Comments On The “How To Save The Internet” Article

Scott Berinato has written an article commenting on Professor Hari’s predictions of the Internet’s demise. Most interestingly, he gathered the opinions of some people in the industry on the topic of “how to save the Internet”.

I’d like to comment on a few of the ideas:

Create a giant Manhattan Project style think tank. I like this, but it’s easy to get into the trend of having meetings about meetings and/or coming up with lofty policy ideas that have zero chance of being implemented.

Have a security czar. This too, is a good idea, but it’d have to be a very powerful position rather than some political figurehead with no teeth. They’d have to have enough authority to really do some major shaking up.

Treat users like dummies. While that may not be the best way to put it, I’d have to agree on this one to some extent. Unfortuntately, the degree to which admins lock down what users can do is directly related to the size of the staff needed in the user support department. Developers often code for “admin needed” (since it’s easier), and that would have to be looked at if changes were to be made in this area without having a major cost impact.

Eliminate coding errors in 2 years. The two years part belongs on theonion.com somewhere…that’s just crazy. And as for eliminating errors, that’s a tall order in ANY timeframe. To me it’s more interesting and efficient to address the ability to limit what can happen to a system even if the errors exist. In other words, rather than trying to eliminate errors, make systems more resistant to them.

Require licenses on systems that can be programmed on. This seems a bit extreme. First of all, in order to be useful in any way, computers have to be able to have software loaded onto them. From there, being able to say “everything’s ok, except stuff that you can write code in” is not trivial by any means. I mean, you can write code in notepad, compile it in a PuTTY window, and then download it to the local system again; I don’t see anything realistic coming out of this one.

Create a Cyber Police force. This seems logical. All it would really be, however, is a focused area of existing law enforcement agencies, and I think this is well on the way.

Site data via XML, i.e. you go to a site and you get transparently handed down security information about it — which your browser or other application could then take action based on. This is very interesting, but I see obcious problems. First off, getting this information to be current, accurate, and un-biased would be nearly impossible. Secondly, how do you get sites to include information that users’ browsers will respond negatively towards on their own sites? So if I am wearebadpeople.com and the open-metainfo-group’s info says my site is bad (and Internet Explorer 9 might block it by default), then why am I going to include that data on my server? I’d have to be forced to do so, which is more red tape.

The creation of a newer, more secure Internet that we’d move to eventually. Uh, no. Our physical connections aren’t what make the current Internet insecure — it’s the stuff connected to it. If you move that stuff to a new network, you now have a new, insecure network.

All in all, though, I like this sort of brainstorming and I hope it continues.: