Reinventing the Internet

Security and privacy are maddeningly elusive on the Internet, where gangs of Eastern European criminals unleash malware that's infecting millions of computers every day. Engineers liken the last two decades of security efforts to a Maginot Line approach to defense:“Hard on the outside, with a soft chewy center.” “Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says one Stanford engineer, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.” So what to do? The Stanford Clean Slate project, a group of scientists armed with federal research dollars, is working to create a whole new Internet: They want to create “a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today’s Internet,” the New York Times reports. They plan to have it working on eight campus networks around the country by the end of the summer.