Why Using the Internet is Getting More Dangerous

Scientists are worried about the future of data transmission throughout the internet. People seem to consider the Internet as a permanent thing that can never be absent, but that is actually incorrect. Supposedly, Amazon and Google have both experienced outages in their respective business and mail clouds (basically a huge shifting conglomeration of data) due to a sort of “Internet failure”. I had never considered the Internet as something that could break down, but it does make some sense that it has its weaknesses. The internet bears a larger and larger data “burden” by the hour and it isn’t some untouchable, invincible thing – logically, it is bound to falter at some point or another.

Being that almost everyone uses the internet daily for a range of tasks, varying in importance to their lives, it’s actually kind of scary to consider the possibility of some sort of “Internet blackout”. Think about what you do every day that involved the internet – the first things that come to mind are probably trivial, such as social networking. However, some deeper thought will likely lead to more significant uses: checking the news; staying in touch with family members; making purchases or sales of things. Imagine the implications an all-encompassing internet outage would have for the stock market or for financial transactions in general. Banks wouldn’t be able to access their stored information which would either dramatically complicate or altogether halt money transfer, and commerce would slow or stop.

In addition to the possibility of “overloading” the internet to the point of its failure, there is also the possibility of increased hostility of users of the internet. If data transfer is 100 times faster, you can fairly logically state that hacking, identity theft, and other malicious activity via the internet will become 100 times faster. This means that money needs to be spent on beefing up security systems. Just today (Nov. 13^th), there has been some sort of scandal going on across facebook as a result of the actions of the hacking group “Anonymous”. If the internet were 100 times faster, the obscene material being broadcast by this group would circulate that many times more quickly. While in this particular case, no one is being physically harmed, it’s quite possible that more immediately harmful things could be done via the internet in the near future. Hopefully I don’t sound like some sort of crazy doomsayer, but these things seem pretty feasible to someone who has a basic understanding of how networking works, and I do not want to fall victim to any form of abuse over the internet.