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Inviting Attack
Nov. 29th, 2011 10:27 amI'm pondering the current LiveJournal attackers, along with the ever-present spammers of mail and newsgroups and blogs, SEO con artists, and various types of anonymous trolls and abusers.
One view of the network that enables all this is that its creators were nice people and amazingly naive, that the worst of humanity's parasitic nature, which would be magnified by commercialization of the net, was beyond their imagining. On the other hand, we (technologists) keep doing it. It's not just 70s technology that's being hijacked to serve one scam or another but today's as well.
I wonder whether we still don't expect low-life to be quite that low or whether the pressure to ship software now (!), either for money or acclaim, stops people from confronting the possibility that they're putting another "weapon" into the wrong hands.
(It all reminds me too much of "Nobel's Safety Powder".)
If the originators of TCP/IP and the various services that use it had designed with perfect foresight, what would the internet look like? Would it even have been usable enough to develop into something popular and worth attacking?
One view of the network that enables all this is that its creators were nice people and amazingly naive, that the worst of humanity's parasitic nature, which would be magnified by commercialization of the net, was beyond their imagining. On the other hand, we (technologists) keep doing it. It's not just 70s technology that's being hijacked to serve one scam or another but today's as well.
I wonder whether we still don't expect low-life to be quite that low or whether the pressure to ship software now (!), either for money or acclaim, stops people from confronting the possibility that they're putting another "weapon" into the wrong hands.
(It all reminds me too much of "Nobel's Safety Powder".)
If the originators of TCP/IP and the various services that use it had designed with perfect foresight, what would the internet look like? Would it even have been usable enough to develop into something popular and worth attacking?
