textfiles/uploads/netslum.txt

                         Is Abandoning the Internet
                           "The Next Big Thing"?

                               by John Walker
     _________________________________________________________________

     As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to worry
     that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police
     state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside
     the rule of law. The public and many corporations will be reluctant
     to embrace a technology fraught with such problems. The Internet
     economy will continue to grow, but it will do so at a much slower
     pace than forecast by industry analysts.

                     Jacques Vallee, The Heart of the Internet, p. 162

Bad Neighbourhood

   In 1970-1971 I used to live in a really bad neighbourhood. In the
   space of two years I was held up three times, twice by the same guy.
   (One's sense of etiquette fails in such circumstances--what do you
   say: "New gun?") Once I found a discarded sofa cushion outside my
   apartment building and, being perennially short on seating for guests,
   rescued it from the trash man. After bringing it inside and whacking
   it to liberate some of the dust prior to vacuuming, I heard a little
   "ker-tink" sound on the floor. Three times. These turned out to be
   caused by .22 calibre bullets whose entry holes were visible upon
   closer examination of the pillow. I know not whether this ballast was
   added while it was sitting on the sidewalk or in the apartment of the
   neighbour who threw it away. The sound of gunfire wasn't all that rare
   on Saturday nights there, then.

Getting Out of Dodge

   Looking back on that time, I don't recall any sense of chronic fear or
   paranoia, but there's a low level edginess which slowly grinds you
   down. Now, I could have gotten a large, intimidating dog, put bars on
   the apartment window and motion detectors inside with triple deadlocks
   on the door, a concealed carry permit and suitable heat to pack,
   Kevlar vest for going out after dark, etc., etc. Instead, immediately
   I received a raise which permitted it, I decided to get out of Dodge,
   as it were, trading 50% higher rent for a sense of security which
   freed me to worry about career-related matters instead of whether my
   career was about to be abruptly truncated due to collision with
   rapidly moving metallic projectiles.

The Internet Slum

   I've come to view today's Internet as much like the bad neighbourhood
   I used to inhabit. It wasn't always that way--in fact, as recently as
   a few years ago, the Internet seemed like a frontier town--a little
   rough on the edges, with its share of black hats, but also with the
   sense of open-ended possibility that attracted pioneers of all sorts,
   exploring and expanding the cutting edge in all directions:
   technological, economic, social, political, and artistic. But today's
   Internet isn't a frontier any more--it's a slum. (I use "Internet"
   here to refer to the culture of the Web, E-mail, newsgroups, and other
   services based upon the underlying packet transport network. I have
   nothing against packet switching networks in general nor the Internet
   infrastructure in particular.)

One Fine Day at Fourmilab

   What's it like living today in the Internet slum? What comes down that
   pipe into your house from the outside world? Here's a snapshot, taken
   on March 31st, 2004, a completely typical day in all regards. The Web
   site racked up 682,516 hits in 56,412 visits from 44,776 distinct
   sites (IP addresses), delivering 14.8 gigabytes of content. That's, of
   course, not counting the traffic generated by the Distributed Denial
   of Service Attack underway since late January 2004. Whoever is
   responsible for this attack bombarded the site with a total of
   1,473,602 HTTP request packets originating from 1951 hosts all around
   the world. These packets were blocked by the Gardol attack detector
   and packet blocker I spent much of February developing instead of
   doing productive work. Well, the attack this day was only half as
   intense as during the first wave in January. Entirely apart from this
   recent denial of service attack is the routine attack against Earth
   and Moon Viewer in which robots attempt to overload the server and/or
   outbound bandwidth by making repeated requests for large custom
   images. This attack has been underway for several years despite its
   impact having been entirely mitigated by countermeasures installed in
   October 2001; still they keep trying. This day a total of 3700 of
   these attacks originating from 342 distinct hosts were detected and
   blocked.

   Moving from the Web to that other Internet mainstay, E-mail, let's
   take a peek at the traffic on good old port 25. This day I received 8
   E-mail messages from friends and colleagues around the globe. Isn't
   E-mail great? But that's not all that arrived that day. . . . First of
   all, we have the 629 messages which were blocked as originating at IP
   addresses known to be open SMTP relays which permit mass junk mailers
   to forge the origin of their garbage. Open relays, whether due to
   misconfiguration or operated as a matter of principle by
   self-described civil libertarians, are the E-mail equivalent of
   leaving a live hand grenade in an elementary school playground. A peek
   at the sendmail log shows a total of 6,444 "dictionary spams"
   attempted that day. These are hosts which connect to your mail server
   and try names from huge lists of names culled from directories used by
   spammers in the hope of hitting a valid address which can be sent spam
   and then re-sold to other spammers. A total of 275 E-mail messages
   made it past these filters into the hands of sendmail for delivery,
   being addressed to a valid user name in my domain, usually the E-mail
   address which I take care not to publish on any of my Web pages. Of
   these, a total of 259 were correctly identified as spam by Annoyance
   Filter, the adaptive Bayesian junk mail filter I spent two months
   developing in 2002 instead of doing productive work. A total of 8 junk
   mail messages were "false negatives"--misclassified as legitimate mail
   by Annoyance Filter (in all likelihood because I hadn't recently
   re-trained the filter with a collection of contemporary spam) and made
   it to my mailbox. This day's collection of junk mail included a total
   of 74 attempts to corrupt my computer with destructive worm software,
   thereby to enlist it in further propagating the corruption. Since the
   machine on which I read mail uses none of the vulnerable Microsoft
   products these programs exploit, they pose no risk to me, but consider
   how many people with computers which are at risk without the filtering
   tools and the more than 35 years of computing experience I bring to
   the arena withstand this daily assault. This day there wasn't a single
   criminal fraud attempt to obtain my credit card number or other
   financial identity information; this was a light day; usually there's
   one or two. Absent the open relay block list and Annoyance Filter, I
   would be forced to sort through a total of 896 pieces of junk mail to
   read the 8 messages I wish to receive. Isn't E-mail great?

   Ever since 1996, when a dysfunctional superannuated adolescent
   exploited a vulnerability in the ancient version of Solaris I then ran
   on my Web server to break into the server and corrupt my Web site,
   I've kept the local network here at Fourmilab behind a firewall
   configured with all the (abundant) paranoia I can summon. A firewall
   not only protects one against the barbarians, but monitoring its log
   lets you know which tommyknockers are knocking, knocking at your door
   and what keys they're trying in the lock. One doesn't bother logging
   the boring, repetitive stuff, but it's wise to keep an eye peeled for
   new, innovative attacks. On this day, the firewall log recorded a
   total of 1915 packets dropped--the vast majority attempts to exploit
   well-known vulnerabilities in Microsoft products by automated "attack
   robots" operated by people who have nothing better to do with their
   lives. That's about one every 45 seconds.

The Tunnel in the Basement

   Imagine if there were a tunnel which ran into your basement from the
   outside world, ending in a sturdy door with four or five high-security
   locks which anybody could approach completely anonymously. A mail slot
   in the door allows you to receive messages and news delivered through
   the tunnel, but isn't big enough to allow intruders to enter. Now
   imagine that every time you go down into your basement, you found
   several hundred letters piled up in a snowdrift extending from the
   mail slot, and that to find the rare messages from your friends and
   family you had to sort through reams of pornography of the most
   disgusting kind, solicitations for criminal schemes, "human
   engineered" attempts to steal your identity and financial information,
   and the occasional rat, scorpion, or snake slipped through the slot to
   attack you if you're insufficiently wary. You don't allow your kids
   into the basement any more for fear of what they may see coming
   through the slot, and you're worried by the stories of people like
   yourself who've had their basements filled with sewage or concrete
   spewed through the mail slot by malicious "pranksters".

   Further, whenever you're in the basement you not only hear the
   incessant sound of unwanted letters and worse dropping through the
   mail slot, but every minute or so you hear somebody trying a key or
   pick in one of your locks. As a savvy basement tunnel owner, you make
   a point of regularly reading tunnel security news to learn of
   "exploits" which compromise the locks you're using so you can update
   your locks before miscreants can break in through the tunnel. You may
   consider it wise to install motion detectors in your basement so
   you're notified if an intruder does manage to defeat your locks and
   gain entry.

   As the risks of basement tunnels make the news more and more often,
   industry and government begin to draw up plans to "do something" about
   them. A new "trusted door" scheme is proposed, which will replace the
   existing locks and mail slot with "inherently secure" versions which
   you're not allowed to open up and examine, whose master keys are
   guarded by commercial manufacturers and government agencies entirely
   deserving of your trust.

   You may choose to be patient, put up with the inconveniences and risks
   of your basement tunnel until you can install that trusted door. Or,
   you may simply decide that what comes through the tunnel isn't
   remotely worth the aggravation it creates and dynamite the whole
   thing, reclaiming your basement for yourself.

Abandon the Internet?

   Is it time to start thinking about abandoning the Internet? Well, I've
   pondered that option at some length, and I'm not alone. Donald Knuth,
   who's always at least a decade ahead of everybody else, abandoned
   E-mail on January 1st, 1990, saying "Email is a wonderful thing for
   people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me;
   my role is to be on the bottom of things." Harry Schultz, one of the
   wisest observers of the financial and geopolitical scene, advised
   abandoning E-mail in favour of FAX more than a year ago. While few
   people have explicitly announced their retirement from the Internet, I
   suspect that more and more parents are loath to provide Internet
   access to their children, knowing that their mailboxes will be filled
   every day with hundreds of disgusting messages. People of all sorts
   simply walk away from the Internet after suffering the repellent
   pop-ups and attacks by spyware installed on their computers. You won't
   see this as a downturn in people on the Internet, at least right away,
   but keep your eye on the second derivative.

   Another trend I expect to emerge is an attempt to re-create the
   Internet of a decade ago by erecting virtual barriers to keep out the
   rabble. When I'm feeling down I call it "Internet Gated Communities",
   when in an optimistic mood, "The Faculty Club". This may lead to what
   many observers refer to as "the Balkanisation of the Internet"--a
   fragmentation of the "goes everywhere, reaches everybody" vision of
   the global nervous system into disconnected communities. This may not
   be such a bad thing. Yes, we will not end up with a ubiquitous global
   wired community. But if you want to get an idea what that might
   actually look like, here's a little experiment you can try. Turn off
   your spam filter and read all the spam you get in a day, including
   visiting the Web sites they direct you to. Now imagine that,
   multiplied by a factor of about a hundred. Welcome to the electronic
   global slum! I am one of those despicable people who believe that IQ
   not only exists but matters. From the origin of the Internet through
   the mid 1990s, I'd estimate the mean IQ of Internet users as about
   115. Today it's probably somewhere around 100, the mean in Europe and
   North America. The difference you see in the Internet of today from
   that of ten years ago is what one standard deviation (15 points) drop
   in IQ looks like. But the mean IQ of the world is a tad less than 90
   today, and it's expected to fall to about 86 by 2050. So, when the
   digital divide is conquered and all ten billion naked apes are wired
   up, you're looking at about another standard deviation's drop in the
   IQ of the Internet. Just imagine what that will be like.

   Optimists point to initiatives underway to address the problems of the
   Internet: secure operating systems, certificate based authentication,
   tools for identifying abusers and legal sanctions against them, and
   the like. But I fear the cure may be worse than the disease, so much
   so that I penned a 25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of
   the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for
   delivering commercial content to passive consumers.

   I'm not ready to abandon the Internet, at least not right away. But
   I'm thinking about it, and I suspect I'm not alone. Those who have
   already abandoned it are, by that very choice, neither publishing Web
   pages nor posting messages about it; they are silent, visible only by
   their absence from the online community. Will early adopters of the
   Internet, who are in the best position to compare what it is today
   with what they connected to years ago, become early opters-out? Me,
   I'm keeping an eye on this trend--it could just be the next big thing.

   Flash!   Within twelve hours of my posting this document, CNN ran a
   story titled: Gangs Used Internet to Plan Street Fight. You can't make
   up stuff like this. Thanks to Mike Sisk for pointing this out.

   ______________________________________________________________________

   by John Walker
   May 12th, 2004