This is not news.

On the other hand it is big news. (One more reason to love O'Reilly is at left. They do better parodies of themselves than any rival can.)

At the DefCon show in Las Vegas, a few weeks ago, a speaker from Avaya noted that DNS, the Internet's "white pages," makes it inherently easy to attack. At another conference in the same town a speaker noted that the best tool for hackers is...Google.

Shock. Consternation. Anger.

What should we do about this?

The answer is...nothing.

You can design a safe network. That would be a closed network. But a closed network will reach very few people, it will cause very few ripples, and it won't spread knowledge beyond that closed loop.

Our you can design an open network. The Internet is an open network. There is danger in an open network, but you're placing a bet that has nothing to do with technology. You're betting that, by diffusing knowledge widely, some wisdom will eventually result.

That's what has happened. Compare the world of 2004 to the world of 1994, when commerce was not allowed on this network, and thus the only true "free speech" was on closed networks like CompuServe.

Anyone want to argue we were better off then?

Yes, there are risks. Yes, there is evil. But if we let our fear rule us we'll be caged forever. If we let freedom rule, on the other hand, some will choose to remain caged, and others will choose to strike out from their cages, but in the end they will fail.

That's the key lesson of the 20th century. Why argue against it? Because fear remains a powerful force. Fear begets fear, terror begets terror, closed minds beget closed networks, and that well is very, very easy to fall into, because when you look into the darkness what you think you see is safety.

But what you actually see down there is death.