Jonathan Zittrain is a professor of Internet Governance at Oxford University. Recently he wrote a book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, describing the uncertain future of the internet. In April, he sat down for an interesting and entertaining interview with Brooke Gladstone.
In the interview, Zittrain explains his apprehension towards the future of the internet. He believes that the wicked use of the internet over the past decade has drastically threatened the internet’s fate. In other words, people who are using the internet for malicious intent could cause a chain reaction that would create over protective security measures that stifle the internet. This stifling would result in an impediment on the way people use the internet to create and invent. Zittrain also believe we are at a crossroads of sorts, “One is tethered to a central brain and barricaded, like the IBM mainframes of old. The other path is the unbounded Internet we have now… that allows everyone to tinker… unimpeded.”
Like Zittrain, I think that the openness of internet should be preserved in order to uphold its beneficial properties that promote the creativity of the everyday person. And although this openness could result in more identity thefts and computer viruses, it is worth it. Not only is it worth it, but there are many ways to help prevent malicious intent in a manner which would not “stifle” the internet in any means. For instance, in the interview Zittrain discusses Butler Lamson’s red machine and green machine idea. Lamson has created a system where 2 virtual pc’s sit inside one computer. One of the virtual pc's inside of the computer, the green zone could be used for all of one’s important data like financials and term papers. And with a flip of a switch, the computer could change to the red zone where one could “preserve the experimental spirit” of the internet. If the red zone becomes compromised, it can be erased and rebooted with no harm done to anything involved with the green zone. It is important that this idea and others like it be promoted and developed to ensure the everlasting openness of the internet. Without them, we could end up with overprotective measures which lead us down the wrong path of the crossroads we now face.
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Brian, I have not listened to Jonathan Zittrain’s interview with Brooke Gladstone but I did find your post to be very interesting. What I found most interesting is when you discuss Butler Lamson’s red machine and green machine idea. This seems like a great idea! I am wondering though how Lamson would be able to protect the green machine better than the red machine or current machines unless he plans to keep the green machine unconnected to the internet. You discuss how the green machine or zone is used for important things like finances, but I do my banking online, so assuming the green zone were not connected to the internet, it would defeat the point. I probably do not understand the idea well enough. I am sure one could have increased security settings on the green machine, but won’t hackers adapt to these security settings eventually? This idea seems very interesting, yet I do not understand how one would go about protecting the green machine in a realistic way to the point that it would eliminate identity thefts and computer viruses.
ReplyDeleteI think I agree with Allison's comments; the red must have a way to access the green, and a hacker with access to the red could eventually find the green. That said, the idea isn't totally without merit. It's also not totally new, though; I am in a certain sense using a red/green system right now!
ReplyDeleteMy computer dual boots between windows and ubuntu, and I have a shared partition between my two OS partitions. These three partitions act, as you said, like seperate hard drives within the same physical computer, and one can always be reformatted without causing damage to the others. Also, it's relatively unlikely that a windows virus would be able to harm anything in ubuntu, or vice versa. (Not sure about the shared one, though..)