ASYLUM

* We Control The Vertical

I've been offline for a while due to moving house and, for various reasons, I've not been spending that long infront of a computer recently, outside of office hours. Anyway, on to the main point of this post: The combination of rampant stupidity and greed that threatens what we mean by The Internet.

I wrote in an earlier article on the end-to-end principle that there was little innovation in telecommunications for many years because "telephone networks were owned by monopolies who wouldn't let anyone else play. Barriers to entry. No innovation. No progress."

Eventually this situation changed, when AT&T was forced — by the courts — to allow other people to connect up new technology they had created. Every now and then, certain organisations — generally large, heavy, slow-moving ones with a vested interest in killing off innovation — try and change this. It happens in the 90s when Hollywood tried to get the Internet banned/reinvented as Cable TV. And now it's happening again — funnily enough, by the original telephony monopolist, AT&T:

Amoroso of AT&T believes that the fundamental security problem is that during the past decade, and quite unintentionally, the network's intelligence has migrated to the edge.

Unintentionally? No, I think researchers knew full-well what they were doing — even if their employers disagree. Note the setup for this opportunist land-grab-to-be: Sing it loud, sing it proud, all together now: "SECURITY!"

He thinks AT&T can make a ton of money off this idea: Return control to the network providers (like his own company's phone system in the 1970s, he says, a time when Ma Bell controlled everything, including the technology's interface), and let the providers charge you for doing all of the filtering, traffic analytics, worm detection and incident response. "That's my solution," Amoroso says. "Create a service. Make money."

Yes! "My solution to internet security problems is to tear the internet apart and go back to 'the good old days' when we controlled everything and made all the money! And if you want any services, we'll make them, not those pesky goddamn users, for fuck's sake!"

But wait! That's not all!

James Whittaker says programmable PCs are dangerous, so why not treat them like guns? "Let's make all end user devices nonprogrammable," he says. "No one can connect to the Internet on a machine that creates code. If you want a computer to do programming, you would have to be licensed.

The final nail in the coffin. You'd think an associate professor of CS would know better; but then, he did used to work for the FBI. Or perhaps he was just being ironic, and noone at the discussion noticed.

Because the situation Whittaker describes, is that of Cory Doctorow's re-imagining of Asimov's I, Robot, a story I recommend reading if you remember the original Asimov stories, or even if you don't.