QUOTE(Star_girl @ Jun 15 2007, 01:23 AM)

The internet in the one place that I do believe is still free and open (unless you are in China

) I just hope that all efforts to keep it this way will be made if it ever comes under threat...
Here you touched upon something that's been grinding at me. Keeping the internet, and every aspect of our computers private and free is under
constant threat.
A
short clip explaining "Trusted Computing" (safe to run active x, you can "trust"
these people)
This means a chip in every computer, pda, cell phone, basically every single piece of electronic equipment that can monitor and regulate what you are allowed to do and send that data (if connected to a network) to the manufacturer... or the
TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance) or Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (Formerly Palladium, before that known only as a system used in Trusted Computing Platform Alliance - confused yet, they make it confusing for a reason!). Learn more about NGSCB
here and
here. For now they are powerless to do anything with that information, their proposed laws to prosecute have been shot down in Congress, but the chips have been shipped in laptops and other electronics already. Thank the
EFF for helping to keep the laws from passing.
Recently they have been doing research and development into scrapping the existing internet all together for a more "secure" internet. Read more
here. The more I read about this, the more I don't trust the implications. Especially when I see lines like this:
QUOTE
The Internet's early architects built the system on the principle of trust. Researchers largely knew one another, so they kept the shared network open and flexible - qualities that proved key to its rapid growth.
But spammers and hackers arrived as the network expanded and could roam freely because the Internet doesn't have built-in mechanisms for knowing with certainty who sent what.
Of course we should be
afraid of spammers and hackers. The tools are widely available to protect ourselves, all it takes is a bit of knowledge and a tiny amount of effort. And again, the system today is built on
trust, I
trust myself with my own computer. I
trust myself to know that the information I'm sending is safe. I
trust myself to investigate a website before I give them my credit card information. Yet the decision seems to be being made that my knowledge is not enough, and systems need to be put in place so everything I do can be tracked and I can be personally identified? Are they not catching spammers and hackers with the tools they have today - I read the news.
But it's so expensive today to track down those hackers and spammers, is that the excuse? My argument to that is the technology to do that is improving so the expense will decrease. And the expense of this "new" internet isn't so tiny:
QUOTE
Guru Parulkar, who will become executive director of Stanford's initiative after heading NSF's clean-slate programs, estimated that GENI alone could cost $350 million, while government, university and industry spending on the individual projects could collectively reach $300 million. Spending so far has been in the tens of millions of dollars.
(Source is above linked article)
Forgive the rant, as I said, it's been grinding at me.

And as far as a connection to something like a larger NWO type of organization, I could see how something like controlling PCs and other electronics would be quite handy.