Internet
security
It is no longer safe to assume that any wifi
connection is entirely private. We all now rely on the hidden machineries of
software engineering in our everyday lives, and just how complex these
complexities are. No one entirely understands the systems that we all now take
for granted. Even the anti-virus systems that many users
hope will protect them can be turned inside out.
The devices which most users do not even notice
are connected to the net. It is estimated that there will be 21bn things
connected to the internet by 2020, from baby monitors and door locks to cars
and fridges. Billions of these are unprotected and will remain that way.
But this kind of technological failure should
not blind us to the real dangers of the digital world, which are social and
political. Plundering of personal information by criminals should be prevented. Such
hacks might be regarded as the outcome of technical wizardry, but are dependent
on human shortcomings in recognising and fixing security flaws.
Complexity certainly causes vulnerability. But
more importantly, so does stupidity. The majority of publicly known security
breaches are due to pervasive failures of diligence, care, and common sense on
the part of management, not due to overwhelming complexity.
Fridges need internet, so that when you stand
in the supermarket to buy your groceries and wonder: do I still have this or
that in the fridge or not? You can simply get your phone out and ask your
fridge. Toilets should have wifi, too, so they can remind you that you need to
buy toilet paper on the way home.
The Canadians, Kiwis, Aussies, Brits, led by
the Yanks, force themselves upon technology companies to introduce backdoors
and vulnerabilities that they can exploit. They have introduced weak random
number generators (very important for encryption), paid companies to implement
backdoors, and had them re-architect systems to improve their surveillance.
It appears that Apple and Microsoft have
already distributed software updates that reduces or eliminates the risk this
WiFi problem presents. Google may well have done or be about to do likewise.
However Android users are at the mercy of their handset makers and may be more
vulnerable if they have to wait for an update.
By using the routers inbuilt mac address
capabilities, you can add another layer of security by using a mac address
whitelist. This will make it harder for someone to gain access to your network.
What we need to do is rebuild the internet from
scratch. It should just be an Indian internet, totally incompatible with
foreign systems such as Russian and North Korean systems to avoid hacking and
spreading fake news.
Read "Future Crimes" by Marc Goodman.
The risks to personal as well as national security are laid out in detail. When
you've read that then read "Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel
Suarez. These books say “When our homes are full of wifi gadgets we will be
even more hackable and under protected than we are at present........At present
there are no back up systems to protect against attacks on e.g. our national
power grid, police IT systems, NHS systems etc etc etc.” Will this be the
future of war?
One danger is that smartphones have face
recognition software. Every time someone takes a picture or films a person this
software will search for certain facial charateristics. For spying government
agencies and spying companies it is a dream (and therefore likely true) to have
this face recognition software results of filming and photographing via a small
parameters file containing the facial characteristics, transmitted over the
Internet by for example piggybacking with the next upload stream. Most
smartphones are online. This parameters file is sent to an online system that
searches for a parameters matching pattern in an enormous database and is
likely able to find a match and track you.