On 07/24/2012 06:59 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
In <500ded13.3030...@acm.org>, on 07/23/2012
at 07:32 PM, "Joel C. Ewing" <jcew...@acm.org> said:
The government ARPA-net became the Internet we know today because
Al Gore recognized its potential and pushed legislation, first in
1988 to help link universities and libraries, and additional
legislation in 1992 which opened it to commercial traffic.
In an anarchic fashion that opened us up to all sorts of network
abuse.
Probably someone else would have eventually done so if he hadn't,
but maybe not for another decade or more;
And maybe without the epidemics of, e.g., spam, virus attacks, DOS
attacks.
That certainly would have been nice, but I'm not convinced anyone at the
time understood the potential scope of those problems, much less would
have been seriously motivated to have come up with a technical solution
that would have prevented them before the Internet made it obvious they
were serious issues.
The virus vulnerability (and number of spambots and DOS attack bots) on
the Internet is much more a function of the Operating Systems of the
user nodes connected to the Internet than of the Internet itself. Much
of the current problem stems from early MS Windows design philosophy,
which didn't take the Internet seriously and implicitly assumed
networking and data sharing would would only involve local networking
where all parties had benign intent; so, MS made it easy for machines to
share active content that could access and alter content on remote
machines or even initiate remote programs on other machines, and put the
integrity management burden on end users without providing any tools to
make management possible.
When MS belatedly recognized the importance of the Internet and began
supplying Internet applications and interfaces to allow mass access
beyond local networks, that's when all heck began to break loose with a
vengeance. But does anyone think MS would have had any inclination to
harden their Windows designs and reduce virus vulnerability if they were
not forced to do it by problems made evident by connecting Windows
systems to the Internet? Even motivated by that pressure for over 15
years, their products and users are still vulnerable.
In hindsight we can now see things that should have been done better,
but I doubt if much of that would have been obvious without our
experience with the current Internet. Local networks with one
centralized authority with the power to immediately terminate a
deliberate network abuser and chastise an accidental abuser were so much
simpler to manage.
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org
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