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I have an idea for a new
reality TV show: take a dozen families and cut off their Internet access for
two weeks. See how long it takes them before they have to use the telephone to
talk to their friends, check the local movie listings in the newspaper, and
have to go to the mall to do their shopping. Soon, this will be like watching
the PBS reality shows where we watch how people lived in the 1880s and had to
beat their clothes with rocks to get them clean. In my show, we would ask each
of the players to keep track of their Internet-less moments and show cute video
snippets of them sitting looking longingly at their computer screens. Maybe we
should even pay them for their participation.
This sounded like a great
idea, until I realized that someone has already beat
me to it: a research study that was funded by Yahoo and media agency OMB at the
end of September.
Surprise,
surprise, the average amount of time that participants could go without their
digital connection was five days. Most of the participants felt,
well, disconnected. Like many of us, they developed their social
networks, shopped, made plans, and got their news from online sources. What I
found amusing was that the participants were allowed brief moments of
connectivity, called "lifelines," to do specific tasks (out of the 35
moments, 25 were money-related and most of the requests occurred about 10 days
into the project).
So much
for my idea.
I guess Al Sharpton (yes, that Al Sharpton)
and The Donald are safe for the time being with their own reality shows. But
here are a few other data points to understand how pervasive the Internet is to
our lives. The Pew Research folks have found that 88% of online Americans say
the Internet plays a role in their daily routines. And while we can debate
exactly what this role is, clearly the Net is here to stay. And in another
study Pew conducted in February, 55% of American Internet users have access to
broadband either at home or at work.
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/c/4/topics.asp
The Net has definitely crossed
over from oddity to necessity by now. As if there were any doubt: just ask my
teenage daughter, who complains when her wireless network goes away for a few
seconds while she is in the middle of 47 different IM conversations.
The downside of the more
connected world is that the stakes are now higher to stay more connected, and
our thresholds for what is connected are getting higher. I can't remember the
last time I had to use a dial-up connection, and we have come to expect
broadband everywhere we go. I remember the first time I was in
Another example of higher
stakes is what Lycos Europe is doing this week. Many of you have seen those
SETI-At-Home screen savers that process interstellar radio signals in the hopes
of finding intelligent life, or cracking some protein, or some other large
distributed computing problem. Lycos has come up with a screen saver that will
send annoying Internet pings to known spammers, in the hopes of clogging up
their bandwidth and getting them to cease and desist. Because they don't
completely crash the intended machines, apparently this technique is legal.
http://www.makelovenotspam.com
The other downside of the
all-broadband world is that the bad guys are also counting on your cooperation
to help them do business. I am talking about the lack of protection for your
computers when you hook up. Those of you that are still operating without any
firewalls on your home (or office, for that matter) networks should take heed
of this experiment, conducted by the marketing firm AvantGarde
and Kevin Mitnick (yes, that Kevin Mitnick). They placed brand-new, out-of-the-box computers
on random networks and measured the amount of time that it took before the PC
was compromised by some hack over a two-week period.
http://www.avantgarde.com/xxxxttln.pdf
It took just four minutes
before the plain-vanilla Windows XP PC with SP1 was compromised. An XP with SP2
and a Mac received numerous attacks, but weren't compromised. What was
impressive about the Mac was how many times someone tried to reach out and
touch the machine. But because the exploiters were looking for Windows PCs,
they couldn't deal with attacking the Mac. Also interesting was how effective
either SP2 or Zone Alarm was in keeping the wolves at bay: neither machine was
compromised during the study.
Granted, this study was
about as scientific as my proposed reality TV show, but what is telling here is
the four minute metric. If a new machine can be so easily compromised, imagine
how easy it is for one that has an actual user attached.
Life in the broadband world
has its challenges. Maybe it is time for all of us to turn off our PCs for a
few minutes each day and go outside for a walk.
Entire contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
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