-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.32/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.32/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 32</A> ----- Laissez Faire City Times Aug 16, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 32 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Cyberdefense of a Virtual Community Part 1: Keeping the Grid (and the Dream) Alive by Estaban Hill The Internet was originally designed to be a communications system that was indifferent to message routes. If a nuclear bomb hit a large city in the middle of the country, communications could continue from other parts of the north to the south, and the east to the west. The communication messages would travel alternative routes. Even if the only route from New York to Los Angeles might be from New York to London, to Norway, to Sydney, to a satellite over the Pacific Ocean, and finally to Los Angeles. But this seemingly invincible communications system only addresses the problem of computer data and messages getting from one point to another. What happens if some cluster bomb hits the city where your ISP is based? Where your home page, e-commerce, and Internet-based business is physically web served? The Internet, as a flexible communication system, would continue routing traffic around the ashes of the city where your ISP and Internet site were located. But that wouldn�t help you much. The point here is that the current "survives nuclear attack" description of the Internet communications system only applies to those that are not at ground-zero; or that are not at the center of a powerful government agency cyber attack on the web page/site/application or personal finances of an "enemy of the state". So, how can you avoid being nuked or gov�d? The answer is in the wires. Guerrilla Computing Before we get to the main point, let�s correct some commonly used, but limiting language. Forget "Home Pages" and "Web Pages". That is simplespeak�language that limits the mind by the use of na�ve, childish, or dummy terms and categories (as in "language for dummies"). Is yahoo.com a web page? Or a site? Or something else? What yahoo.com really is, is a computer program that runs through a web browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. Many years ago Bob Metcalf, inventor of the Ethernet network protocol, predicted the next great operating system (OS) would be the Internet combined with a web browser. In a sense we are already there. A web page is a computer program. We need to think of web/home pages/sites as computer applications. This applies even to a web page containing only text information. Before it was on the web, this information was just a text file. But once it is hyperlinkable from any web browser, accessing it requires computer commands: code in the HTML language to display the results. Whether your site contains buttons, or other special sections to go to, or stock quotes, news services, secure web-based-encrypted email systems (such as http://www.mailvault.com), or even Digital Monetary Trust (DMT) anonymous banking transactions, they are all web applications. Static, or dynamic, some programs do more than others, are more interactive, or perform more valuable services. Now think of MailVault, a secure, web-browser-based encrypted email system. There is not just one computer somewhere called www.mailvault.com doing this mail system. There are probably dozens of computers running the MailVault system as each of us sees it�displayed by a browser on a computer screen. Millions of users, logging in, checking mail, sending mail, getting pop mail from external mail servers. This is a fancy web page, or web site. It is also a fancy computer program, that runs over a web browser, and could be accessed by millions of people at the same time. These types of web applications can run on 100's of computers at the same time. This is a new breed of program. Call it guerrilla computing. Guerrilla computing is distributed computing. Shoot one computer down, and another pops up in its place. But there is more to it than this. Share and Share Alike Most of us are familiar with "running" Microsoft Word on our machines. Each machine has its own copy, and the program runs on only one machine independently of the others. By contrast, the new Internet programming methods allow for what is technically called "clustering" and "load balancing". Let me explain. What these techniques allow is for programmers to write a computer program that runs on multiple machines at the same time, and to distribute the processing and traffic load among the machines in the "cluster" automatically with no additional programming. If a busy site was getting 1 million hits a day, and there were 10 machines in the cluster of computers, the load balancing software would dynamically assign 100,000 hits to each machine in the cluster, to achieve 10 times the speed of a single machine (referring here to processing speed of the traffic or to the number of transactions). Need more speed, better performance? Get another 100 machines, and plug them into the cluster. And that�s only the start of a beautiful relationship. This clustering is nice. It gives us scalability. But it also gives us more than the ability to just add 10 or 1,000 machines to the cluster and increase the capacity of the entire system. It has given us the ability to "run" a computer program application on many machines, thus making all the machines act as one large computer, running one large application. These are not just machines with copies of the web pages, these are connected machines sharing data, and variables, and globally acting as one machine. Now, let�s take advantage of this scalability of clustering and load-balancing�by using the core Internet communications protocol standard (TCP/IP) as the protocol of communications between the machines in the cluster. With TCP/IP, we can stretch the distance from 3 feet between each computer system to 5,000 miles. Each computer system could be located in a different physical location around the globe. In the event of a bomb landing on Site #5�say your New York City ISP hosted web location�only 1 of your 10 computers that is running your web page/application in any particular city or communications system would be shut down. The "application" continues to run on your other 9 unaffected machines scattered over the Internet-enabled globe. Even if there were users connected to the machine that is destroyed or shut down, there is "fault tolerance"�the ability of a system to have a failure, yet continue in its function unaffected. This is widely used today on critical information network servers. Many servers have fault tolerant systems, called "RAID storage systems", which at certain levels perform fault tolerance on a hard disk drive. This is accomplished by having 2 disk drives that are written and read from simultaneously with the same information. If a single hard drive (drive 1) fails, or crashes, the system continues using the other drive (drive 2) unaffected. Many times these hard drives are also "hot" swappable. This means that while the computer is running, and the system is performing international financial transactions, you can pull a defective or even perfectly functioning hard drive out of the computer, and slide a replacement in its place. All the while the power is on, and when the replacement drive is recognized by the system, the computer "rebuilds" the new drive automatically as a clone, and starts using it in sync with the original drive (drive 1). No data lost, no beats skipped. Fault Tolerance This same technique of "hot" swapping hard disk drives while a system is active can be applied to this web application clustering technology to make a global web site/application system extremely resistant to many forms of attack; and extremely resilient also. The global web application can have a New York Internet server node taken out (nuked or gov�d or by some other mechanism), and it continues unaffected. A server in Asia is plugged into the Internet, and with the proper authentication, it is assigned as a node; the global web application installs all necessary software and data, and this machine becomes one with the others. The system almost becomes an organism, something that can live within the Internet. All that is needed is a suitable "host." Any attack by unfriendly fire will have little effect. The system will dynamically move, and perhaps may never be located on the same machines by the end of the week. Dynamic Scalability Is Here Now This is not sci-fi. These web applications exist today. I am personally programming some of them now. Even the "host system" growing new nodes is to the point of being automatic. The new Macintosh systems have what is called NetBoot, which gives the computer the ability to NOT even have a hard disk drive, only a net connection. Plug the power in, the Internet connection cable, and the system searches out its "master" with instructions, and�with the proper authentication�self-loads its software. Linux also has this feature. Members of an organization could travel the world, purchase a Pentium computer, plug into the net, insert a floppy disk, and the machine not only installs the necessary software, it will also install its entire Operating System. Authorized individuals would also be able to login to a web location, and dynamically turn their machine�s processor, hard-drive space, and bandwidth over to this global application. Clever programmers are already creating artificially intelligent agents, or computer program robots, that are searching the net for suitable friendly host computers, and duplicating their content and applications with no human interaction. On a smaller scale, some hosts that are being taken advantage of now are the many "free" web site portals, such as GeoCities and Tripod. In the future it will be any location on the Internet that is capable of doing a calculation, or of storing data. This means it is now possible to speak freely (as in "free speech") in spite of a presidential decree from some hostile country, and to have the information spread almost as a friendly virus, distributing itself to friendly hosts world wide with no human intervention. For a globally distributed website/application of this type to be destroyed or closed down, would require a near blackout of the entire Internet and global communications system. This will not happen. Protection is on the side of the defenders, and therefore victory also. The system lives in the wires. Shut down the wires, and you shut down your economy. Lock out the foreign wires, and you shut down foreign trade, suffocating your own people. These and other new technical abilities are opening new opportunities for free men and women. For free speech. For free commerce. Eternal life for the billion dollar value financial services soon to be competing with the dollar and the existing corrupt government-controlled bank cartels. Many of these services will be offering substantial competitive pricing, service, and quality. Some totalitarian countries will not like the free market competition, and will try and curb their citizens and world trade partners from exercising free choice in their contracts. Meanwhile, these new systems will live, and will thrive. The most powerful individuals in the world are working on these systems, and they are not on Wall Street, nor elected officials, nor CEOs. They are passion-driven, freedom-determined. They are the next generation. Whisper to yourself: encryption, anonymous banking, power. You will not meet these people, you will not see these people. They will be shaking financial markets from behind their portable computers and anonymous wireless satellite connections. Deep with-in the system. And living simple lives wherever they choose. Sovereign Individuals, making their own way. Making a system all can use. Making a system for free men and women. And remember: it's all just Ones and Zeros. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Estaban Hill ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is the author of "Is MP3 the Future of Music?" He is currently working on the cyberdefense of Laissez Faire City. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 32, August 16, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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