Nigel Phair's blog

No matter how hard we try, it's proving hard to steer ordinary people away from the Internet with spooky threat stats.

Despite mounting risks on an information superhighway jammed up with malware, 419 scams, phishing and credit card fraud, the number of 'net users is still growing rapidly.

All the way back in 1998, America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) categorised and analysed 237 computer attacks. The results of that analysis revealed such pearls as:

• 3 percent of the attacks enabled web sites to attack site visitors

Last week a Stockholm court found four men guilty of promoting copyright infringement for running The Pirate Bay, a peer-to-peer site primarily used for illegal file-sharing, and sentenced them to a year in prison, plus a large fine.

Handing down a year in the big house is a strong deterrent against those who may consider doing this type of thing in the future, but is it really the best judicial outcome?

The Swedish cops raided The Pirate Bay a couple of years ago and seized servers, but even this action didn't shut the site down. The investigation was well handled, but surely police resources should be dedicated to more serious crimes.

In February 2009, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Lamar Smith, both Texas Republicans (yee-haw), announced proposed legislation titled the Internet SAFETY Act, designed to combat cyber-predators and online child exploitation.

Under this Act, lawmakers are seeking to impose requirements on ISPs and wireless network operators to keep records about the identities of their users.

Under the law, network operators would have to retain the network addresses assigned to any users for a minimum of two years, information which law enforcement could use to track down criminals.

But the broad language of the Bill, which would apply to any "provider of an electronic communication service," could mean that coffee shops, airport lounges and even individual households would be required to keep detailed logs, and that just isn't going to happen.

I have never been ripped off via the Internet, but I know of plenty of people who have.

The online environment is just like the real world, yet for some reason many consumers completely abandon their street smarts the second they fire up their browsers. When a leather-clad, toothless ruffian is walking up and down the street saying "give me $500 and I'll come back in an hour with a computer worth $1000," everyone knows not to trust him. Yet this is the same premise by which many scams, such as online auction fraud, are perpetrated.