiding identity is a real issue in this century. This way, internet will be a tool of discrimination rather than a facilitator of livelihoods because of the repressive laws such as CFAA.
According to IGCSE internet, has billions of web pages containing varied information some of which are fantastic while some are not good. The fact that the internet is not regulated means that anyone can create web content whether legitimate or not. Internet has been used to spread much false information which has damaged individuals, families, society and the community as a whole. There are thousands of web pages with diverse viewpoints, biased or inaccurate content. Internet has been used to conduct all manner of illegal and socially unaccepted activities such as child pornography, illegal trade, money laundering and other sorts of vices. During the era when internet was not known, these activities were not rampant as they are today. It is also a concern that most of the information on the internet and www are not accurate and reliable. To some extent, this has affected thinking and creativity of researchers, students and teachers. Inaccurate, highly offensive and illegal material is on the public domain and without proper filtering mechanism; the psychological and emotional development of users especially children exposed to them is affected. The site portrays the security of data transferred over the web as of great concern. Online shopping and online banking can lead to theft of information and financial losses if sufficient encryption techniques are not utilized. Phishing, pharming and mail spam are all the resultant consequences of internet, and many people’s lives are affected every day by it.
According to D-Lib Magazine, the development of internet from a research tool to a commercialized model for profit making has introduced two challenges. First, the profit-driven model has challenged the original netiquette that effectively ruled it during the research era. Questions are emerging as to whether the customs used in that era should constitute a legal rule in the commercial era. Traditionally, when it was a research site, internet was built for the purpose of allowing hypertext capabilities where a single hyperlink could connect to another to create a research network. However, times have changed, and the commercial context have prompted some website owners to content that before using a hyperlink, the linking site should look for permission from the website it wants to link to. The legal perspective of this interpretation should be referenced to the netiquette of linking websites. In a recent case illustrating this controversy, Ticketmaster Corp sued Microsoft for linking its site without permission. In the case Ticketmaster Corp. v. Microsoft Corp, Ticketmaster argued that in a business perspective, the act of linking deep within its site rather than its homepage lead to diversion of advertising revenue that it could have gained. Though it is an economic and trademark issue rather than copyright, there are emerging issues with respect to applicable internet laws.
In conclusion, Internet presents bright and dark sides. Though it is argued that the bright sides far outweigh the dark sides, more deliberations and considerations should be made, and appropriate policies drafted to manage it. The benefits are unparalleled, and while humans are enjoying the fruits, privacy issues emerge to be the leading challenges.
References
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IGCSE. (2014). IGCSE ICT. Retrieved from Internet use issues: http://www.igcseict.info/theory/6/internet/
Kende, M. (2012). How the Internet continues to sustain growth and innovation. AnalysisMason.
O'Rourke, M. A. (1998, April). Legal Issues on the Internet: Hyperlinking and Framing. Retrieved from D-Lib Magazine: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april98/04orourke.html
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