The Need For An Open Internet

The internet has become a prominent part of our lives. Sending an email, visiting a social networking site, online shopping, and online gaming have become part of our daily routine. It almost seems like anything is possible with the internet, but then what seems to be the issue?

Integration of Services:

The internet is an infinite source of information, entertainment, productivity, and networking but the major missing link between all these features is integration. There are companies like Google which offers great search, email, productivity, and social networking services but the integration between them is not exactly complete and in some cases the only thing that’s common between these services is the Gmail ID.

Data Portability:

The key issue here is data portability. Most data stored in the company servers are under lockdown, as in it cannot be accessed, moved, or duplicated by another internet service. Some services do offer data portability but it’s either not completely portable between the various services available on the internet or the portability is restricted to services offered by the parent company offering them or just that the data that can be ported from one service is not compatible with another service.

Data Transparency:

Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was seamless integration between any service of your choice? What I’m trying to say here is not a tightly coupled integration where a bunch of services are tightly integrated with each other but an open framework where the user can add services of his choice to one location (Framework). Similar to a bookshelf where books of different types and topics can be added depending on the readers choice except unlike books in a bookshelf what happens to services added to the framework is that they can seamlessly share data between them. Of course the user must have control over their information and how much information is available to the different services added to the framework is completely their choice.

Home Pages:

The home pages like Pageflakes and iGoogle are just façades that brings many services to the same page but there is no actual sharing of data between the different services.

Closed Internet:

Coming back to what the title actually means, do you really think that the internet is an open platform when most of your data is locked with their respective service providers?

Open Internet Framework:

Creating an open framework may be next to impossible because of the different terms and conditions imposed by the different (similar and non-similar) companies causing various problems to the users including termination of service with loss of data and/or may be legal issues. There are many obstacles in the way to making “Open Internet” a reality and it probably will remain a dream with may be partial implementations towards the right direction, but one aspect is very clear; this is a necessity and hopefully there would be internet standards and laws that causes a shift towards the direction of openness because after all the user has the right to own their information and has the right to do what ever they are willing to do with it; the only problem is that there is no easy way, if any, to do things like moving or sharing data/information between different services of choice.

There are a few services like OpenId that have taken steps to move in the right direction like offering portability of identity, but internet wide implementation of such a service is still to be seen. Hence it’s a proof that acceptance of similar services can be painstakingly slow and with popularity might accelerate but it is a necessity that needs to see the light some day.

Virus Hits Google Search

Internet users have become very accustomed to the use of Google as their primary search engine that they take it for granted that no matter what Google will always work! It has become a very important aspect of our daily lives that sometimes you have to wonder what would happen if something had to have happened to it. As a matter of fact it seems that that’s exactly what happened. Recently a friend of mine asked me to go check out Google search and perform a search, to which I replied that I had already done so and also out of curiosity I asked why he wanted me to do so out of the blue. Well at first glance I did not notice anything fishy of course since the search worked perfectly fine, but then when trying to open the search results is where the problem occurred. A malware warning message appears on the site instead. As of now there is no news as to what the virus/malware might be, what effect it has on the Google servers and whether it will infect the client computers. The only obvious fact is that Google is not working temporarily!

Days like this have come to our lives when we have to reevaluate ourselves and think how dependent we have become on the internet and its services, and how would we go about our normal life when a hiccup like this happens. None the less something minor or major like a viral infection is not going to affect my use of the internet and the world it opens us to. The same goes with Google as my primary search engine. Honestly the only search engine I do use is Google for all its glory and my loyalty towards this incredible tool. Our computers have been infected by a variety of viruses over time and no matter what measures we take, the chances are that we will be infected by viruses in the future. The reason being that the weakest link to computer security is the human element and hopefully that element will not be eliminated! Computer viruses have become more like the common cold, once infected take necessary steps to get rid of it and then continue on with our lives. That does not mean that the user must leave their system open to attacks. Necessary precautions must be taken, but during a situation like this we just have to let the experts do what they are paid for and know that everything will get better.

Update

Google automatically identifies whether a website is harmful or not, but according to telegraph and BBC there was a glitch in the system that wrongly identified all websites as harmful. According to BBC, Google still does not know about the nature of the problem, but everything has been solved and Google is making initial enquiries into the problem.