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Yes, it was, Michael. At the time of web swooshing over
other competitors, there was the whole hurrah about the
simplicity of TCP/IP, worse is better, 80/20 and so on from
the usual suspects. It was witless, self-serving, and
the myths became accepted as facts, were fed into the
Darwin Machine, and uncaring nature as it always does,
discriminated little between safe applications and
unsafe applications. The defenses for it read like
the P2P file sharing defenses that claim they can't
filter when anyone who understands metadata and
hash marks knows they can, but hey, "up the system"
as they used to say in the olden daze while getting
famous for the crap that passed for art. Now engineers
have the same 'be a star' disease. Me too. The difference
is I have to answer the RFP truthfully even if it
costs my company the contract because the procurement
personnel 'drank the kool-aid' while accepting the
Federal dollars.
The reason we have a brain is to make judgements about
such things, not to go lemming like over the cliff just
because the crowd is going there. There are lots of
businesses for which such risks are acceptable. There
are some that are not, but today we have the pundits
espousing, consultants reading, and few considering
the really obvious problems that are there at the base
of an 80/20 design being used for applications for
which it isn't designed.
That's stupid. You may be right about the curse of
the witless. You'll hear it when those pdas in the
hands of the first responders stop working as their
servers go 'off the air' just as the truck or plane
filled with something nasty takes out the local mall.
Hang on to your radio. RF doesn't know about DDoS.
The web was fielded witlessly.
len
From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]
On Feb 5, 2004, at 9:21 AM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> , but the fault lies in the design of the Internet
> itself; specifically, TCP/IP. It's another case of 80/20 coming
> back to bite us.
>
> The web was fielded witlessly.
The Web (or rather the TCP/IP Internet, you appear to mean from the
context) wasn't "fielded witlessly" it was designed to solve a problem
that had we ever faced, the Russian malware authors would be as
radioactively dead as the American male potency enhancement spammers.
The commercial world jumped on it because TCP/IP works as well for very
real infrastructure link failures as it does in hypothetical nuclear
attacks . As always, Father Darwin had the last word, and the
monoculture that this success created serves as a fertile ground for
all sorts of parasites that exploit the lack of
accountability/tracability/confirmation that are inconsistent with
TCP/IP's core mission of simply and efficiently routing around points
of failure.
It may be time to change priorities and either handle routing and
reliable messaging farther down in the infrastructure or add new layers
in the middle of the stack so that there can be better authentication
and accountability at the levels we care about. Whatever is done, it's
likely that a new type of parasite will evolve to exploit it -- maybe
we'll trade the hassles the spammers create for the hassles the
bureaucrats create, and in 20 years curse the "witless" people who
created the situation. Such is life (and I think the invevitability
of parasitism is well-known in Artificial Life as well).
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