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The Death of the Internet
The Death of the Internet
Intended to be open, free, and decentralized, it’s now dominated by a handful of companies that control what we see and what we can say.
Credit: Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock.com
The internet was meant to be open, free, and decentralized, but today it is controlled by a few companies with grave consequences for society and the economy. The internet has become the opposite of what it was intended to be.
In the early 1960s, Paul Baran was an engineer at the RAND Corporation when he began thinking about the need for a communications network that could withstand a nuclear strike. RAND was contracted by the Pentagon to create a system that could continue operating even if parts of it were destroyed by an atomic blast. It was supposed to be the ultimate decentralized system.
Baran went on to publish a paper in 1964 titled “On Distributed Communications,” which was influential in establishing the concepts behind the architecture of the internet.
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn put these concepts into practice at the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, and created the communication methods that make the internet possible. The principles of freedom and openness were at the heart of the design—packet switching made the system robust in the face of nuclear attacks and Internet Protocol allowed for open interconnection.Advertisement
Years later, Cerf said, “The beauty of the internet is that it’s not controlled by any one group.” In his view, “this model has not only made the internet very open—a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere—it’s also prevented vested interests from taking control.”
The principle of decentralization went directly against the business models of technology giants like AT&T and IBM. Until AT&T’s monopoly was broken up in the early 1980s, communications were extremely centralized and traveled through dedicated, point-to-point channels. The use of third-party devices on the network was prohibited.
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Malware Attacks Used By the US Government Retain Potency For Many Years, New Evidence Indicates
A NEW REPORT from Rand Corp. may help shed light on the government’s arsenal of malicious software, including the size of its stockpile of so-called “zero days” — hacks that hit undisclosed vulnerabilities in computers, smartphones, and other digital devices.
The report also provides evidence that such vulnerabilities are long lasting. The findings are of particular interest because not much is known about the U.S. government’s controversial use of zero days. Officials have long refused to say how many such attacks are in the government’s arsenal or how long it uses them before disclosing information about the vulnerabilities they exploit so software vendors can patch the holes.
Rand’s report is based on unprecedented access to a database of zero days from a company that sells them to governments and other customers on the “gray market.” The collection contains about 200 entries — about the same number of zero days some experts believe the government to have. Rand found that the exploits had an average lifespan of 6.9 years before the vulnerability each targeted was disclosed to the software maker to be fixed, or before the vendor made upgrades to the code that unwittingly eliminated the security hole.
Some of the exploits survived even longer than this. About 25 percent had a lifespan of a decade or longer. But another 25 percent survived less than 18 months before they were patched or rendered obsolete through software upgrades.
Chart: RAND
Rand’s researchers found that there was no pattern around which exploits lived a long or short life — severe vulnerabilities were not more likely to be fixed quickly than minor ones, nor were vulnerabilities in programs that were more widely available.
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