Face It:: The Internet is Yelling Across a Crowded Room [View all]

[Phillip McCleod]

If you want to whisper a secret to someone for some legitimate reason.. of which there aplenty.. take measures to whisper.

Even email is not private because it is and always has been a distributed communications medium since the ARPAnet days. That means if I'm running a server node, then your email is bounced off of my hard drive on its way to its destination. That's the magic. If I'm a bad sysadmin who knows how, I can read it. I can tell my computer to 'read' it and tell me if it says 'bomb'. That's the magic, since the get-go.

That doesn't mean you can't digitally whisper, but as in real life, if you want to communicate something private, you don't yell it across the cafeteria. You draw the one person aside and put your mouth close to their ear and whisper.

This can be done, if you want to do it, in the digital age. You can still whisper if you care to learn how.

Just be aware that the rest of the time you are yelling across the bar on a Saturday night.