The ethos that made the internet so wildly successful is not the ethos of a majority of its members at this point. Any ISP has the ability to “unroute” traffic by claiming to be a site it doesn’t own, and flushing all the packets it receives. We are relying on the neighborly nature of lots of ISPs working together, and that’s certainly not the way most people are. Wikipedia depends on passionate volunteers who keep out the spammers. Wikipedia is only 45 minutes from utter chaos if all those volunteers, who are in no way contractually obligated to stay, leave. The internet’s siblings to those wikipedia volunteers are called NANOG, they are the passionate volunteers who fix the “map” of the internet whenever someone attempts to alter it maliciously. What happens if those, again, not contractually obligated volunteers, leave?
Originally, personal computers merely ran any executable code that you asked them to run. What would have happened if someone had distributed bad code? They could have taken down several computers, but for 20 years, no one did. Today’s pcs have huge stacks of software running at any given time, and their users don’t know which ones are good and which ones are bad. Since computers are increasingly networked, and we’ve legislated to allow ecommerce, we now have a huge motivation to distribute bad code – money.
Steve Jobs has said that the beauty of the iPhone is that Apple can control it, meaning it’s nothing like the pc because no one can send you bad code. Even after the app store launched, Apple approves all apps available in the app store to protect its users. But that gives apple the power to deny any app at any time. Apple can pull the plug on any app you use without explanation. In fact, Apple has denied apps merely because they seem to be pointless and they might offend part of the user base (case in point: a Bush presidency countdown clock that was denied). What would Wikipedia be now if they had denied everything that might be offensive or pointless? The same thing is happening with Facebook apps.
Our devices are now “updating” themselves to be things quite different from what we bought. What if your toaster got an upgrade and suddenly started making orange juice? We are no longer purchasing devices we control (like the pc), we are merely paying to enter into enigmatic breakfast-oriented relationships.
Contractually, Apple could reprogram all iphones over the air to turn on their mics and send the ambient noises back to Apple. They wouldn’t even have to tell users that they did this. We would only know that our batteries aren’t lasting as long as they used to.
What do we do? We can all report to each other what software we are running and what software our “experts” are running, so that when someone tells your computer to run code, you have some idea of whether that code is new or old or common or rare. That would be a good start.
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