Slashdot Mirror
'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.
just no
The true sign /. has jumped the shark when it starts pushing this kind of authoritarian bullshit.
It's not the speed of the internet that is the problem- it's humans adapting to it.
Whether it's behavior or security practices it is all about adaptation. Adding "friction" is corporate weasel terminology for "I'm an MBA and can't understand this".
There's nothing like getting a blank stare from an MBA, who is your boss, who either refuses, or cannot, understand technology or it's social consequences.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
"For example, a piece of software should not be able to penetrate more than 10 percent of a corporate intranet without its growth being paused and an IT admin explicitly approving any additional installations." How is this going to work? All installations of software need to be actively approved by someone. Unless you are talking about allowing end users install their own software. Then I don't know how you would control it to 10 percent. Anyway, I don't know how that would help stop anything.
By abolishing net neutrality?
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!
I can't tell if the author is a raging dumb-ass or very, very snarky.
..they want us to revert back from fiber to Bell-202 ?!?
Google has a parallel internet twice as fast as the regular Internet. They can move everything they own across the world than we plebs can move stuff through the Internet. They built it using leased optic fibre lines around the world that they bought at a bargain when the dot com bubble burst. Now they are preaching to us that the Internet need to be slower.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
That Slashdot has gone so much downhill as to post stuff like this.
The idea behind this article is probably the stupidest thing I've ever read. And I've read two Ayn Rand novels.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Like Google. That's what the Internet needs.
For smarter people, they will KNOW whether it's actually dangerous or not.
I see this time and time again, the notion that dumber people will get what's coming to them, but everyone affects everyone else. We all vote, we share the same civic spaces, we share infrastructure, tax base, etc. You want protections in place that protect the dumber people, not the smarter people. By the very nature of the definition of smarter people, they don't need protection. But that protection isn't for the sake of the individual, it's for the sake of the society and nation state.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Everyone with a technical mind here will think that "adding friction" is about inserting delays in transfer protocols, which is a stupid idea.
But the article is not about technical bandwidth, but about social conventions. It *is* a good idea to reduce the amount of exposure to bad actors, as every security specialist can tell you. Spam filters, white lists and ad blockers add friction to transmission, and we all consider those a good thing, even if sometimes you need to recover false positives from within the filters.
Similarly, closed group-based social networks like Whatsapp are less prone than Twitter to focusing noise onto a single spot. Twitter is known for destroying the life of people in a few hours, and it happens because of the speed with which information on a topic can propagate through the network and concentrate the discussion of the whole internet on the timeline of a single person or reduced group. If the topic needs to propagate slowly through several closed groups, it is less prone to produce the same burning effect.
Pursuing those objectives - isolating one from bad content, reducing speed of propagation, distributing replicated info through several smaller channels - is a good use for social friction in the net.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Maybe he penned it during last week's walk-out?
No, they're not a big company like Google.
They own Google.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
How to use the internet safely? https://www.susthesurfer.com/h...
That the author is employed is a testament to his ability to sell bull shit.
That this fluff piece got published is a testament to no one reviews articles before they are published.
If we take a our way back machine, we would learn that security was an after thought to software design. Largely because computers were non-networked, single user (as opposed to multi-user) machines. Then computers started to be multi user machines, more than one person working on the the same machine and then they started talking to each other, i.e., networked.
During this evolution from single user to multi-user and to networked, people started looking at security. How to prevent people in a multi user environment from seeing each others information and how to prevent people from their computers accessing someone else's computer on the same network.
This was all BEFORE 1994 and the WORLD WIDE WEB. The internet existed long before 1994 but when you say "internet" you are referring to the WORLD WIDE WEB.
So no the internet did not change anything. As multi user environments became the norm and networking evolved, security became an issue and a concern.
What you jackasses like Google did was continue the long history of software makers ignoring security concerns. But you did it AFTER people where focusing on security. You did it AFTER lessons learned. You COULD HAVE backed in security into your products and services but CHOSE not to.
So please fuck off.
"Content that might contain phishing or malware could be extra-delayed to algorithmically look for patterns in suspicious links or attachments."
Gee, I wonder where we might get some service to scan, parse, examine, study and commercialize our digital correspondence?
Hopefully a friction-less computer can do it so I can hurry up and wait for my communications to be approved!
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.
Soft of, and I've read those novels also. There's a nasty coincidence between her expression of Objectivism and Socialist theology, but another topic, another time...
No, the idea that the Internet make 'easy' what is better left to be 'difficult' is the lament of the powerful. They loathe their opposition, of course, and often consider much if the opposition to be inadequate, uneducated, common, and beneath respect or inclusion. There is no particular political movement more or less guilty of this I suspect, though it's an argument intended to divide 'us'.
And we forget, before the Internet, that information was well controlled, but not necessarily of better quality nor more trustworthy, The Pentagon Papers were the Wikileaks of their day. And this is an issue not just for news, but look at the courts. SO many 'public records' that are only now really accessible, and yes they engage in both suppression and rent-seeking by assessing fees, requiring you be qualified by trade or association, blah blah.
This is the last thing the Internet needs. The argument is the same as locking the dumpsters to keep the divers and scavengers out - it's annoying for the expected users, it won't actually keep the unwanted out, and one mistake forgetting to set the lock opens up the floodgates. It doesn't take mere hours to compromise a major site's databases, it takes much work in advance to find the ways. That the data is moved in figurative moments isn't the point, unless you think real time monitoring is good enough to catch bit transfers and block them, which clearly didn't happen at Yahoo!, Equifax (or whoever they are all the same to me). and others. But it's a fabulous topic, one that belongs here. Plainly.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"Highways have speed limits and drugs require prescriptions"
Both are just suggestions that you can ignore whenever you want or need it.
I have never driven an automatic, always stick, so i an accustomed to use a friction clutch. Where is the problem? I know that those lazy Americans have some problems to drive a five-speed manual, but we in Europe are accustomed.
I once have driven a car with a broken clutch for 20 km to reack the nearest car mechanic and was a bit tricky to drive witout friction, especially stating
If there's one thing I've learned from the internet, it's that friction is bad and lube is essential.
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.
My immediate reaction is that the article is nonsense, but I'm willing to withhold judgement unless there's some concrete proposals. For example, it's not uncommon for people to greylist email or have a timeout after a number of failed login attempts. Both of those could be considered "friction" of the sort the author is talking about, and I don't have a problem with those.
But I think we should also be thinking about the opposite: What happens if everything is open and virtually frictionless? What if computers get so fast that we can't trust encryption anymore?
We send around encrypted traffic all the time with the idea that it's safe, and then we hear stories about how some encryption scheme had a flaw and can be cracked (or will soon be able to be cracked). So consider what would happen if someone were to have intercepted and stored your encrypted email or HTTPS traffic, and in 5 years it becomes trivial to crack. Are you going to be fine with all of that information to be out in the open? Scarier still, what happens if a suitable replacement isn't created in time, and we can't adequately encrypt things. How will we keep the world operating if we can no longer secure our transactions? Is there another model of operation that can exist in a transparent world without secrets?
I'm not saying it will happen, or even that it's likely to happen, but I think we should be considering what we want to do if it does happen.
The person behind the idea that caused the article to be written, is pretty seriously misunderstanding reality at it's present state, for sure. However, I feel like the reason that it's posted here on slashdot is because it exposes what sort of ideas are being kicked around by those that can make shit happen. It allows some of us to read between the lines.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
So the morons who wanted to move fast and break things suddenly realize they broke everything. No shit. You broke democracy through one social network that is a spying platform and another that has never made a dime.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
Adding "sleep" statements to my code right away!
Some settling may occur during posting.
So this privileged male of European decent (Justin Kosslyn) thinks he or people just like him, should be allowed to take control over tax-payer built internet (Throttle speed) and discriminate based on income, ethnicity, gender, or what ever. So he can feel safer, like In the old days. Maybe like when we had "Jim Crow Laws" those good old days? I mean when you consider context clues like the history of our country. I can't be sure but this sound familiar. as for internet throttling my view is (If it ain't broke, don't fix it)
The person behind the idea that caused the article to be written, is pretty seriously misunderstanding reality at it's present state, for sure. However, I feel like the reason that it's posted here on slashdot is because it exposes what sort of ideas are being kicked around by those that can make shit happen. It allows some of us to read between the lines.
Oh, I feel it is absolutely to know what kinds of things people are thinking. Even this ridiculous "give the internet friction" idea. It's important to know what stupid ideas people have, so that you know to oppose them.
People who only read "The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed" or, on the other side, people who only listen to "Fox News and Breitbart", are really not doing themselves any favours. It is important to see all sides of an issue. Even the stupid side.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
We should ban all advertisements on the internet, they are the enabler that allows anyone to afford putting up useless content. Without advertisements we wouldn't have the social media sites that are basically the epitome of your claimed 'problems'. Look in the mirror pal.
brutal.... I like your style
It appears you don't understand how privatisation can deregulate the restraints to power. Where social media used to be treated as public speech where there were restraints to censorship Facebook is now free to censor whatever they want, and they outsource that job to whatever interest group wants control, including the Atlantic Council , the neoconservative Weekly Standard and the state itself. Without restraints.
Convenience instead of security, that's why there are so many security issues in, e.g., IoT devices. The goal of the IoT vendors appears to be to make it as easy as possible to get the device online so that data collection can commence. Until that goal changes, security will continue to suffer.
First, this does not even identify the right problem: The problem is in the end-points, not the network. Second, "friction" will not solve it. It is the wrong idea in the wrong place. Third, does this person even know how the technology works he is talking about? Apparently not. Next: Even adding minutes of "friction" to software (malware) distribution, that would not help. I did some research in this area about 2 decades ago, you still can saturate the whole net and reach all vulnerable targets with significant delays. Analysis of malware takes days, so unless you propose to slow it down that much, this is just a very bad idea that stems from lack of understanding.
The actual issue is bad endpoint security and, if you want to blame the network, global direct reachability.
Google really seems to be in decline, if that is the level of insight they have to offer there.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What I don't understand is the above sentence...
Well, as they ought to be — they aren't a governmental institution...
As long as government can not tell them, whom to censor....
This would be against the First Amendment — do you have citations?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just come and propose that BSD adopt systemd on Slashdot and you'll see just how much friction the internet can generate.
By abolishing net neutrality?
By abolishing net neutrality?
It's called ads. And also your general confusion over the content you are drowning in.
but close enough... https://xkcd.com/669/
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
The internet is full of bad stuff. Fake news, lies, ads, identity thieves, scam artists. But I worry when someone else gets to decide what is 'BAD' and what is 'GOOD' and try and eliminate or handicap everything they don't personally agree with. There is plenty of 'friction', but it is in my brain where I prefer it to be. I don't fall for everything that gets posted on social media, or even in mainstream news outlets. I am skeptical of almost everything I see today. You are a fool if you believe a significant portion of the BS being pushed on the internet.
Anyone screaming for regulation just thinks they'll be the ones doing the regulating.
Especially if you are already big yourself and don't want to face any competition.
Pretty well spot on, but I also want to point out that more powerful user devices also increase the attack strength of compromised devices. Its incredible what a modern hexacore machine with 16GB of RAM, and an SSD can accomplish. You've got to have software and infrastructure that can react fast enough.
Is this an argument for returning to good old fashioned crime, breaking the internet, or both?
The same design philosophy that accelerated the flow of correspondence, news, and commerce also accelerates the flow of phishing, ransomware, and disinformation.
Well, yes. These are called "tradeoffs".
I don't see anything in the summary (and the stupid hurts, I am not reading the article) about what we would lose with "more friction".
Anyway, there's plenty of friction on the internet, where it matters. Have to login to any site that matters, have to prove identity to things like tax services and (at least initially) banks, etc.
What Facebook and Google have proved lately is that the kind of "friction" they want is against people and ideas that they don't like. #%^ that.
Could a "bad actor" be somebody you don't agree with?
Maybe that person's views could cause sociality harm, or make you feel that you're not safe.
For example: maybe somebody could insist that there are only two genders.
[With a 5-minute delay on payment cards,] Paying a toll booth or a bus ticket or any number of on-the-spot purchases becomes impractical.
Not if the cardholder asked the issuing bank to authorize a particular (merchant, maximum amount) pair more than 5 minutes in advance.
Artificial delays will kill things like media streaming
Unless it's a live stream of a sporting event or whatever, I don't see how a 5-minute delay to buffer up the start of a stream would hurt.
gaming
Video games can be downloaded to a suitable computer in advance of play. Multiplayer video games can run on a split* screen or over a local area network (LAN).
and VOIP
Even if a low-latency channel can provide only 2400 bps each way, Codec 2 squeezes usable voice into such a channel.
* Or otherwise shared, as seen in Konami's Bomberman and Nintendo's Super Smash Bros.
and the state itself
This would be against the First Amendment — do you have citations?
Under the authority of the Communications Act, the U.S. federal government bans the broadcast of profanity. It also issues exclusive nationwide spectrum licenses to carriers that have since formed a cartel. At the local level, cities can require incoming wired service providers to agree to an unreasonably rapid buildout schedule in order to qualify for right-of-way access.
Anything using 10/8, 172.16/12, or 192.168/16 is a "private internet" according to RFC 1918 - Address Allocation for Private Internets (1996).
Dear Vice,
Go away.
Thank you.
So, nothing about the likes of Facebook, yet, right?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This guy is applying this to just the Internet, whereas I apply it to everything: our technology, in general, has evolved orders of magnitude faster than our species has evolved physiologically, especially our brains. If you use as objective an eye as possible you can see where the comparatively fast development of technology has created problems. In some ways, we, as an overall species, would have benefitted from many technologies developing slower, allowing us time to adapt better. Not that it matters now, of course; it would take a total collapse of our global civilization, to the point where nobody knows how most of our current technologies work anymore, to bring us back down to a level commensurate with our level of evolution; essentially nobody is going to give up what they already have. But we could slow things down overall a bit rather than overloading everyone with more, more, more.
This is the kind of overreaction porn I come to slashdot for.
Is this an overreaction though? You could make exactly the same claim about the postal service. It sped up the interaction between people and allowed for mail-order scams etc. too. However, that same service was also used by law enforcement to transmit information about crooks rapidly e.g by sending fingerprints, crime reports and arrest warrants between jurisdictions. The same applied when the telephone came along.
In all these cases the solution has always been that you use that same reduction in friction to speed up the police e.g. now police can get arrest warrants, photographs, files etc. sent directly to them on the street. It is far better to force everyone to speed up rather than try and make everyone slow down to the speed of some authoritarian, bureaucratic department of government. Indeed if one country did this it would likely find itself left behind by those which don't have such impediments.
You try that approaching a toll booth on an unfamiliar road at night. Tell me how it goes.
When you obtain directions through TomTom, Google Maps, or another navigation application, you could have the app notify the banks to authorize payment for tolls along your route. Apps lack this feature now but are likely to add it should banks introduce friction measures against unauthorized use of payment credentials.
Live stream is one.
Attending ball games in person rather than watching some out-of-market game through IPTV would fulfill "Third, favor local content" in Kosslyn's editorial.
Short videos a la Youtube is another. Can't stream hop when it takes awhile to start a new stream.
A counterpart to YouTube on a high-latency network would buffer multiple videos in a playlist. Allow human beings to curate these playlists, and the algorithm won't kick viewers onto an endless loop of "Finger Family", "Surprise Egg", and "Peter Parker and Elsa Agnarrsdaughter Are Roommates" videos.
Video games can be downloaded to a suitable computer in advance of play. Multiplayer video games can run on a split* screen or over a local area network (LAN).
Thus totally killing remote play. Most FPS and MMORPGs are worthless if everyone has to be in the same room or building.
Prior to Xbox Live, split-screen or LAN play was the norm, particularly with iconic shooters such as MIDI Maze, Doom (1993), GoldenEye 007, and the first Halo. Switching the dominant mode of multiplayer from online play back to split-screen or LAN play would fulfill "Third, favor local content" in Kosslyn's editorial.
Latency is exactly the problem with artificial delay. Bandwidth isn't an issue.
Perhaps I wasn't clear about it, in turn because Kosslyn's editorial wasn't clear about what constitutes "urgent content". Perhaps adding QoS would reserve a small fraction of bandwidth for low-latency use and the remainder for high-latency use.
Want to slow down the internet? Let AT&T handle it. Pay to play. Pay more to play faster. Pay even more to make your competition play slower (not a real option yet). Damn. I love a free market.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Comparing the internet to highway speed limits or pharmaceuticals makes no sense. Sometimes a prescription requirement is there for the sole purpose of lining the pockets of drug manufacturers. This is why different countries have different cutoffs for over-the-counter vs prescription only. Comparing drug restrictions to the internet amounts to making restrictions deliberately to make Zuckerfuck even richer. Likewise I am probably one of the few /. members who remember when the federal government capped the speed limit at 55mph. Whereas speed limits are SUPPOSED to represent a safe driving speed for a, very much, lesser skilled driver.
Maybe instead of artificial barriers that only serve to enrich the gatekeepers, mandate a de-centralization of all data so that one security breech does not buy the entire farm.
The preferred term is "Googledouche".