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Denver (pte043/27.06.2005/18:00) - Hackers, viruses, worms, spam, spyware and phishing sites have pervaded the World Wide Web to a degree that has thrown Internet experts into crisis mode.
Recently, Kyle Haugsness from the Internet Storm Center http://www.isc.sans.org , an emergency-response system - the 911 approximation for the global network - was inundated by emails from alarmed Internet users. The Internet was broken: thousands of companies had had their connections 'poisoned' and sites like Google, eBay, and other large sites were down and temporarily inaccessible.
Experts believe that the Internet, originally developed by the Defense Department almost two decades ago, is now so overused and saturated with traffic that it can no longer operate efficiently and safely.
Last year, for example, Carnegie Mellon University CERT Coordination Center registered 3,780 new computer security vulnerabilities, compared with 1,090 in 2000 and 171 in 1995. Over the last decade the computer security firm Symantec Corp. has catalogued 11,000 vulnerabilities in 20,000 technologies, which affects 2,000 vendors.
Technologists are saying that the Internet or parts of it are so antiquated or damaged that it needs to be rebuilt from scratch. The past decade has seen attempts to do so, but most now agree that the network has become too big and too scopeless for a complete overhaul.
A movement involving computer scientists and academic institutions, named Internet2, is underway in the Sates to improve and upgrade the network, to create an Internet 2.0. However due to the massive scope of the Internet, and because it belongs to no single entity, this is proving extremely difficult.
Internet2 has built a inordinately-fast network separate from the public Internet, and is testing technology that addresses the Internet security issue.
Daniel C. Lynch, 63, who was on the original engineering team in the Seventies at the Stanford Research Institute and at the University of Southern California, which developed the Internet's framework says: "The problem with the Internet is that anything you do with it now is worth a lot of money. It's not just about science anymore. It's about who gets to reap the rewards to bringing safe technologies to people."
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