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

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remain as safety valves should network filtering begin to block more than bad
code.
In the meantime, ISPs are in a good position to help in a way that falls short
of undesirable perfect enforcement, and that provides a stopgap while we develop
the kinds of community-based tools that can facilitate salutary endpoint
screening. There are said to be tens of thousands of PCs converted to zombies
daily, 27 and an ISP can sometimes readily detect the digital behavior of a zombie
when it starts sending thousands of spam messages or rapidly probes a sequence
of Internet addresses looking for yet more vulnerable PCs. Yet ISPs currently
have little incentive to deal with this problem. To do so creates a twostage
customer service nightmare. If the ISP quarantines an infected machine
until it has been recovered from zombie-hood—cutting it off from the network
in the process—the user might claim that she is not getting the network access
she paid for. And quarantined users will have to be instructed how to clean their
machines, which is a complicated business. 28 This explains why ISPs generally
do not care to act when they learn that they host badware-infected Web sites or
consumer PCs that are part of a botnet. 29
Whether through new industry best practices or through a rearrangement of
liability motivating ISPs to take action in particularly flagrant and egregious
zombie situations, we can buy another measure of time in the continuing security
game of cat and mouse. Security in a generative system is something never
fully put to rest—it is not as if the “right” design will forestall security problems
forevermore. The only way for such a design to be foolproof is for it to be nongenerative,
locking down a computer the same way that a bank would fully secure
a vault by neither letting any customers in nor letting any money out. Security
of a generative system requires the continuing ingenuity of a few experts
who want it to work well, and the broader participation of others with the
goodwill to outweigh the actions of a minority determined to abuse it.
A generativity principle suggests additional ways in which we might redraw
the map of cyberspace. First, we must bridge the divide between those concerned
with network connectivity and protocols and those concerned with PC
design—a divide that end-to-end neutrality unfortunately encourages. Such
modularity in stakeholder competence and purview was originally a useful and
natural extension of the Internet’s architecture. It meant that network experts
did not have to be PC experts, and vice versa. But this division of responsibilities,
which works so well for technical design, is crippling our ability to think
through the trajectory of applied information technology. Now that the PC
and the Internet are so inextricably intertwined, it is not enough for network