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

Conclusion 241
can convincingly put forward the very real risks attendant to a project only partially
planned, without extensive layers of measurement, control, and accountability.
These risks are most obviously grouped under the rubric of security, but
the label is far too narrow either to capture the problem or to point us to the
most promising solutions—just as the story of badware on PCs is not simply a
story about security worries on the Internet, narrowly defined.
Rather, the limits of an open PC and Net, and the fears for the XO, are much
more general case studies of what happens within systems that are built with a
peculiar and extraordinary openness to contribution and innovation and that
succeed because of it. They challenge us to understand and meet the problems
arising from success in a way that does not neuter what made the original success
possible.
The puzzle of PC security is fundamentally the same as the puzzle of keeping
Wikipedia honest and true—and perhaps giving birth to its version 2.0 successor—now
that Wikipedia has entered the prime-time glare, attracting participants
who are ignorant or scornful of its ideals. It is the puzzle of empowering
people to share and trade stories, photos, and recommendations without losing
their identities as they become not only the creators of distributed scrutiny and
judgment, but also their subjects.
It is the puzzle of Herdict, the application designed to run on netizens’ PCs
to generate and share a collective map of vital signs, that can produce distributed
judgments about good code and bad. One of the first questions asked
about Herdict is whether makers of badware will simply hijack lots of PCs and
compel them to report to Herdict that they are happy, when in fact they are
not. One answer acknowledges the problem and then seeks, from day one, to
forestall it while it is still on the drawing board, with attendant complication,
investment, and elaboration. An alternative answer says: The point at which
Herdict is worth the effort of bad people to game it is a milestone of success. It is
a token of movement from the primordial soup that begins the generative pattern
to the mainstream impact that attracts the next round of problems.
Imagine planning but not yet executing Wikipedia: “Won’t people come
along and vandalize it” One response to that question, and to the others like it
that arise for an idea as crazy as Wikipedia, would be to abandon the idea—to
transform it so much in anticipation of the problems that it is unrecognizable
from its original generative blueprint. The response instead was to deem the
question reasonable but premature. The generativity that makes it vulnerable
also facilitates the tools and relationships through which people can meet the
problems when first-round success causes them to materialize.