Auerbach on Internet Cruft

Captain Beefheart writes "Karl Auerbach has a story on CircleID in which he declares '...Between spam, anti-spam blacklists, rogue packets, never-forgetting search engines, viruses, old machines, bad regulatory bodies, and bad implementations, I fear that the open Internet is going to die sooner than I would have expected.' The Balkanization of the 'Net appears to be upon us."

Comments

Re:The scariest part about Balkanization.

[Bonker]

The 'Open' Internet was never unbiased or ucensored. It sure seemed that way, until you remember that a handful of sysadmins controlled which groups got created on usenet and which groups were censored. Those with more networking hardware got to make more of the decisions because more of the traffic passed through their equipment. You blocked 'alt.borkborkbork' in one key place and it got blocked to a great deal of the people who could keep it alive today.

'Unbiased' will never enter into the equation. Sorry.

'Uncensored', however, describes the vast number of people who can and do use the Internet and any other communication outlet they can in a myriad of ways to spread their own ideologies, their own software, their own news coverage, and their own gossip. As soon as one avenue for this kind of information is blocked, another springs up.

As soon as Napster was shut down, Kazaa and Gnutella became more popular. With Kazaa and Gnutella's decline in popularity due to the rabid, power-mongering influence of copyright interests (RIAA Lawsuits), other, more immune file sharing apps are gaining acceptance.

Think of the net as a huge, self-regenerating organism. Its cells are not computers, but people who want to spread information via whatever method possible.

At first it's simple and dedicated solely to its own task. As it's attacked and parisited, it begins to develop defenses and immunities to those attacks. Unlike natural selection, which required brute-force trial and error combinations to build those defenses, the Internet has thinking logical minds building its defenses, which include spam filters, intelligent routing, firewall, mail, and other message protocols, data encryption, steganography, high-bandwidth transmission pipes, error correction, and other tools to control the 'background radiation'.

I, for one, use data encryption in almost every kind of computer-to-computer file transmission I make, just out of habit. Do you?

If you don't beleive that the net is building its own defenses, note the truly desperate measures the aforementioned copyright interests are going to now in order to try to stop the evolutionary tide. The RIAA knows it can't keep up technologically with the HUGE number of people people sharing files, so it's attempting to change they way they behave with organized legislation and 'public education' drives.

The Internet, the people who write software and share data of any kind, is disorganized and seems unable to act in response fast enough. The million monkeys on a million typewriters eventually spouts software like Freenet. Freenet, while hard to use when compared to Kazaa or Napster, is almost completely immune from RIAA, MPAA, or publishing industry attacks, and may even be immune from the best efforts of law enforcement and repressive governments.

Just today, the RIAA leaked that it can track files by their MD5 sums. How long will it be (later this evening) before someone writes code that will pad MP3s in a way that skews their MD5 sums but leaves the music listenable? How long will it be before that code or something very much like it makes its way into WASTE or Gnutella? Even if this code is made illegal and the writer/perpetrator goes to jail, how will the media industry stop it when it's already in the hands of the public?

We're not just developing technological defenses either, but mental and social defenses. The EFF makes it possible for anyone to fax their senator and other legislators for free. (http://action.eff.org/) Various internet websites publish details about public figures and public officials, especially those with the clout to make change.

Remember who originally reported on Monica Lewinsky? Matt Drudge. Who all will report on the fact that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld more or less set up undercover CIA agents to take the fall for the Iraq-Nigeria scandal?

The Internet is under attack, but without attack, it will never become stronger and immune to those attacks.