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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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