Internet - a world without friction

When I study physics in my junior secondary years, my teacher asked me what the world would be without friction. While I was told that friction causes energy loss and reduced the efficiency of the systems, I was also aware that friction has also a place in the world to make us live better - when we saw the cars skied on an icy road!

At the time, I have made an internal conclusion - friction is good so long that it is not too strong. I draw an analogy with inflation, which most of us thinks it is good if it is, say, below 3%

When internet grows more popular, I find this "second world" is a world without friction. We can use copy-and-paste to replicate information, instead of photo-copying or hand jotting. We can search information by googling instead of browsing the catalogue in the library. We can send mails to friends and they can nearly instantly receive them instead of waiting for days as in the normal postal paper mail.

However, in a recent news report, I heard parents complaining about their lack of control on their kids how they use internets. The parents urge the government to take a more active role to make the internet "safer" to use.

While I have no kids and cannot comment on the difficulties of a parent, I try to view the problem in an alternative way.

The root problem is that in this world, there are bad guys. In a world with friction, there are hurdles for bad guys to contact us or vice versa (actually the hurdle also applies to good guys). Worst still, with the anonymity in internet, we cannot easily identify whether a guy is good or bad.

I try to draw another example. If a bad guy wants to fool somebody in the non-internet world by saying he/she is a banker, he/she may have to waste some effort to set up a fake office with a XXX bank logo. Because of relatively higher setup cost (friction), the bad guy will not make it easily unless the target fraud is a much higher amount of money!

On the other hand, in the world of internet, setting up a fake bank web site is much easier and cannot be easily trapped. Therefore the bad guys will easily spread the net to trap some innocent victims.

I consider this is just a problem of awareness. For instance, even in a phone call, we should not tell a caller our personal details, even though he/she is indeed from a famous (but foolish) university conducting a survey.

When one speaks loudly in the public transport on a phone call about his/her personal life, phone number, address etc, please do not say the pubic transport has not protected his/her privacy!