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Mother of Internet Speaks Out
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that Radia Perlman, sometimes called the "Mother of the Internet" for her invention of the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges and switches, recently gave a very candid interview with NetworkWorld. From the interview: "The taste of whoever is in the funding agencies tends to cause everyone to look at the same stuff at the same time. Often technologies get hot then go away. There was active networking for a while, which always mystified me and has now died. In security the money is behind digital rights management, which I think ultimately is a bad thing -- not that we need to preserve the right to pirate music, but because the solutions are things that don't solve the real problems in terms of security."
Where should the funding go?
The things that seem absolutely unsolvable but that we have to solve is the user interface stuff. Everything is so complicated. People tell you to turn off cookies because they are dangerous, but you can't talk to anything on the Web without using them. People build this horribly complicated software, put up all these mysterious pop-up boxes and then blame the users when things don't go right. I keep hearing people say, like with distributed denial of service, that there are all these grandmothers out there who don't know how to maintain their systems. Don't blame the grandmothers; blame the vendors. Liability is one of those things I don't understand. Somebody makes a toy and some kid manages to stick a piece up his nose and dies from it, that company has to pay millions of dollars because everyone is so sympathetic. But in the software industry, when you install something there is this 9,000-page legalese that basically says: "We have no idea what this thing does, we're not claiming it does anything, if it remotely does anything useful you should be grateful to us, but you shouldn't blame us if it doesn't do what you expect." And they get away with it!
Which is why I don't like it when lawyers get involved in technology for good or bad. We have EULAs and DRM precisely because they make the lawyers rich, not because they are necessary to the function of the technology. When you need them, they are there, but only because they have a hand out, awaiting their payday.
As to the software problems, well, that's a byproduct of the whole system. The fact is, as long as you slap a horribly complicated EULA on your software that ultimately says "if it works, great; if not, don't blame us," you can cover up all sorts of sins of programming. Why do you think Microsoft gets away with so much? By the time you've successfully sued them over something theydid, they're two generations ahead in development and you're out time and money.
Good programming and a recognition that users have the right to workable, funtional, easy-to-use software, would go a long way to solving some problems. It would also help if the courts stopped pandering to the lawyers and started bearing down on the software makers.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
And there I thought they were talking about Al Gore's wife.