This is a must read because it is so clarifying over a wide scope of computer technology, security, and privacy issues.
Quinn Norton: Everything is Broken
Facebook and Google seem very powerful, but they live about a week from total ruin all the time. They know the cost of leaving social networks individually is high, but en masse, becomes next to nothing. Windows could be replaced with something better written. The US government would fall to a general revolt in a matter of days. It wouldn’t take a total defection or a general revolt to change everything, because corporations and governments would rather bend to demands than die. These entities do everything they can get away with – but we’ve forgotten that we’re the ones that are letting them get away with things.
Computers don’t serve the needs of both privacy and coordination not because it’s somehow mathematically impossible. There are plenty of schemes that could federate or safely encrypt our data, plenty of ways we could regain privacy and make our computers work better by default. It isn’t happening now because we haven’t demanded that it should, not because no one is clever enough to make that happen.
So yes, the geeks and the executives and the agents and the military have fucked the world. But in the end, it’s the job of the people, working together, to unfuck it.
Maybe the sun will emit a whoop ass EMP and we’ll be scrambling around searching for those old trusty mechanical machines and pigeons.
My take is humans become complacent and like convenience and shiny knew things. Therefore, we adopt tach (not always by choice for individuals) and skip questions about what it is and how best to use it for my purposes.
But what would I know — I still miss those black rotary dial phones (and those we’re high-tech from when telephones were first introduced) and never thought CDs were superior to records for sound quality, only different, but far superior for lugging around.
Life was different when there was no voice mail and caller ID. Social relationships were different without so much time-slicing and so-called multi-tasking.
No one had CD parties like they had record parties and no one has Applestore parties. But they do play multi-user games with side chat sessions. And they can do that with acquaintances cross-country and globally. But who has pen pals obtained from the back of a magazine anymore.
The sun will eventually emit a whoop-ass EMP; even a small lightning strke on a tree 60 feet from my window fried my wi-fi/router.
And then there are the phones before rotary phones in which the local operator performed localized surveillance of what was going on and with whom.
Ah, Ernestine. (Not Tomlin but the phone operator.) To remember fondly or to say thank goodness she’s gone.
Much of facebook and chat rooms is like pen pals without the snail mail delay. More immediate and instant gratification.
It almost always takes time to perfect the authentically new and useful. If it’s introduced when still ragged and is too quickly adopted by consumers, there’s no incentive to perfect it. Better to move onto the next new thing because that’s where future revenues/profits reside. When the internet opened up to general use, home computers were a couple of decades behind what was truly required for security etc. But consumers didn’t know or care about that as long as new bells and whistles were continuously introduced.
Home computers unconnected to the internet don’t require much security. I was a relatively early adopter for computers (1988) and the internet (1995), and security only became an issue when there was money involved or personally identifiable information (PII). That concern began with online passwords and quickly spread to three-part authentication on banking sites. Government monitoring of sorts began about the same time and exploded after 9/11 and under Iran-COntra Admiral John Poindexter.
Plese read the entire article when you can. It ranges much more broadly over the IT world.
Got through half of it before it began to bore me.
Not sure in the pre-internet era, home computer users fully understood that there were security issues. The limitations of password protections. However, a hacker had to in some way obtain physical access to the machine.
Cyber-crime didn’t originate with home computers or the internet. The earliest ones were in-house thefts, embezzlement. And at least one of those thieves was later hired as a computer security expert at the bank he’d ripped off. Then there was the $10 million wire transfer robbery. Again the thief required physical access to the computers. (Published reports on these instances are incomplete and somewhat inaccurate for obvious security reasons. Since it’s now so old, I’ll share that SecPac didn’t recoup the $10 from Rifkin. The diamonds he purchased were worth less than half what he’d paid for.)
Theft is a fact of life. And there’s always a trade-off between convenience and the cost of a higher level of security and the inconvenience of it.
The oddest, to me,individual behavior change with the internet and smart phones is that people assume their communications and data are private and protected. How dumb does a man have to be to send a dick pick over his smartphone? OTOH, if the internet and computers were “locked down” the worst of human behaviors would go on without being detected, much less shut down by law enforcement. There’s also money to be made by banking in facilitating on-line porn and gambling.
I’m far from complacent on this issue. However, if the general public is unconcerned about the USG “collect it all” position, the best I can do is limit what “all” I put out there.
A little leniency might be welcome: we are not all equally strong enough to keep our addictions under control.
I always told our daughters that boredom is a decision, not an innate property of printed matter. It is a slog for people not familiar with the technology, but worth the effort to understand the full implications of the less boring concluding sections. Norton tries to make it as easy as possible without losing her intent.
Some classic German social science writers and most 19th century writers’s works easily elicit the response of “boring” from current readers.
Have patience with this one.
Appreciate your response and perhaps bored wasn’t the right word for me to explain why I stopped reading. I’ve never been fascinated by computers. For me it was tool in the late seventies when I was a systems user analyst and coded one program. Hasn’t changed. There’s no shortage of computer techs and they will be the ones that fix it or not, and whatever I may or may not know is irrelevant. There are way too many things that interest me more than tech security issues for me to put in the time required to get not much more than a rudimentary sense of the mega-shortcomings.
fascinating, thanks