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'The Internet Needs More Friction' (vice.com)
Justin Kosslyn, who leads product management at Jigsaw, a unit within Alphabet that builds technology to address global security challenges, writes: The Internet's lack of friction made it great, but now our devotion to minimizing friction is perhaps the internet's weakest link for security. Friction -- delays and hurdles to speed and growth -- can be a win-win-win for users, companies, and security. It is time to abandon our groupthink bias against friction as a design principle. Highways have speed limits and drugs require prescriptions -- rules that limit how fast you can drive a vehicle or access a controlled substance -- yet digital information moves limitlessly. The same design philosophy that accelerated the flow of correspondence, news, and commerce also accelerates the flow of phishing, ransomware, and disinformation.
In the old days, it took time and work to steal secrets, blackmail people, and meddle across borders. Then came the internet. From the beginning, it was designed as a frictionless communication platform across countries, companies, and computers. Reducing friction is generally considered a good thing: it saves time and effort, and in many genuine ways makes our world smaller. There are also often financial incentives: more engagement, more ads, more dollars. But the internet's lack of friction has been a boon to the dark side, too. Now, in a matter of hours a "bad actor" can steal corporate secrets or use ransomware to blackmail thousands of people. Governments can influence foreign populations remotely and at relatively low cost. Whether the threat is malware, phishing, or disinformation, they all exploit high-velocity networks of computers and people.
In the old days, it took time and work to steal secrets, blackmail people, and meddle across borders. Then came the internet. From the beginning, it was designed as a frictionless communication platform across countries, companies, and computers. Reducing friction is generally considered a good thing: it saves time and effort, and in many genuine ways makes our world smaller. There are also often financial incentives: more engagement, more ads, more dollars. But the internet's lack of friction has been a boon to the dark side, too. Now, in a matter of hours a "bad actor" can steal corporate secrets or use ransomware to blackmail thousands of people. Governments can influence foreign populations remotely and at relatively low cost. Whether the threat is malware, phishing, or disinformation, they all exploit high-velocity networks of computers and people.
Lets NOW get regulations put it, while WE have a lot of say and clout and while we have a lot of politicians we can buy off to help make sure that regulations benefit US more AND in a way that hurts other startups.
This business is as wrote as history. When you are small, you hate regs because they cause you pain... when you are BIG, you like regs because you can buy a few of them that help keep your business either directly or at least quasi blessed by one or more of the government agencies. And what is wrong with having the ear of government? And like the TARP bailouts... getting to big to fail is an insurance policy all its own! Government will happily put businesses on welfare too!
This person is pushing towards totalitarianism like they have in China. Someone (or something) checking what you are doing every step of the way.
This is great for the powerful, bad for the people. Good for the copyright holders, bad for spreading culture. Good for dictators and spies (ie. hacking team), bad for Wikileaks.
The hackability and "lack of friction" is a feature, it gives the people a fighting chance. Good days when the engineers of the internet had good ideology on their code.
This is dumb. The abolition explicitly reduced the government's role in the Internet. Reduced — while the TFA argues for an increase: all of the analogies mentioned (speed-limits, prescription- and licensing-requirements) are enforced by government.
Like the early US, Internet was Libertarian — treating censorship as damage and routing around it, remember? The same unfortunate tendencies, which make the countries increasingly authoritarian, can now be observed online...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.