15 ms·

The internet as existential threat

152 points by zephyrfalcon 9y ago

marsrover 9y ago
I don't think this is a revelation to anyone in tech circles. For this reason, I usually choose products that aren't internet enabled.
- mark_edward 9y ago
  The article's point is more than about consumer devices being internet enabled, it's about how many things are internet dependent. Everything from critical infrastructure to production and distribution networks are now Internet dependent in terms of actual delivery.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    In large part because of companh and government cost savings via off the shelf parts and BYOD.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  And when the self-driving semi-truck that delivers food to your local grocers is internet connected?
- kbob 9y ago
  Do you also choose doctors, grocers, utilities, planes, and cities that are not Internet enabled?
  - r00fus 9y ago
    I do look for a RJ-45 port on my doctor (I avoid those), but trying to lure any of the remainder into a faraday cage has been difficult :/
pascalxus 9y ago
Thanks for reminding me to back up my gmail and gdocs. I think she makes a good point about not getting one's paycheck - that could definitely have a devastating ripple effect on the economy. But, is it really possible, that the entire internet go down?
- mattmanser 9y ago
  He. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
- scottLobster 9y ago
  That's the thing, he seems to be ignorant of just how redundant and reliable the system is. He uses the example of a worldwide economic collapse if Google went down for a month. Which is probably true. Thing is, that's about as likely as a worldwide economic collapse from the US being nuked off the face of the planet and everyone else left untouched. The beauty of software is that it can be replaced/repaired quickly. If a power plant gets utterly destroyed, it could take a minimum of months to build a new one. If a piece of software gets corrupted, you load from backups or buy a new copy. Downtime is incredibly minimized for even the worst designed system. That's not to say disasters can't happen, but they will be limited in time and scope so long as there's enough money to throw as the problem, and if the amount of money-throwing ever becomes too much to swallow then we might finally see some widespread solid security practices. Honestly simply keeping systems updated would mitigate most of the potential "devastating" attacks, the reason the recent ransomware attacks got as far as they did is lack of funding/will, because it's largely cheaper for organizations to let themselves get pwned then it is for them to protect themselves.
  - __jal 9y ago
    Part of the issue is not redundancy, but heterogeny. It is like monoculture crops - doesn't matter if you're growing 4x what you need if something comes along that kills all of them. > If a piece of software gets corrupted, you load from backups or buy a new copy Software is cheap, as you say. Data isn't. The piece's author indicated that the influenza-of-the-month was launched via tax software, which generally isn't interoperable. If there is no reasonable replacement, what do you do? Heterogeneous systems are more expensive to operate, require more expertise, and cause more compatibility problems than monocultures. But they also don't all die at once due to the same bug.
elicash 9y ago
> I’ve often wanted to sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and argue with him about Facebook. It is premised on the notion that "connecting everyone" is an unmitigated good. This isn't the author's major point. But worth noting Zuckerberg changed FB's mission recently to "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Said Mark: "Connecting friends and family has been pretty positive, but I think there is just this collective feeling that we have a responsibility to do more than that and also help build communities and help people get exposed to new perspectives and meet new people -- not just give people a voice, but also help build common ground so people can actually move forward together."
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  That doesn't sound different, just rephrased PRBS.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I think most techno-optimists wouldn't say it is an unmitigated good, but a net good.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I think most techno-optimists would probably find in Koster's article much more to which to object than this characterization of Facebook.
- davidivadavid 9y ago
  Wow, that's really interesting. Hadn't noticed the change in the mission statement. For reference, it used to be: "Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." They changed from making the world more "open" to making it "closer", which are antonyms in a certain way. They changed from the idea of having Facebook be this sort of universal community of people getting together to searching for more intimacy, getting people closer, etc. but they keep talking about "the world." I've always thought there was room for an "anti-Facebook" that would be the opposite of their original vision statement. Its goal is not to "share things", i.e. to make things public, but to create more private communities that are tighter; not to make the world "more connected" (everyone having 5000 friends) but better connected (i.e. the value of relationships is higher). It seems like FB may be trying to go in that direction after all, but who knows what they really meant.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
> The Internet ... started out by only connecting computer networks. But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks. Those are all computer networks. It just happens that some of them involve computers running financial software, or computers running electrical control software, or computers running social software. Or computers running phone software, or light-bulb software, or toaster software. Perhaps we don't need networked toasters, but I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors. Computers are just too powerful to ignore. The problem is not that they are computers, but that some are locked down for user control of networking, but simultaneously designed insecurely as, say, "smart web cams" without the necessary incentives to keep them secure.
- jff 9y ago
  > I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors. Seemed to work pretty well for a long time.
  - maze-le 9y ago
    doesn't scale up...
  - jpttsn 9y ago
    Our expectations have since increased. I wouldn't want to go back to the GDP I thought was fine ten years ago.
    - jimktrains2 9y ago
      Adjusted for inflation, has it changed that much in 10years? Ditto for median wages.
      - sien 9y ago
nostrademons 9y ago
The analogy with electricity is pretty good. When the electricity goes out, most people are pretty screwed: it powers our lighting, air conditioning, household appliances, refrigeration, gasoline pumps, Internet access, point-of-sale systems, and in many places, cooking and running water too. However, when the electricity goes out, it usually comes back on within a day or so, because a power outage is viewed as a top priority to fix, simply because so many aspects of modern life depend on it. And really critical businesses (supermarkets, hospitals, etc.) invest in generators so that they can run independently of the power grid. The Internet will likely follow that path. It'll become indispensable to modern life, which means that when there's a threat against it, a lot of experts will be mobilized to put it back in service. And really critical businesses will invest in making sure their systems work even when offline.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Aren't we already at that point? I haven't experienced any "internet outages" that lasted more than a couple of hours. Critical services are highly redundant.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Kinda. Thing is that with PCs and smartphone it is really the first time that the smarts are at the edges. With electricity it is in the transformers and the power stations. The kit at the individual home and office is downright dumb in comparison (and can be operated via local generators in a pinch). Similarly the analog phone network has its smarts in the switches. Not in the phones in homes and offices.
- natrius 9y ago
  It's not like a power outage. It's more like a power surge that's somehow crafted to exploit every engineering flaw in every surge protector that well-funded state actors have piled up over the years. We would not recover from that in days.
  - achamayou 9y ago
Filligree 9y ago
Site got ycombinator'd, so here's a google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AyxA4FAqnfcJ:https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AyxA4F...
- xaedes 9y ago
  scnr: Good we have a little redundancy there =)
- amyjess 9y ago
  Unfortunately, the Google Cache is still trying to load data from raphkoster.com Do you have a pastebin dump?
  - xaedes 9y ago
    Webarchive works for me: http://web.archive.org/web/20170628133305/https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/ http://web.archive.org/web/20170628133305/https://www.raphko...
    - amyjess 9y ago
      Thanks!
  - Filligree 9y ago
    When that happens you can press "text-only" on the header, and you'll get an embed-less version. Sometimes you may have to press esc first.
rsync 9y ago
"But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks." This is, I hope, incorrect. Power, water, road, etc. should not be Internet connected and in many cases should not be networked at all. Homeowners doing cute things with arduino and their lawn sprinklers (and learning good lessons about simplicity and fragility) are one thing. It's quite another to bear the responsibility for critical infrastructure. I hope the adults in the room have the wisdom and experience to eschew these kind of "improvements".
- rocqua 9y ago
  Sensor networks are great boons to any infrastructure. It allows for much quicker reactions and much better tuning. However, this network doesn't need to be public. I can see how you'd pick the internet as a base-layer for this network, which would be a bad idea. The alternative is building an entire separate network, which seems almost un doable.
  - ldp01 9y ago
    For some industries it makes sense. Rail and power networks use their own physical infrastructure as they have specific latency and reliability requirements for protection and signalling systems and it's convenient to just build their own comms networks alongside their other infrastructure.
    - rocqua 9y ago
      Rail and power also already have physical infrastructure and property along which they can setup networks.
Unbeliever69 9y ago
When Raph speaks my ears always perk up.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Animats 9y ago
I'm getting worried. I've been harping on the Maersk downtime lately. The ports of the largest shipping company in the world have been shut down for two days by a cyber attack. Trucks can't unload or load at many of the world's ports, including the main container ports of LA, NYC, and Rotterdam. They're going to be down tomorrow, too. Maybe partial operation by Friday.[1] Maersk even lost phone and email systems. One of the few good sources of info has been somebody at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who sends out alerts to truckers. It's a distributed outage. The usual forms of disaster preparation involve geographic dispersal. That doesn't work against this threat. Few companies are as physically dispersed as Maersk, which has major facilities in 61 countries. It didn't help. What happens when someone figures out how to take over Windows Update or the Intel Management Engine or Ubuntu Update? [1] http://btt.paalerts.com/recentmessages.aspx http://btt.paalerts.com/recentmessages.aspx
- xenadu02 9y ago
  The first step would be to stop using C (and any other memory-unsafe language). The vast majority of these problems come about by memory corruption tricking the computer into executing attacker-delivered code (or ROP gadgets). Yes there will be other security flaws like missing access checks, etc. But none are so pervasive nor so devastating as out-of-bounds read/write. If C arrays were bounds-checked by default then the majority (literally) of exploits would be rendered void immediately. The Rust borrow checker, Swift ARC, or GCs would eliminate use-after-free. Combined that would drastically reduce all available attack surface. The second step is to assign a separate identity to every piece of code, rather than running everything as the current user. Unless it has been initiated by a user action there is no reason for malware to even have write access to your files (or system files for that matter). The idea that any ol random bit of code that manages to execute should be just as trusted as the user is crazytown. IMHM macOS SIP is a good step in that direction, enforcing read-only access to /System and most of /usr. The third step is to have pervasive copy-on-write, including in all filesystems by default. If your system does get pwned it should be a trivial matter of booting to a read-only recovery mode and rolling back to a known-good state. The fourth step is to have more interlocks enforced by the system that cannot be overridden. For example there might be a legitimate reason to truncate shadow copies but why should anyone with admin rights be allowed to do so from a normal login session? That's just stupid. (For those unaware, malware now routinely disables Windows' volume shadow copy and nukes the existing copies to stop you from rolling your files back). Stuff like that should require rebooting into single-user mode or recovery mode. There's always a lot of resistance to the idea of dropping C. Before you go replying with a counter-argument I urge you to stop and think seriously. We've been pushing secure coding standards as an industry for many years now. Everyone is well aware of the risks. We have tools like Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behavior Sanitizer. We have lots of static analysis tools. We have tools like valgrind. And yet... the exploits keep on coming. Despite the thousands upon thousands of years of effort poured into fixing it, we still routinely have new out-of-bounds and use-after-free exploits in critical C code. Even experienced developers get bitten by signed integer overflow and other forms of undefined behavior... and most C code is not being written by experienced careful developers. Embedded code is even worse. If you read the source behind your car's ECU you'd probably never drive again. It is time to admit the truth: programming languages should be memory-safe by default. Period. Whatever the cost it is worth paying.
gavinpc 9y ago
It is kind of ironic, since the internet was designed as exactly the opposite: a damage-tolerant coast-to-coast communications system, i.e. one without a single point of failure.
- crpatino 9y ago
  Double-plus-so. The Internet continues to be damage tolerant. The problem is that we have collectively expended the last 20 years building single points of failure, and hooking them up all through the Internet.
empath75 9y ago
I'm starting to believe we need some kind of Geneva convention among intelligence services. It's one thing for them all to be spying on dissidents and terrorists or however they want to bother their internal populations, because they'll be limited in how much damage they want to do to their own economies. Once you have intelligence services engaged in all out warfare with each other, there's really no limit to how much damage they can do. Up to and including deaths. We need to get to some kind of gentlemans agreement between the CIA and the FSB really quickly before the world economy collapses.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
akoster 9y ago
Site not loading for me. Internet archive mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000253/https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/ http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000253/https://www.raphko... (Also I realize I share a surname with the author but am of no relation that I know of.)
gaius 9y ago
Tainter postulates that societies collapse when they reach their limit of complexity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Social_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Social_complexi...
partycoder 9y ago
If anything, the Internet was created with resilience in mind. In fact there's no "the Internet" but rather a network of networks that is by design very hard to shut down. You could argue that there's DNS and that's more centralized. Sure, point granted. But in theory you can use any DNS server you want... and there are projects which make it less centralized. Now, a different topic is how devices can be taken over... and that's something where we are largely to blame. The EFF, and the old-school Open source folks like Stallman have been warning for years that we are giving away our freedoms by trusting in closed source. And they were right. Now we are in the endgame where every single computer has one of these "management engines" that cannot be turned off and have total control over a computer, and where your source of entropy is RDRAND.

152 points by zephyrfalcon 9y ago

I don't think this is a revelation to anyone in tech circles. For this reason, I usually choose products that aren't internet enabled.

mark_edward 9y ago
The article's point is more than about consumer devices being internet enabled, it's about how many things are internet dependent. Everything from critical infrastructure to production and distribution networks are now Internet dependent in terms of actual delivery.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  In large part because of companh and government cost savings via off the shelf parts and BYOD.
aidenn0 9y ago
And when the self-driving semi-truck that delivers food to your local grocers is internet connected?
kbob 9y ago
Do you also choose doctors, grocers, utilities, planes, and cities that are not Internet enabled?
- r00fus 9y ago
  I do look for a RJ-45 port on my doctor (I avoid those), but trying to lure any of the remainder into a faraday cage has been difficult :/

pascalxus 9y ago

Thanks for reminding me to back up my gmail and gdocs. I think she makes a good point about not getting one's paycheck - that could definitely have a devastating ripple effect on the economy. But, is it really possible, that the entire internet go down?

mattmanser 9y ago
He. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
scottLobster 9y ago
That's the thing, he seems to be ignorant of just how redundant and reliable the system is. He uses the example of a worldwide economic collapse if Google went down for a month. Which is probably true. Thing is, that's about as likely as a worldwide economic collapse from the US being nuked off the face of the planet and everyone else left untouched. The beauty of software is that it can be replaced/repaired quickly. If a power plant gets utterly destroyed, it could take a minimum of months to build a new one. If a piece of software gets corrupted, you load from backups or buy a new copy. Downtime is incredibly minimized for even the worst designed system. That's not to say disasters can't happen, but they will be limited in time and scope so long as there's enough money to throw as the problem, and if the amount of money-throwing ever becomes too much to swallow then we might finally see some widespread solid security practices. Honestly simply keeping systems updated would mitigate most of the potential "devastating" attacks, the reason the recent ransomware attacks got as far as they did is lack of funding/will, because it's largely cheaper for organizations to let themselves get pwned then it is for them to protect themselves.
- __jal 9y ago
  Part of the issue is not redundancy, but heterogeny. It is like monoculture crops - doesn't matter if you're growing 4x what you need if something comes along that kills all of them. > If a piece of software gets corrupted, you load from backups or buy a new copy Software is cheap, as you say. Data isn't. The piece's author indicated that the influenza-of-the-month was launched via tax software, which generally isn't interoperable. If there is no reasonable replacement, what do you do? Heterogeneous systems are more expensive to operate, require more expertise, and cause more compatibility problems than monocultures. But they also don't all die at once due to the same bug.

elicash 9y ago

> I’ve often wanted to sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and argue with him about Facebook. It is premised on the notion that "connecting everyone" is an unmitigated good. This isn't the author's major point. But worth noting Zuckerberg changed FB's mission recently to "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Said Mark: "Connecting friends and family has been pretty positive, but I think there is just this collective feeling that we have a responsibility to do more than that and also help build communities and help people get exposed to new perspectives and meet new people -- not just give people a voice, but also help build common ground so people can actually move forward together."

jasonkostempski 9y ago
That doesn't sound different, just rephrased PRBS.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
I think most techno-optimists wouldn't say it is an unmitigated good, but a net good.
- throwanem 9y ago
  I think most techno-optimists would probably find in Koster's article much more to which to object than this characterization of Facebook.
davidivadavid 9y ago
Wow, that's really interesting. Hadn't noticed the change in the mission statement. For reference, it used to be: "Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." They changed from making the world more "open" to making it "closer", which are antonyms in a certain way. They changed from the idea of having Facebook be this sort of universal community of people getting together to searching for more intimacy, getting people closer, etc. but they keep talking about "the world." I've always thought there was room for an "anti-Facebook" that would be the opposite of their original vision statement. Its goal is not to "share things", i.e. to make things public, but to create more private communities that are tighter; not to make the world "more connected" (everyone having 5000 friends) but better connected (i.e. the value of relationships is higher). It seems like FB may be trying to go in that direction after all, but who knows what they really meant.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

> The Internet ... started out by only connecting computer networks. But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks. Those are all computer networks. It just happens that some of them involve computers running financial software, or computers running electrical control software, or computers running social software. Or computers running phone software, or light-bulb software, or toaster software. Perhaps we don't need networked toasters, but I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors. Computers are just too powerful to ignore. The problem is not that they are computers, but that some are locked down for user control of networking, but simultaneously designed insecurely as, say, "smart web cams" without the necessary incentives to keep them secure.

jff 9y ago
> I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors. Seemed to work pretty well for a long time.
- maze-le 9y ago
  doesn't scale up...
- jpttsn 9y ago
  Our expectations have since increased. I wouldn't want to go back to the GDP I thought was fine ten years ago.
  - jimktrains2 9y ago
    Adjusted for inflation, has it changed that much in 10years? Ditto for median wages.
    - sien 9y ago

nostrademons 9y ago

The analogy with electricity is pretty good. When the electricity goes out, most people are pretty screwed: it powers our lighting, air conditioning, household appliances, refrigeration, gasoline pumps, Internet access, point-of-sale systems, and in many places, cooking and running water too. However, when the electricity goes out, it usually comes back on within a day or so, because a power outage is viewed as a top priority to fix, simply because so many aspects of modern life depend on it. And really critical businesses (supermarkets, hospitals, etc.) invest in generators so that they can run independently of the power grid. The Internet will likely follow that path. It'll become indispensable to modern life, which means that when there's a threat against it, a lot of experts will be mobilized to put it back in service. And really critical businesses will invest in making sure their systems work even when offline.

adrianN 9y ago
Aren't we already at that point? I haven't experienced any "internet outages" that lasted more than a couple of hours. Critical services are highly redundant.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Kinda. Thing is that with PCs and smartphone it is really the first time that the smarts are at the edges. With electricity it is in the transformers and the power stations. The kit at the individual home and office is downright dumb in comparison (and can be operated via local generators in a pinch). Similarly the analog phone network has its smarts in the switches. Not in the phones in homes and offices.
natrius 9y ago
It's not like a power outage. It's more like a power surge that's somehow crafted to exploit every engineering flaw in every surge protector that well-funded state actors have piled up over the years. We would not recover from that in days.
- achamayou 9y ago

Filligree 9y ago

Site got ycombinator'd, so here's a google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AyxA4FAqnfcJ:https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AyxA4F...

xaedes 9y ago
scnr: Good we have a little redundancy there =)
amyjess 9y ago
Unfortunately, the Google Cache is still trying to load data from raphkoster.com Do you have a pastebin dump?
- xaedes 9y ago
  Webarchive works for me: http://web.archive.org/web/20170628133305/https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/ http://web.archive.org/web/20170628133305/https://www.raphko...
  - amyjess 9y ago
    Thanks!
- Filligree 9y ago
  When that happens you can press "text-only" on the header, and you'll get an embed-less version. Sometimes you may have to press esc first.

rsync 9y ago

"But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks." This is, I hope, incorrect. Power, water, road, etc. should not be Internet connected and in many cases should not be networked at all. Homeowners doing cute things with arduino and their lawn sprinklers (and learning good lessons about simplicity and fragility) are one thing. It's quite another to bear the responsibility for critical infrastructure. I hope the adults in the room have the wisdom and experience to eschew these kind of "improvements".

rocqua 9y ago
Sensor networks are great boons to any infrastructure. It allows for much quicker reactions and much better tuning. However, this network doesn't need to be public. I can see how you'd pick the internet as a base-layer for this network, which would be a bad idea. The alternative is building an entire separate network, which seems almost un doable.
- ldp01 9y ago
  For some industries it makes sense. Rail and power networks use their own physical infrastructure as they have specific latency and reliability requirements for protection and signalling systems and it's convenient to just build their own comms networks alongside their other infrastructure.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    Rail and power also already have physical infrastructure and property along which they can setup networks.

Unbeliever69 9y ago

When Raph speaks my ears always perk up.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Animats 9y ago

I'm getting worried. I've been harping on the Maersk downtime lately. The ports of the largest shipping company in the world have been shut down for two days by a cyber attack. Trucks can't unload or load at many of the world's ports, including the main container ports of LA, NYC, and Rotterdam. They're going to be down tomorrow, too. Maybe partial operation by Friday.[1] Maersk even lost phone and email systems. One of the few good sources of info has been somebody at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who sends out alerts to truckers. It's a distributed outage. The usual forms of disaster preparation involve geographic dispersal. That doesn't work against this threat. Few companies are as physically dispersed as Maersk, which has major facilities in 61 countries. It didn't help. What happens when someone figures out how to take over Windows Update or the Intel Management Engine or Ubuntu Update? [1] http://btt.paalerts.com/recentmessages.aspx http://btt.paalerts.com/recentmessages.aspx

xenadu02 9y ago
The first step would be to stop using C (and any other memory-unsafe language). The vast majority of these problems come about by memory corruption tricking the computer into executing attacker-delivered code (or ROP gadgets). Yes there will be other security flaws like missing access checks, etc. But none are so pervasive nor so devastating as out-of-bounds read/write. If C arrays were bounds-checked by default then the majority (literally) of exploits would be rendered void immediately. The Rust borrow checker, Swift ARC, or GCs would eliminate use-after-free. Combined that would drastically reduce all available attack surface. The second step is to assign a separate identity to every piece of code, rather than running everything as the current user. Unless it has been initiated by a user action there is no reason for malware to even have write access to your files (or system files for that matter). The idea that any ol random bit of code that manages to execute should be just as trusted as the user is crazytown. IMHM macOS SIP is a good step in that direction, enforcing read-only access to /System and most of /usr. The third step is to have pervasive copy-on-write, including in all filesystems by default. If your system does get pwned it should be a trivial matter of booting to a read-only recovery mode and rolling back to a known-good state. The fourth step is to have more interlocks enforced by the system that cannot be overridden. For example there might be a legitimate reason to truncate shadow copies but why should anyone with admin rights be allowed to do so from a normal login session? That's just stupid. (For those unaware, malware now routinely disables Windows' volume shadow copy and nukes the existing copies to stop you from rolling your files back). Stuff like that should require rebooting into single-user mode or recovery mode. There's always a lot of resistance to the idea of dropping C. Before you go replying with a counter-argument I urge you to stop and think seriously. We've been pushing secure coding standards as an industry for many years now. Everyone is well aware of the risks. We have tools like Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behavior Sanitizer. We have lots of static analysis tools. We have tools like valgrind. And yet... the exploits keep on coming. Despite the thousands upon thousands of years of effort poured into fixing it, we still routinely have new out-of-bounds and use-after-free exploits in critical C code. Even experienced developers get bitten by signed integer overflow and other forms of undefined behavior... and most C code is not being written by experienced careful developers. Embedded code is even worse. If you read the source behind your car's ECU you'd probably never drive again. It is time to admit the truth: programming languages should be memory-safe by default. Period. Whatever the cost it is worth paying.

gavinpc 9y ago

It is kind of ironic, since the internet was designed as exactly the opposite: a damage-tolerant coast-to-coast communications system, i.e. one without a single point of failure.

crpatino 9y ago
Double-plus-so. The Internet continues to be damage tolerant. The problem is that we have collectively expended the last 20 years building single points of failure, and hooking them up all through the Internet.

empath75 9y ago

I'm starting to believe we need some kind of Geneva convention among intelligence services. It's one thing for them all to be spying on dissidents and terrorists or however they want to bother their internal populations, because they'll be limited in how much damage they want to do to their own economies. Once you have intelligence services engaged in all out warfare with each other, there's really no limit to how much damage they can do. Up to and including deaths. We need to get to some kind of gentlemans agreement between the CIA and the FSB really quickly before the world economy collapses.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

akoster 9y ago

Site not loading for me. Internet archive mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000253/https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/ http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000253/https://www.raphko... (Also I realize I share a surname with the author but am of no relation that I know of.)

gaius 9y ago

Tainter postulates that societies collapse when they reach their limit of complexity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Social_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Social_complexi...

partycoder 9y ago

If anything, the Internet was created with resilience in mind. In fact there's no "the Internet" but rather a network of networks that is by design very hard to shut down. You could argue that there's DNS and that's more centralized. Sure, point granted. But in theory you can use any DNS server you want... and there are projects which make it less centralized. Now, a different topic is how devices can be taken over... and that's something where we are largely to blame. The EFF, and the old-school Open source folks like Stallman have been warning for years that we are giving away our freedoms by trusting in closed source. And they were right. Now we are in the endgame where every single computer has one of these "management engines" that cannot be turned off and have total control over a computer, and where your source of entropy is RDRAND.