internet: The end of the golden age

This had been maybe already published in AO (Could find trace on site)

I'm sure manies know about the excellent wiretrip website whose creator is Rain Forest Puppy (rfp).
[A well known hacker/white hat/grey hat (whatever! u decide!) like Fyodor (nmap).]

He's getting depressed because of the rush of security industries in making money thanks to ppl like him. And he decided to change its behaviour face to the IP community.
(Read this http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/txt/evolution.txt)

ppl like rfp & fyodor make(made) the IP community as a industry free world. But maybe that was an utopia!!! :(

If u read the excellent AO newsletter, and especially the article about SCO/IBM fighting, I sure that u feel like I do:
The internet community is under mutation!!!
And I feel very pessimitics about the result of it.

What do u think? What r u ready to do for fighting and preserving the IP community?

I totaly agree with the artical ...

Security is now a bussines ..exploited by shrude bussinesmen which "sell" security and a false feeling with it most of the time.

Now anybody with a littlebit of computerknowledge is suddenly a security expert and people ...scared by the media ... buy as ike there life depends on it... also firms are oligated of securing there company or they loose valubale bussiness.

In the end I blame the media and our society ...

After all most people are just sheep and follow the big flow... "get secure now befoe it's too late and a malicious hacker steels al your valuable info"... maybe good advice for some people with bussinesses but for ordenairy users ...hmmm.

People start buying products they don't need and are very expensive .. (I mean , you can get firewalls for free and people buy them because they think there otherwise are not safe enough like what you don't pay is not secure)

So in the end ...yes it is the end of a golden age ;)

C.

(sorry for some of the spelling )

It is what it is.

Do the police want all crime to stop? Ostensibly they do. If all crime stopped they would have "won"- but they would also be out of a job.

Business is business and in order to sustain the business there has to be a continued need to fulfill.

A few years back I listened to an audio tape called Dead Doctors Don't Lie. It was from some MLM business selling vitamins or something, but some of the points on the tape made excellent sense.

In a nutshell the guy on the tape was a veteranarian turned doctor. He said that there are many diseases which are completely cured in animals but remain treated rather than cured in humans. Why? Because with livestock the animal is the business. It is not profitable to have sick animals. However, for hospitals sick people are the business so hospitals have a vested interest in having repeat customers.

Information Security has gotten the same way. We need the bad guys. They make us look good. If there aren't bad guys out there getting media attention then the security industry has to hype non-issues to make sure that security stays in the forefront of the media and the CEO's and CFO's and CIO's of major corporations.

Conspiracy theorists have suggested that firms like Network Associates and Symantec who produce antivirus software actually fund underground operations to create new viruses to fuel the need to buy their product. I don't know if I would go so far as to suggest they actively support the creation of viruses, but I don't think they care to eradicate it either. Its not good for business.

If there was no dark, you wouldn't know what light was. If there was no evil, you would have no frame of reference to measure good. So it is in business- if there is no need being fulfilled the business can't justify its own existence and will fade away.

I agree with you both, security is now a very sellable product just like so many other computer issues. Although I am somewhat pleased that more and more people and companies are now seeing security as a real issue and reagardless of whether they buy software or use freeware they are still implementing some amount of security which i think is a good thing (If nothing else it will defeat more and more of the script kiddies).

As to the end of the Golden age, well i`ve been in this a while and I think that the "golden age" as you put it died sometime ago, but its remnants remain and "hackers" are always going to be finding new holes and exploits and as long as some of us out there maintain an inquisitve mind and don`t accept everything we read then things will remian interesting.

I remeber when Prestel was hacked many moons ago, i thought that was about as good as it was going to get, but since then all kinds of crazy things have been done and I don`t see this stopping anytime soon. Yes members of the community will become disgruntled with it all (as I have on many occassions) but there are so many people younger then I who are interested in this field that some of them will hopefully rise up the task.

I agree strongly with the idea that the media has warped this out of all proportion, reports of evil hackers abound who we must secure opurselves against with our $100K firewall installations and expensive anti-virus suites, and there are so many utterly useless security consultants out there that its scarey.

I don't look at this as an end of a golden age but a metureing process. Look security reasearch and programs are reaching a complexity level that a hobbyest has trouble handleing it on there own (open source is the one hope a hobbiest has and that has probelms.). Now that security is the next big thing it will be congested for a while, we will get people looking for a quick buck who are basicly clueless (this happend with the web in general and networking in the 90's), but they will be weeded out by the market.

Quote:

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Originally posted here by R0n1n

As to the end of the Golden age, well i`ve been in this a while and I think that the "golden age" as you put it died sometime ago.

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I'd like to think that's not true!!!

NMAP, Nessus, snort, ... u name it.
The starting point of all these applications is relevant of that is (for me) the IP community:
A school work, a guy that loves code, the guy that want to be famous, ... all sharing their code with the entire community to improve it.
That's the power of *nix!

It seems that open sources world is mutating to close source, because all these sources are now competing with a tough market where money is king.

Internet is one of the last place for unlimited freedom (with its worth and its better). I'd wouldn't like to see it diving into the business blackhole, that's all....