The Future of the Internet

"This is a book I would recommend everyone to read. Jonathan Zittrain is a professor at Harvard, formerly at Oxford, and a very brilliant theoretician of the Internet. His essential thesis is that whilst the absence of design in how the Internet proliferated is part of its wonderment and all the things that it has enabled, if you were to look at it now you would design it in an entirely different way. He says that the absence of design is one of the reasons why security is such an important issue, and also such a difficult issue to get your head round and do anything about. “The NSA is the biggest digital intelligence agency in the world, and probably the single most powerful espionage agency in history” Zittrain is in some respects a Renaissance figure, in the sense that he understands both the technology and the social and political implications of the technology. This is a first class introduction for anyone who uses the Internet as to why it’s worth their while thinking about the Internet and the implications of the web. As a starting place, I really can’t recommend it highly enough. There are a variety of problems. One of the biggest, which there is no stopping at all, is that our desire for convenience consistently overrides our need for personal security, even institutional security. So we’re always ready to welcome and celebrate technological innovation, without necessarily working out what the implications are. To give one example which I think is very telling, there was a British bank which I investigated for my last book, McMafia . They had a very tight digital barrier around them, and they thought they were entirely invulnerable. But a hacker found a vulnerability in a chocolate dispensing machine that they had in the building. Like everything else it had its own IP address, and they had forgotten to put it on the automated patching updates system. And so a British bank was penetrated through a chocolate vending machine. “Our desire for convenience consistently overrides our need for personal security, even institutional security” With the proliferation of mobile devices this is going to become a big headache. Now if you are on Apple, you immediately reduce your vulnerability by about 90%, because 95% of network systems run on Windows so virus makers just don’t bother to do it on Apple. I’m not advertising Apple – I have no pecuniary interest in this – but that is the quickest way to dramatically reduce your security risk. The other reason why Apple is relatively secure is because their applications on the iPhone are screened. So you cannot get any Tom, Dick and Harry putting an application out there for anyone to download. What Apple is creating is effectively a controlled system, where Steve Jobs and his team are the arbitrators of taste, and of what is permissible and what is not. For example, no pornographic apps are allowed on the iPhone. Now, if you don’t have a pressing need to look at pornography on your iPhone through apps, that’s absolutely fine. If you do have a pressing need, you’re going to have to get an Android. But if you do, then your vulnerability to viruses – particularly if you’re downloading pornography – is massively increased. As was ever thus!"