Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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cessing unit, screen, and network connection—a rediscovery of the hobbyist
PC and its own modularization that made it better and cheaper than its appliancized
counterparts.
There could be a spectrum of virtual PCs on one unit, one for each member
of the family. Already, most consumer operating systems enable separate login
names with customized desktop wallpaper and e-mail accounts for each user. 2
If the divide were developed further, a parent could confidently give her twelveyear-old
access to the machine under her own account and know that nothing
that the child could do—short of hurling the machine out the window—
would hurt the data found within the other virtual PCs. 3 (To be sure, this does
not solve problems at the social layer—of what activities children may undertake
to their detriment once online.)
Easy reversion, coupled with virtual PCs, seeks to balance the experimentalist
spirit of the early Internet with the fact that there are now important uses for
those PCs that we do not want to disrupt. Still, this is not a complete solution.
The Red PC, despite its experimental purpose, might end up accumulating
data that the user wants to keep, occasioning the need for what Internet architect
David Clark calls a “checkpoint Charlie” to move sensitive data from Red
to Green without also carrying a virus or anything else undesirable that could
hurt the Green PC. 4 There is also the question of what software can be deemed
safe for Green—which is just another version of the question of what software
to run on today’s single-identity PCs. If users could competently decide what
should go on Red and what on Green, then they could competently decide
what to run on today’s simpler machines, partially obviating the need for the
virtual PC solution in the first place.
Worse, an infected Red PC still might be capable of hurting other PCs across
the network, by sending spam or viruses, or by becoming a zombie PC controlled
from afar for any number of other bad purposes. Virtualization technology
eases some of the sting to users of an experimental platform whose
experiments sometimes go awry, but it does not do much to reduce the burdens—negative
externalities—that such failures can place on everyone else.
Most fundamentally, many of the benefits of generativity come precisely
thanks to an absence of walls. We want our e-mail programs to have access to
any document on our hard drive, so that we can attach it to an e-mail and send
it to a friend. We want to edit music downloaded from a Web site with an audio
mixing program and then incorporate it into a presentation. We want to export
data from one desktop calendar application to a new one that we might
like better. The list goes on, and each of these operations requires the ability to