1/12/2005

A Note On Computer Security & Changes To This Site

I am considering moving this site to one of my personal servers. If so, that move would be next week. The main change would be the URL, but I will continue to use blogger/blogspot for the foreseeable future.

While I'm on that note, I'd like to say a thing or two about the Internet and security. Before I became a lawyer, or even went to law school, I worked for almost 10 years in the computer industry. I owned a domain name in 1992, and was building computer networks well before the Internet revolution.

Back in those days, viruses were much more malicious. They would wipe out your hard drive. But like biological viruses, the ones that kill off the host organism too quickly do not get a chance to propagate. But today, the literally scores of programs that run without your knowledge on your computer diminish the power of your computer and suck internet bandwidth, thereby raising the cost. Yesterday's Internet Explorer vulnerbaility was the last straw for me, and I switched to Mozilla.

I was hopeful that anti-spam legislation would be almost as effective as the do not call list was for telephones; it has not been. Therefore, I'm even more doubtful that any legislative action against "spyware" will solve the problem either.

It's up to the software makers. They'd better act, because as I see it, the Internet is broken.