machine-envy

This week’s column in the New Statesman stretches a metaphor. After Tony Neate, director of GetSafeOnline advised UK web surfers to “treat their PC like their car” and maintain it with regular updates, lock it away safely behind a firewall, etc, I go on to suggest that, if we want our PCs to remain open and flexible, we should learn how to drive them safely on the information superhighway. Funnily enough, the day after I filed this I went to a seminar at the Oxford Internet Institute chaired by Jonathan Zittrain, whose work on internet generativity I cite in the piece. The discussion - about “badware”, executable code that is not malware in the traditional sense, but dangerous in the wrong hands - bore out many of the ideas in this piece.

A trip to Brussels earlier this week served to do the same. We were there to discuss citizens access to information, and Shamit Saggar, professor of political science at the University of Sussex, said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since: “The logical conclusion on the Gutenberg Press was compulsory schooling”. There’s a theory that bears exploring.

Anyway, for those that can bear a stretched metaphor or two, here’s the column (and before you ask, why the headline has referenced phishing is beyond me):

“Batten down the firewalls, release the anti-spyware hounds, and up the spam alert to red status: 21 per cent of us are now more worried about online crime than about being burgled. According to a survey for the UK’s Get Safe Online campaign, fear of being duped by hackers is enough to put some of us off going online altogether.

“And we’re right to be concerned. In the week the survey was released, coinciding with the national internet safety roadshow, Microsoft issued a record number of security patches for its software, and the online virtual world Second Life was attacked by a code storm of self-replicating grey goo…”

Read the rest here.