I’ll have to translate this from my morning paper, and I’m short on time so forgive any bad translation
<b>Helsinki</b>
Internet will die in 2006, thinks profesor Hannu H Kari at the Technical University in Helsinki. There’s a great possibility that the network will crash within the next few years if the current trends keep up. According to other estimators, the crash might come even sooner.
Spam and viruses are the main culprits in Kari’s scenario. When the amount of trash reaches the limit, the trust in the information found on the internet will crumble, according to Kari.
Thoughts? Personally I doubt this’ll happen soon, if at all. People are fighting against viruses fiercely, and it’s not exactly hard to tell most of the spam from sincere stuff. If you know what you are looking for on the net, then you should be able to tell whether what you find is reliable or not. Things like e-mail and discussion forums have become such a vital part of schools and work that it’ll be very hard to give it up.
I don’t know about crashing completly, but maybe in some not-so-near future (About twenty years from now) if the virus threat keeps increasing there may be need for some major cleanup. Maybe they’ll come up with some way to enforce a World Wide reformat of all the servers.
I dought it will happen anytime soon. One of my friends had a computer virus, and his family deleted EVERYTHING on the computer to get the virus out. Then they reinstalled it all, and uploaded every firewall ect that they could find to keep from getting another one! Although, because of this he can’t do anything on the internet because with so many firewalls almost everything is blocked out…but as you can see, people will go really far to get rid of viruses.
>>;; How could viri and spam ruin the internet? His theory is a tad flawed
And the comments about the trust in the internet crumbling could happen, but i don’t think so. I think with more time, people will come to trust their online experience more and more, and eventually treat the internet without the stigma of “ohmigosh, well, its online, you can never believe what is online.” Didn’t we used to say that about TV? I also think sites like wikipedia, and "Gutenburg Project Online, and database resources will only help to further the trust of the internet. I think once there is an abundance of reliable information and sites online, even if it is just a few sites, i think that will boost the “believablity” of the entire 'net.
I read the article too, and I must admit I’m rather skeptical aswell. Unless something BIG happens, who’d want to throw away all the money they invested into the techonology called internet? And there’d still be people keeping up some sorta network…
No, see, in 2006, someone will create a device that allows you to stab a person over the internet, thus killing a rather large number of the world population.
Just imagine being able to kill people over the net… MMORPGs would be so much more pleasant without the usual guy screaming “PH33R MY MAD SKILLLZZ!!!” every fifteen seconds.
youknow what would make life perfect…is if like adware got illegalized…who care if it goes against the constitution of america or whatever laws from whereever everyones from it’d be funny for all those people peddling adware to end up in jail…human booster shot form a guy named jim for all those people
The collapse will occur not because of viruses, but because of porno. If we have enough horny guys and gals logging in at the same time, the networks of the world will buckle and crash, destroying the Internet. We’ll then devolve into monkeys and start throwing our shit at the strange boxes.
Well, the idea is that spam will eventually come to comprise the vast majority of the traffic on the Internet, drowning out all of its useful functions, jamming networks and interfering with normal communication.
It’ll slow down and go unstable, but not crash. We’re so dependant on the Internet that by that time they will have introduced a method of defeating spam; even if it means the death of e-mail.
