December 3, 2023		INDEX
Why online identities should be protected by law
I use a VPN, a virtual personal network. If you don't know what a VPN is then virtual personal network probably won't mean much. What it is, is a method of browsing the internet (or sending and receiving emails etc) with the security of a home network. It is a system that works by bouncing your internet traffic across sometimes multiple internet nodes (servers) and thus disguising your ip address. That's probably an explanation that only those who know what a VPN is will grasp. So in really simple terms it just hides your internet traffic. It plays hide and seek with hackers. Now, why didn't I say that in the first place.. VPNs are only useful up to a point since there are much more secure systems out there. These cost a lot more than VPNs but price is not really an issue. To use these systems may be to cross an imaginary line, since only international drug cartels and similar organisations demand that level of security. Anyway that's what a VPN is. There are a lot of them out there and you can find adverts for them in commercial media like Facebook. To use them, though, is to cause puzzlement at some of the largest and most technologically aware organisations on the planet, like the company formerly known as Twitter. Every day I get emails or similar messages saying an unusual log in has been received. Was it really me? The mind boggles about how these tech behemoths define "unusual'" since I use VPN all the time and they send the same email over and over again. One thing that is particularly annoying is that the emails say if it wasn't you click this link to change your password. If it was you, however, you can do nothing. So you can not confirm that your account was used properly. You just have to put up with receiving the same emails over and over again. Is this a problem? I guess not since my email is always cluttered with junk and a few more make no difference. I could write a rule to automatically delete them but then if someone really did hack into one of my accounts and the tech giant alerted me, I'd not get the genuine warning. What I think it does mean is that these people do not trust passwords and do not even trust MAC addresses, the physical address every computer carries. For many years there have been fingerprint based identity systems, which seemed to work pretty well on phones. Some computer companies have also been trying facial recognition. Surely it is time for some kind of protocol for a portable identity backed by law that is a crime to steal (even if it is the security services doing the stealing)?
INDEX Jonathan Brind	December 3, 2023