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from the not-what-we-expected-but-is-it-bad? dept.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/is-the-internet-a-failed-utopia/
LONDON—At Shoreditch Town Hall on Thursday, at an event hosted by Intelligence Squared and Vanity Fair, the longevous British broadcaster Jeremy Paxman of University Challenge fame asked the audience of few hundred: "Is the Internet a failed utopia?" He asked us to vote on the matter by raising our hands. About two-thirds of the audience disagreed with the statement, a fair few (including myself) were undecided, and only a smattering of people actually thought the Internet was a failed utopia.
It was then the turn of four panellists, in the style of an electoral hustings or stump speech, to change our minds. In the failed-utopia camp were Andrew Keen and Frank Pasquale; in the not-a-failed-utopia faction were Peter Barron and Beth Noveck. They took it in turns to deliver quite rousing speeches.
The naysayers obviously had the harder job from the outset—we were at an event that was specifically tailored for fans of the Internet, after all—but they did a good job of reminding us that the Internet, as it stands, is not the elysium that we were all promised at its inception. Keen warned us that, while we think the Internet is an idyllic plateau where everyone is on an even footing, where two guys in a garage can compete with the monolithic, infrastructure-owning giants, we're all deluding ourselves: just like the real world, the Internet is now ruled by big corporations.
The utopian speakers, Barron and Noveck, mostly focused on all of the cool things that wouldn't have been possible before the Internet and World Wide Web were created. Noveck, who was a driving force behind President Obama's Open Government Initiative, reminded us that, with a smartphone in your pocket, you have access to more information than the president of the United States did 25 years ago. Barron, who is a public affairs bod at Google, spoke about the equality of opportunity on the Internet—and of course, about all the free services that we get to enjoy.
What does SN think?
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Tuesday June 16 2015, @08:46AM
Over the years, I've written much about what shall eventually replace the Internet. Now it's finally getting under way in public with Named Data Networking (distributed, cache-friendly URLs that work via hash). They actually got this mostly right so far, but I wonder how butchered it'll be by the time it gets implemented / standardized.
And, finally, secured HTML pages can specify an "integrity" attribute containing a hash of the resource that the tag will pull in (see: Subresource Integrity). I only proposed that over a decade ago. Now if the browsers could shut up about mixed content warnings when all the non-encrypted assets have valid integrity tokens then we could finally have security that plays nice with caches (instead of streaming every last resource over the SSL connection every time you load the page) -- Oops, except for Mozilla's dumbass push to force HTTPS on every connection (esp. those that don't need it) threatening that they'll disable browser features in if the connection is HTTP sans S (the S stands for Security Theater).
Seriously, WTF: We have had the HTTP Auth (password protected resource) for decades, which prompts you to enter a password in a dialog (outside the browser page, so we don't have to clutter shit up with login forms all over the place [which phishers & XSS just love to exploit]). HTTP Auth has a proof of knowledge mode where the client satisfies a server challenge by HMAC of a nonce with your passphrase -- STOP RIGHT THERE! That's it. We're done. Instead of sending that HMAC output in the clear to have the server verify it, just have the server and client drop that HMAC into the symmetric cipher as the key and we'd have real security without a damn Man-in-the-Middle (Cert Authority). The PKI system's public key crypto should only ever be used to identify the endpoint(s) and encrypt the initial passphrase exchange; Everything else after that can be a simple fast symmetric stream cipher. One you have a shared secrets (user / pass) with a site the whole PKI system is moot -- Just a security theater that ENSURES a compromised CA can get into the middle of your connection. The problem here is that the "web" was designed to be stateless, which is dumb since that's not how anyone used any computer system ever.
Is the web a failed utopia? No, it's always been a cluster fsck of bubblegum and duct tape. Just being "imperfect" or "flawed" would be something of a loft goal the web could strive to achieve. It took half the age of the Internet just to get from HTML4.01 to HTML5, FFS. Few if any features have ever been implemented properly, there's so much "WAT?!" going on that if the average person knew what was really happening under the hood they'd demand the whole Rube Goldberg Machine be torn down and redone right before it kills someone (again).
Also, I'm pretty sure what TFA is talking about isn't the Internet (a decentralized peer to peer network capable of self healing even in the face of nuclear war). No, what they're talking about is the moronic centralized "World Wide Web" some fools wickedly weaved atop the Internet when first we practiced to deceive themselves that the most interactive machines on the planet shouldn't have any fucking state!
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 16 2015, @08:15PM
It is not dumb given the original purpose of the web, which was simply information retrieval. There was no JavaScript, no cookies, no web apps, no online shopping, nothing like that. You don't need a stateful protocol for retrieving some document any more than you need a stateful protocol for looking up some information in a book.
The problem is that the web is now used primarily for things it was not originally designed for, using technologies that were bolted on.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.