Criticism of the Internet
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Current and potential problems
The Internet, along with its benefits, has a lot of negative publicity associated with it ranging from genuine concerns to tabloid scaremongering.
Child abuse
According to children's charities, the number of annual convictions for child pornography offences have increased by over 1000% since the Internet was first available to the public in the late 1980s. With the recent growth in Chat rooms and instant messaging services in the late 1990s, the potential for a new form of child abuse has emerged: so-called grooming. This involves a pedophile pretending to be a child in a chat room/instant message conversation, to gain the trust of a child before arranging to meet up.
Copyright infringement
Copyright infringement has also been the focus of much media attention, mainly through peer-to-peer filesharing software, but also through private members-only chatrooms, so-called warez sites (which either offer unauthorised copies of software directly or the means to crack copy protection), or even the sale of counterfeit CDs, DVDs and software masquerading as official product. Many ordinary Internet users are less concerned about the actual infringement itself but more about the effect on the Internet as a whole if tighter controls result from the infringement.
Viruses
In the 1980s and early 1990s, when very few people had access to the Internet, viruses were not a huge problem. They did exist and did cause just as much damage to computers as modern viruses can today, but there was no fast-moving epidemic because there was no means for a virus to directly infect other computers. Before the Internet, the only way for a computer to be infected was through use of a removable disc that was itself infected. As a result, virus infections were mercifully rare.
All that changed with the widespread growth of the Internet. With near-universal Internet access among computer users in developed countries, and the proliferation of high-speed broadband Internet connections, a virus on one person's computer can infect thousands of other computers. In fact, much of the disruption from virus outbreaks is caused not by the payload of the virus (e.g. deleting hard drive, shutting down computer every five minutes), but by the Internet congestion caused by the virus spreading itself.
Security cracking
Main article: Security cracking
When computers were stand alone machines (or at most connected to a company's internal network), to steal data from a system an intruder had to physically steal it. The Internet means that data from an insecure site could be stolen by someone working two blocks from the site, or just as easily from another country.
Some of the recent high-profile examples of this were when a working version of the source code for Half Life 2 was copied from the developer's computer systems by security crackers and when portions of the Windows NT codebase were copied from one of the companies that had access to it via the Microsoft Shared Source initiative. In both cases the Internet was used for dissemination of the leaked code, in particular using P2P networks.
Dated technology
Very few people outside the technical community are aware of the future problems posed by the Internet's archaic technology. It was originally designed for a small number of research institutions to share research data, and was never intended for the multi-billion user behemoth the modern Internet has become.
One serious problem is that the IP address (a unique number assigned to each Internet computer, functioning much like a street address in the real world) will run out eventually. Despite an estimated world population of over six billion, there are only a little over four billion different IP address combinations possible under the current system — see IPv4 address exhaustion for more information. This also doesn't take into account the fact that there is not a 1:1 person to computer ratio in current computerised countries, where many people will have a desktop machine at home, a laptop machine for on the go, another desktop machine at work, and an e-mail mobile phone, all requiring their own IP address.
This could pose serious problems in the future as more and more nations expand their computer infrastructure (the vast majority of the world's population does not currently use the Internet, that's the so-called digital divide) and even now efforts are proceeding to find new ways of running the Internet. The new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, which expands the address space of the Internet, is one proposal for how to deal with some of the technical problems caused by the growth of the Internet.
Self-destructive subcultures
As a decentralized, largely uncensored worldwide network, the Internet promotes free speech. Since the early 1990s, it has been widely recognized that the Internet enables broader distribution of all ideas, including those considered distasteful by any portion of the population. The most widely condemned of these ideas are those that promote, condone, or justify the infliction of violence upon innocent, non-consenting people. Examples include racism, sexism, and fascism.
Around 2000, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications revealed a similar but distinct issue: The Internet also allows people who exhibit or wish to practice abnormal behavior to find one another easily, due to anonymous search engines and online forums or services. As sparse subpopulations, it was often unlikely or difficult to find willing partners or like-minded individuals prior to the Internet.
A small number of these subcultures promote self-destructive or mutually destructive behavior. Websites and mailing lists exist that explicitly promote anorexia, apotemnophilia, necrophilia, and suicide. While these activities are easily recognized as abnormal and self-destructive by most adults, many people fear that children or mentally ill persons visiting such sites would lack the maturity necessary to make that discrimination.
In rare cases, people have used the Internet to find willing partners for abnormal activities, but with disastrous or fatal results. In one case, a German named Armin Meiwes (the "German cannibal") made an online arrangement with [[Bernd J�rgen Armando Brandes]] to kill and eat him. Meiwes was later convicted of manslaughter.
Censorship
See main article Censorship in cyberspace
Some countries such as Iran and the People's Republic of China restrict what people in their countries can see on the internet. This has made blogging very popular in Iran in order to avoid the censorship. The BBC is proposing to offer its entire range of terrestrial television broadcasting as free downloads, but only to people within the UK. At the moment most internet content is available regardless of where one is in the world, so long as one has the means of connecting to it.
| This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Internet. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of this Wikinfo article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. |
