I always tend to look at the internet in "physical" terms!

I see it as being flat, one dimensional and as a result plagued with problems, with security being the biggest.

If it were two dimensional then some of the problems could be solved although I suspect not all.

But I would really like to see the internet as being three dimensional. Is this feasible? I see it as a series of separate "boxes", one inside each other, with the more secure sites being located towards the centre.

Thinking about it again it sounds a bit whacky, but I may as well throw it into the ring for any thoughts?

I have no idea what you mean.

Do you mean having multiple layers of protections ? Some places operate multiple firewalls, but that makes communication with the rest of the net diffcult

Besides, most of the security problems on the internet are eaither because of holes in microsoft products (which don't get fixed quickly, and when they do a lot of people don't apply the update), or from people doing really dumb things (like running the attachment in an email they recieved, yes its still happening)

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I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Intelligent design

I love your avatar!

Yes, I believe I am suggesting multiple layers of protection with the system becoming more secure as you got ino it. Consider at the deepest would be banks etc with the maximum degree of protection. At one level above that you could only have persons of the highest degree of security.

These "policemen" for want of a better name, would be the only persons eligible to enter all partitions of the net. At the level above that you would again have policemen with a slightly lower rank plus a filtration of general personell - bank staff, doctors and trusted personell etc. All of these people would only have access to their level because of some form of security signature which would have been obtained from a policeman at one level below.

This type of control would be carried right up the scale to where the masses congregate on the largest secure partition,above them you still have policemen monitoring the situation. It would be the aim of virtually all users to progress to a more secure network below. This could only be be achieved by security checks. It would be a matter of keeping hackers etc. out of the system.

I know that this probably sounds a little complex and maybe it would go down better as a board game!

Who's going to pay the policemen

who's going to organise it

how do you organise all the page's on the internet?

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

I for one welcome our new inner-circle overlords!

No... wait, never mind.

One of the things I like about the internet is its wide-open, wild-West aspect. What's wrong with asking the users of the web to take responsibility for their own security?

Okay, I can see a counterexample, since these days a lot of less computer-savvy people are online. My 90-year-old father, for example. He managed to get his system so bugged up that we had to toss his hard drive in the trash and start over.

Maybe we'll evolve toward a happy medium -- adequate freedom with adequate security.

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

I now agree with both of you - and hey I'm 2/3 of ninety.

But what about using it as a board game, done up as the security forces for some innerplanetary old peoples home?

I think I see what your idea is, and it wouldn't help security much. You've got the Internet divided into zones, each zone has a different level of security. That won't work for a number of reasons. Everyone in a zone would have to have the exact same level of security, so what rating do you give to a Linux machine with 2 firewalls made by X company and a virus scanner made by Y? What about a Windows PC running a Microsoft Firewall, 2 virus scanners by two different companies and regular security updates? You see the problem with blanketing security levels? Besides, you seem to think that hackers would have to get through the outer zone to get to the inner, that can't possibly work, you cannot arrange websites that way. Finally, if everything had similar levels of security then once a hacker learnt about one zone he could hack everything in it, effectively lessening security.

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Yes, diversity is the key for making secure systems. Even the most secure systems will have security holes in them (well, the most secure would be disconected from the net completly, but im not counting them) but the real question is how quickly are they fixed after the bad guys learn about them. If the systems on the net are diverse (like they will be when linux takes over) then a single hole, no matter how bad, can't affect more than a portion of the users.

However you will still have problems with users doing stupid things, like opening the virus attachments in emails, but a good system will provide them with more warnings.

GDwarf, as for your comment about a linux machine with a virus scanner. There are no currently roaming viruses for linux, but linux virus checkers exist. They are used to scan for viruses in data that is being sent on to windows machines

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I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Intelligent design

Not sure how it fits in but in the air force there are two main nets. NIPRNET and SIPRNET. The NIPRNET is unsecure and basically gives everyone access to the internet. The SIPRNET is secure, classified secret and can only be accessed on certain computers in certain locked rooms. These nets have no physical contact with each other.

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"Eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy"
------------Mark Twain

"Women are like Voltron. The more you can hook up, the better it gets."

Actually I thought I had given up on this idea some time ago - but now I'm not so sure. If they can have two internets completely separate from each other then why would'nt it be feasible to have three, ten or even one hundred internets.

I bet your airforce jobs are like little boxes, one inside the other with no electrical contact. A physical contact can be made between the two but only under secure conditions.

It makes you wonder how many internets the Airforce actually has?

If computers are hooked up to each other but not the Internet then it's a network, presumably a WAN (Wide area network).

Anyways, the internet wouldn't work if you had layers separate from each other, you'd only be able to get at sites on the same layer as your machine, so if you don't bother with security you can only get at other insecure sites, which rules out most servers. Where as if you had a secure computer you wouldn't be able to get at any less secure ones.

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Think I'll take one step back on this one!

Your not saying I'm a fool are you?
or are you simply saying you're great!

Taurus, I have no idea how serious you were with your last post. This is an answer in case you were serious.

The last line of GDwarf's post, beneath the --- line, ishis sig. It isn't aimed at you personally, it's just a random bit of wisdom he puts beneath every post he makes. So if you felt personally attacked or offended, that wasn't the intention.
Likewise with mine, it is not aimed against you or anyone, it's just a way of looking at life, science, and this board.


On the other hand, if you knew all this yet, I have just made a good fool out of myself...

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

Well, you did keep me from making a fool of myself.

(I thought that Taurus was commenting on GD's post...I didn't "connect" it at all with GD's sig.)

My very sincere apologies to GDwarf.

And thanks to Fram.

I admit the blood level rose when I saw that quote - I really feel as if I have been attacked from all sides! But then If you have your beliefs you have to defend them!

Security issues aside, the Internet can be thought of as having a 3d topology. Here´s an interesting site featuring a visualization. You can plot the Internet nodes as polar coordinates. And here´s another one.

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There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

Heh, it's alright, I've done similar things before. It gets really bad on forums that don't have that little line, you end up not knowing what's part of a person's post and have really no way of knowing.

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Hmmm... It really would not be in the Internet design philosophy to have multiple security tiers as part of the Internet itself, the Internet should only be concerned with OSI layer 1, 2 and 3 matters, and do these as fast, reliable and viable as possible, that means minimal access filtration and multiple redundancy as long as it is economicaly viable. The security should be implimented on the boundries between the Internet and the users networks or internetworks, and so be tailored to the users requirements, not maximum security.

In fact the issue most of the time safety issues is not the network design, it is its users, an administrator can easily firewall their network and set up their servers to be inaccesable from the Internet, but they can not install safety instructions on users in the same way, most humans are remarkaly vunrable to being "pwnd".

Giving only security personel/"police" access to confidential or important data is totaly unviable, a bank will have a bunch of employees that need access to this stuff, but its not viable for them all to have years of education and experience in computer managment and network security. It easy to make stuff secure, it is just that most of your users will not stand the limitations. What if the upper management could not send out a memo because management have the top clerance level, and so can only create files that are top clerance rated, and the mandatory rules does not allow them to degrade information? That would not do in normal companies, even banks or others with need for high security networks, though it would prevent certain security issues, Internet access would only be available to the people with the lowest level clerance, and they would not have access to anything but what the ones on the same level have made(probably nothing more important than discussing how cold the winter is), and has not been edited by someone with a higher level...

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Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...

Thank you for your very convincing argument. It deserves more comment than I am going to give it - very convincing!

Tell me - what would the two internets be about for the airforce?