Massive Washington Post series on Internet history and security http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/30/net-of-insecurity-part-1/?hpid=z1
This is an extremely long article which is Part 1 of a series in the Washington Post about the history of the ARPANET/Internet and why we currently live with the network security and abuse elements that are all too apparent today. The article includes both text and some video interviews, some great photos (including of the UCLA IMP #1 -- you can still see one of the bolts on top that we used to joke were for "lowering it down into submarines"). I'd like to emphasize a couple of aspects. For those of us who rode this ride over these years, so much of the effort for a very long time was focused on just getting basic communications to operate in robust and reliable ways. We were a relatively small and closed community, built almost entirely on trust that we'd all behave properly. Anyone who seriously transgressed risked a visit from officials and ignominious removal from the ecosystem. It was such a small community that we had thin printed directories listing our contact numbers, and a somewhat thicker one listing available network resources (I still have all of mine). There's a line that Jimmy Stewart says near the beginning of the 1965 film "The Flight of the Phoenix" - "Time was you could take real pride, in just getting there." That was largely what we were concerned with -- getting there. And another thing, it was not generally anticipated that our work would transition in the manner it has to a wide-open, global communications foundation. Yes, we assumed our work would help point the way, but there was a general belief that the phone companies would build the public data networks their way and more in the model of traditional telephone networks and billing. That ARPANET became Internet became the world's communication network as it has was not reasonably predictable early on, just as it was not predictable that domain names would become valuable commercial properties. (While I own one of the first 40 dot-com domain names ever issued -- back when you could get them issued for free -- you can bet that if I had been able to see the future in this regard I would have asked for a few select others on that same phone call.) --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir
