Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I always assumed it was part of the UNIX culture -- share the information,
share the patches, etc.  You get lots of completely untrained people running
Windows; many fewer non-techies running UNIX.

wg
  

    <scribbled by jonl Thu 3 May 01 08:40>
  

    
(I erased 102 so I could repost with a minor change.)


Yeah, I sometimes wonder how non-techies manage to survive even Windows.
Could be that they become more technical, or drop off. When I was doing
ecommerce, I was surprised how many people were clueful about web
security.
  

    
Lots of folks starting out with Linux don't have the skillset to
securely administer a Unix box.  It's great that they're eager to
learn, but doesn't help as far as security goes.
  

    
But at least the facilities are there.  I remember how astonished I was to
move from TRS-DOS, in which you could password-protect a floppy disk, to
DOS, in which you couldn't.

wg
  

    

Linux security will probably grow as the kernel becomes more enterprise-
ready. Businesses probably won't entrust their computer security to hackers,
but they will entrust it to those consultants who have the background for it
and look decent in a suit.
  

    
When you talk about entrusting security to hackers, how are you defining
the word "hacker"? It seems to me that any good security group would have
one or more "hackers" involved, if a hacker is someone who is creative at
exploring networks and connected systems.  That's how you can detect
vulnerabilities, no?

Wendy, do you think the original denizens of the Internet had any idea
where all this was going? Did they envision the need for the kind of
security we're seeing today?
  

    

   That "password protection" of floppies in TRS-DOS was, to put it
kindly, just a bad joke.
  

    
I'm sure it was.  But it kept the accounts files from being tampered with or
written over.

Well, as has been written many times, the earliest days of the Internet were
characterized by a lot of trust, largely because it was a relatively small,
relativelyl homogeneous population.  But PGP was written in what? 1991?  So
obviously people were thinking about the need for some kind of security.
And certainly consciousness of hackers goes all the way back to 1984 and the
movie War Games -- er, sorry, rab, crackers.  I first read about the cracker
type person in Bill Landreth's book, and that was mid 1980s.  And the
potential for widespread damage was pretty clearly shown in 1988 with the
Internet Worm.  So these really aren't new issues.  It's just that there's
more at stake now.

And it's likely to get worse -- it's not just that we're opening up a world
in which millions of people have insecure people attached to permanent
Internet connections, but that the tools are so easy to find and use now and
we're going to have an entire generation of teenagers at home after school
with broadband Internet connections (and you can launch so many more attacks
so much faster over broadband)...

What's interesting is to look at 802.11b, which I became aware of only
recently.  You've got geeks driving all over SF looking for open wireless
networks and finding them, but at the moment it's like the old Internet days
-- they just want to borrow some bandwidth.  And there's an outfit here in
London that wants to promote that, so you could sit anywhere in town and use
a wireless card and get online, kind of grass roots public utility.  But you
kjnow that if it grows into the mainstream you're going to find the same
kinds of abuses popping up we';re seeing on the Internet now.  Well, maybe
not -- it's like the IRA never bombing the ferries.  They need them.

wg
  

    
PGP was released initially because Phil Zimmermann was concerned over
potential legislation against strong crypto, so there's the issue of
privacy, protection from government and corporate interests, as well as
the issue of protection from crackers. Wendy, have you written about the
cypherpunks?
  

    
Not much.  net.wars had two chapters on crypto, one called Guerrilla
Cryptographers (a title I stole from a topic in the eff conference here, I
think it was).  The cypherpunk movement would certainly make an interesting
history/social study.  But Ellen Ullman covered a fair bit of that in Close
to the Machine, and I can't imagine doing it better than she did.

wg
  

    
That book was written as the slipstream caught on that geeks could be
sexy.
  

    
I still love it.

wg
  

    
Wendy, thanks for joining us at Inkwell.vue! We've covered interesting
ground here, and I'm sure folks will be eager to pick up a copy of _From
Anarchy to Power_. Any closing comments?
  

    
Well:  the net wars continue, basically.  I find myself somewhat
schizophrenic about it.  On the one hand, I do believe that the Net has a
lot of resilience to being taken over.  On the other hand, I do believe that
the threat that megacorps pose to the freedoms we enjoy online is a serious
one.  I really wish the AOL/Time Warner merger hadn't been allowed to go
through; we're already seeing all kinds of cross-marketing -- AOL using
Madonna tickets as a lure for new members, etc.  I get sort of heartened by
the failure (or at least, the corporate cessation of willingness to throw
money at) of things like Go, which really are attempts to turn the Net into
broadcasting channels.  But at the same time, fewer and fewer companies
control the bandwidth and access.  The downside of broadband is I think
-- or it's something I've been wondering about this morning -- going to be
more traceability.  The RIAA is already talking about ways to find the 1% of
Gnutella users who do most of the sharing...

Hopefully, I'll meet you back here in a coupla-three years.

wg
  

    
Looking forward to it!
  

    

Thanks, Wendy. Glad to have had the chance to chat with you.
  

    
This lurker says: thanks, Wendy.
  

    
Hope the book goes far and well!
  

    
Current Amazon.com sales ranking:  1,304,455

wg
  

    
A very flattering book review of "From Anarchy to Power" in last week's 
New Scientist :

"Don't confuse it with the usual run of nerdy "how to..." books. From
 Anarchy to Power is an excellent, highly informative book. It cannot be
 recommended highly enough. Anyone concerned about the future."

<http://news.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns229911>
  

    
Excellent!
  

    
Er, yes, months ago, and thanks for noticing.  The book also had a nice
review in the Independent here, but it's no longer online.

If anyone has seen a review in the US, I would love to have it brought to my
attention.  AFAICT, it hasn't been looked at *anywhere*.

wg