A recent story in the New York Times raised an intriguing question: Is the Internet so unsafe and inefficient that we should just scrap the whole thing and start over? Some Stanford researchers think so.
The Internet was originally designed as a way for academic and military researchers to exchange information—not as a vessel for an immense load of global communications between private citizens. As such, security was not a huge concern on the early Internet; rather, the ability for every computer network to talk to every other computer network was the main priority. This openness and flexibility was eventually exploited, to great success, by hackers and cybercriminals.
The Stanford Clean Slate project aims to develop a more secure Internet that's also better equipped to deal with applications—from mobile apps and beyond—that haven't been invented yet. It's unclear when, if ever, this new Internet will be unveiled, or how successful it will be at protecting the identities of innocent users while keeping criminals at bay. The Internet's biggest drawback and its biggest asset are the same: anonymity. Taking that away would create a huge stir among privacy advocates, even if it did help to curb malicious activity.
Until somebody works out those thorny issues of where privacy ends and safety begins, we can expect to work with our same old Internet. In the meantime, companies like Trend Micro will keep fighting the good fight—trying to keep consumers and businesses protected, one Internet threat at a time.
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