Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the worldwide web, warned that the internet was becoming a 'place where untruths start to spread more than truths'. We seem to inhabit parallel universes. While our day-to-day life is dragged ever more under the surveillance of CCTV cameras, data bases, loyalty cards and identity checks, the web spirals out of control. Perhaps, indeed, it is because ordinary citizens feel so scrutinised in everything they do (someone somewhere knows not only where you shop and what you buy, but also where you live and what kind of health problems afflict you) that they run riot on the web, forging imaginary identities and spinning fanciful tales.

Picture the OAP battling to open his post office card account from which he can draw his pension in cash. He has been using his post office for more than 30 years and everyone recognises him. Yet, because of draconian anti-fraud and money-laundering regulations, he has to present his passport to prove that he is not someone wishing to put dirty money into circulation, even though the account he is drawing from is only accessible to the government.

Contrast this world of atoms, with its fact-checkers at every step, to the world of electrons. Here, all is freewheeling and totally trusting. David Cox, who has a popular blog on the Comment Is Free website, has had a string of contributors who, in contesting his views, claim expertise in the subject at hand. But can such an expert be validated or is the person writing, say, as Ella7 who purports to be a female Californian environmentalist teaching at the University of San Diego, in fact a British man with no degrees to his name?

Humphrys harrumphs

Here, there and everywhere, John Humphrys pops up: witnessing the war in Iraq for the Today programme, investigating faith for Radio 4, protecting the English language from abusers in his book, Beyond Words. So he deserves a knees-up.

His publishers at Hodder and Stoughton thought so and gave him a swanky dinner to launch his book. And Rod Liddle, who used to edit Humphrys on Today, thought so too and invited him to the christening of his baby or, rather, he invited Humphrys to the party following the christening.

Humphrys claimed to be hurt by this: wasn't he good enough to participate in the holy ceremony? he asked Liddle at his book launch. 'I thought there might be a clash of egos between you and God,' Liddle explained. A shame, suggested Simon Hoggart: the Humphrys interview with God, replete with interruptions, would have been an almighty punch-up.

Any identity is yours at the click of a mouse. You can disguise yourself in any chat room as a thirtysomething babe-magnet with pecs to die for. You can introduce all kinds of fantasy elements when you write your profiles on My Space and Second Life - from fake friends to fake pastimes. And no one will be able to catch you out.

Sir Tim believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust: "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust. That, if you like, is a very simple system, but in fact the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what." The next generation of the internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.

Sir Tim was yesterday launching a new joint initiative between Southampton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create the first degree in web science. The two schools hope to raise the standards of web content.

"Our plan would be to run similar courses on either side of the Atlantic," said Wendy Hall, head of Southampton's school of electronics and computer science. It is little more than a decade since the web was just a glimmer in the eyes of a handful of scientists, but internet-savvy students will get the chance to study online phenomena like Google.

The vision for web science embraces traditional technology subjects such as computer science and engineering, but also brings in other areas of social studies and academic thinking. Students will be expected to explore questions such as internet privacy and regulation, as well as investigating the social trends behind massively popular websites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com Prospective researchers will be encouraged by new figures that indicate the web is growing at an unprecedented rate, having doubled in size in less than two and a half years, and with more than 1 billion people around the world now connected to the internet.

The new discipline is expected to gain widespread support from huge internet companies such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon, as well as more traditional computing giants such as Microsoft and IBM. The ultimate task for students of web science will be to come up with the next generation of the internet - and bring about the "semantic web", a more intelligent version of the systems we use today.

But Sir Tim said his only intention was to make sure the internet of the future remained free and open for anybody to use. "We're not going to be trying to make a web that will be better for people who vote in a particular way, or better for people who think like we do," he said. "The really important thing about the web, which will continue through any future technology, is that it is a universal space."

In a DoS attack, a hacker plants a bot virus on PCs, where it lies dormant until it is told to overwhelm a website with millions of page requests or send spam emails. It's a lucrative crime. "You can buy a custom-written bot virus on eBay for around $4000 that will evade antivirus software for at least two weeks, giving time to stage a DoS attack," says Ian Brown of the Communication Research Network, an internet policy group based in Cambridge, UK. Some gambling sites will pay extortionists up to $50,000 to stop an attack because it's cheaper than being offline for long, he says.

At a conference in London next week, Lilian Edwards, an internet lawyer at the University of Southampton in the UK, will argue that the attacks could be stopped if ISPs were required to check the contents of the data packets they relay. ISPs can already do this, using a technique called deep packet inspection, so that they can tell the difference between, say, internet phone calls and video downloads, and charge accordingly.

The technique could identify sudden storms of identical page requests, and the ISP could use this information to shut them off, says Edwards. "The ISPs have the knowledge, the resources and the power. They control the net traffic and they can detect unusual patterns in that traffic."

The idea will be strongly resisted by ISPs. Malcolm Hutty of the London Internet Exchange, an ISP association, says that to distinguish between malicious data and innocent traffic would be far too expensive. "For instance, the public blog at the Internet Governance Forum in Athens was so popular the servers went down, taking many other UN sites with it. That was not a DoS attack - but it looked like one."

Further problems loom, says Ollie Whitehouse of Symantec Antivirus. Hackers now transmit unencrypted commands to zombie PCs, but if they use encryption the commands will be almost undetectable. "That will make spotting a DoS attack a whole lot harder for an ISP," he says.

From issue 2577 of New Scientist magazine, 11 November 2006, page 32