A long required update

Hello all. Again I find myself swamped with work, so I'm a little MiA. I still will try to keep up the blogging and bring you (hopefully) useful information. So here are some links and my opinions about them:

The McAfee lab guys think they're smart. And most probably they are. However the above mentioned post struck me for its lack of professionalism.

On a similar note on the Authentium Blog there is a philosophical post about the Internet and democracy. Before I write my comments, a little disclaimer: I'm a technology guy, without any background in philosophy or political science (or history for that matter), and it may well be that I'm beating a dead horse here with these thoughts. Now back to the matter at hand: in my opinion democracy only works in matters where there is an overwhelming majority either (a) believing the same thing or (b) not really caring about the issue. However, when there are two groups which are of similar size (lets say 60% - 40%), even though you technically have a majority, you will have very difficult time applying the winners perspective. And this is why (IMHO) democracy driven approaches will fail on the Internet. Because the medium itself empowers everybody and people are no longer bound by psychical boundaries. Even if there is very little opposition to an idea in country A, if there is a strong opposition in country B, it may also prevent passing any resolutions concerning international matters in country A (if such an international democracy gets introduced). An other problem would be that democracy tends to work better on small scale, and as the scale of things increases, it tends to drift away from the original idea of the rule of the people. This is a problem of information flow in both direction: many people - myself included - do not always - or should I say most of the time - know about the grand scheme of things and how supporting one or the other candidate will influence our everyday lives. Also, many representatives don't have an clear enough picture about what her/his voters want or would want or act out of self interest. Having all these issues in mind I think that we won't see something like an Internet governance for a long time.