Currently viewing the tag: "open security"
How can we reach the state of affairs in which online activity is entirely secure against identity theft? Hyper-convergence means media and services of all kinds will be increasingly integrated across a broad-spectrum multi-media fabric, where one’s actions and interests, private information and financial data, will be increasingly widespread.
The underlying problem in the financial system —which allowed banking institutions to hide bad debt in bundled assets, and resell it to trading partners who may not have been given full disclosure on the unsustainable nature of much of the underlying debt— is transparency. A fierce individualist ideology led to a convenient clouding over of the reporting mechanisms intended to make financial institutions more ethical, more stable, and more useful to those outside their walls.
It may be that “a few bad apples” got the ball rolling on what has turned into a massive international financial disaster. Or, it may be that a few bad apples got their names in lights, while the entire system conspired unwittingly in a spectacular collapse. Either way, the best expression of the problem might be to say that markets have stopped working, in part, because they have been comprehensively modified to stop working like markets. An open banking transparency network would reduce the motivation for wrongdoing and privilege more reliable sources of information, creating confidence and motivating sound market dynamics.
Freedom of information and the standard of net neutrality —connection providers not controlling content or access to content in any way— require that information posted online not be removed, blocked, or made unavailable to readers, so long as the publisher wishes to include that content. For content publishers and content consumers to shape the web experience they desire, not only do we need an ethical standard of total net neutrality, but we need a technical standard of zero-downtime bandwidth guarantees.
As the population of users on the world wide web expands at still astonishing rates, and “web 2.0″ —the social networking phenomenon, the integration of real open source innovation, and the free-services standard being pushed by Google— becomes the communicative norm, powerful new realms of innovation could be emerging that will become the third-generation Internet, or web 3.0. We need to understand fully how the interrelation of data and vital security interests can come together to give end-users the richest possible experience.
We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers. Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics.
The open-source movement has been a revolutionary phenomenon of startling proportions. It has changed the way software works for us in our daily experience, by bringing costs down far enough that now anyone with an internet connection can launch a web-based publication in literally seconds. Its efficiency, its appeal, its human element, make it a standard to watch as other sectors of economics and public life evolve to integrate the latest communications technologies, and aim for optimum end-user freedom and flexibility.
As the world acclimates to digital technology, and its usefulness in everyday life becomes increasingly relevant to how we achieve a higher quality of life, higher quality of education, and more efficient means of deploying solutions to complex problems, the standard for securing data and ideas may shift from closed environments behind firewalls to a new open standard, where the commons guarantees provenance, and thereby, rights, when warranted.
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