Nick Carr notes that the U.S. Army is using social networking to help wage war. Citing an article by David Talbot in Technology Review, Carr also points out one obvious fly in the ointment: "cheap, simple Web-based systems are also easily available to insurgent and guerrilla forces."

Does that mean that the Internet is entirely unsafe? It is if you believe Patrick Dempsey, who says the Internet is so rife with cybercriminals, we just ought to leave it to the bad guys and build a whole new Internet just for us good folks.

The former FBI agent, current chief information security officer for Janney Montgomery Scott, thinks we can do that by applying the "lessons we've learned."

Fat chance. We have a hard enough time agreeing to standards on the Internet we already have.

The Internet is looking a lot like the physical world; we all know what areas to avoid, and we have radar that warns us when someone's acting fishy. Now we just have to develop an instinct for detecting people who also seem phishy.