In other words, if everything had happened ten years later we would now be around the same point we were 10 years ago. No one could have foreseen the problems the Internet would bring until there was an Internet. Which pretty much demonstrates the pointlessness of such counterfactual considerations. But anyway, let's bash Microsoft as usual for not being smart and prescient enough. As if only Windows had security weaknesses. And we know Windows is a pretty trivial operating system that should be easy to patch up. Otoh, without Windows, who really would have been using the Internet leading to all the amazing services that have been created within it? Possibly a brief mention of the endless advantages it has brought all of us would not be amiss. Frankly I don't find spam to be much of an issue nowadays in any case. Criminals will catch you out in other places too. They always will. Better education about computers and the Internet is what could be the best help there just as it is IRL.
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag von Joel C. Ewing Gesendet: Dienstag, 24. Juli 2012 18:10 An: [email protected] Betreff: Re: Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet? On 07/24/2012 06:59 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote: > In <[email protected]>, on 07/23/2012 > at 07:32 PM, "Joel C. Ewing" <[email protected]> said: > >> The government ARPA-net became the Internet we know today because >> Al Gore recognized its potential and pushed legislation, first in >> 1988 to help link universities and libraries, and additional >> legislation in 1992 which opened it to commercial traffic. > > In an anarchic fashion that opened us up to all sorts of network > abuse. > >> Probably someone else would have eventually done so if he hadn't, >> but maybe not for another decade or more; > > And maybe without the epidemics of, e.g., spam, virus attacks, DOS > attacks. > That certainly would have been nice, but I'm not convinced anyone at the time understood the potential scope of those problems, much less would have been seriously motivated to have come up with a technical solution that would have prevented them before the Internet made it obvious they were serious issues. The virus vulnerability (and number of spambots and DOS attack bots) on the Internet is much more a function of the Operating Systems of the user nodes connected to the Internet than of the Internet itself. Much of the current problem stems from early MS Windows design philosophy, which didn't take the Internet seriously and implicitly assumed networking and data sharing would would only involve local networking where all parties had benign intent; so, MS made it easy for machines to share active content that could access and alter content on remote machines or even initiate remote programs on other machines, and put the integrity management burden on end users without providing any tools to make management possible. When MS belatedly recognized the importance of the Internet and began supplying Internet applications and interfaces to allow mass access beyond local networks, that's when all heck began to break loose with a vengeance. But does anyone think MS would have had any inclination to harden their Windows designs and reduce virus vulnerability if they were not forced to do it by problems made evident by connecting Windows systems to the Internet? Even motivated by that pressure for over 15 years, their products and users are still vulnerable. In hindsight we can now see things that should have been done better, but I doubt if much of that would have been obvious without our experience with the current Internet. Local networks with one centralized authority with the power to immediately terminate a deliberate network abuser and chastise an accidental abuser were so much simpler to manage. -- Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
