Wednesday, August 6, 2008

iPatriot Act

Lawrence Lessig warns of a "i-9/11 event" (which doesn't mean an Al Qaeda event, just a catastrophe on the internet that has the scale of the 9/11 terrorist attacks) during Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference. This event, suggests Lessig, is what the government is waiting for in order to push through Congress an already drafted "iPartiot Act" to regulate the internet.

Today, CNN reports that there's a major security flaw in the way that the internet operates. The security flaw tricks a computer into visiting a phony dupilcate of a legitimate site, which could be used for various nefarious purposes. One such scam has already taken place:

[C]riminals have pulled off at least one successful attack, directing some AT&T Inc. Internet customers in Texas to a fake Google site. The phony page was accompanied by three programs that automatically clicked on ads, with the profits for those clicks flowing back to the hackers.
Could this "i-9/11" be just around the corner? I fear what an "iPatriot Act" might do to the model of free-flowing information that drives the internet.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey big brother is already watching everything the Quantico line is real they've been monitoring everyone before 9/11 and Verizon helped em build it.

David said...

I started to leave a comment about you possibly being in trouble for even posting this story, but then realized it wasn't funny...

David said...

Oh, by the way, I happened to find your site from the CNN site, after clicking on the blogs, etc. section in the article. Guess you are now famous.

illegal youth said...

David,

That's interesting, heh. I would've never thought CNN would link to my little corner of the net here.

Thanks for the comment!