Speaking of Al Gore...

Back when Gore promoted use of what would become the Internet, I don't know that people conceived that it could all bog down and become sticky, hazardous goo that requires more than one square of toilet paper to clean up.

But I digress.

Back to the topic at hand:

November’s Wired magazine (14.11) contains a lengthy and interesting article about cybercrime, botnets and DDos attacks (Distributed Denial of Service). We are all familiar with email spam and its yearly increase despite the proliferation and increasing intelligence of anti-spamware and bayesian filters. According to many pundits, 60-70% of all email traffic world wide is spam, increasing by 10% a year. So by the year 2010, email will cease to become a viable method of communication. Theoretically. It’s not that simple of course.

Now spam is the benevolent side of cybercrime....

Of course, we might just ignore the problem and bring on the Internet Luddite Inversion. Once ecommerce becomes insecure, and email too spammy and time-wasting and web sites inundated with banal comments and meaningless social tagging, we might just abandon it altogether. We survived without it once. Perhaps the future is one where the young and hip adopt the old ways of cash, snail-mail and libraries and its cool and socially acceptable to be Offline. That would leave the sleazy, back-alley black marketeers to ply the internet freely. Picture it: Illegal drug deals conducted online on sophisticated Ajax-enabled web sites with computerized packing and shipping, whilst teenagers trade textbooks for cash on the street.

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