> 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.
One subtle question: how much of that is GDP change is growth, and how much is risk redistribution?
Obviously communication efficiency has real advantages. Some of what has been gained is lasting improvement. But humans have a nasty tendency to enforce order on chaotic systems and mistake legibility for growth. Everywhere from forest fires to housing prices, we create systems that delay, but concentrate, risk. Annual brushfires are extinguished, leading to decadal infernos. Credit default swaps enable high default lending at low risk, right up until they don't.
I'm darkly suspicious that many of the gains from communications technology, particularly in stock trading, fall into this category. They've allowed us to push concentrate and defer everyday risks, getting us growth over most time windows when the reality is that we've redistributed risk.
Absolutely yes for both. The past decade was one of the most successful ones, if not the most successful one, in global wage increases and poverty reduction. Literally billions of people have been raised to standards of living they didn't dare to dream of a decade ago.
Of course, these increases have been concentrated among the poorest people in the world, so you don't see them in the US.
Almost all of that in two countries: China and India. And much of that in China. Which had a hell of a lot more to do with raising the floor than lifting the ceiling.
Some of our international globalisation tools assisted in that -- shipping (Maersk included), finance, and realtime shelf-to-factory inventory control. But a lot of it didn't.
As Gibson's noted, the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. You might also want to ask, from time to time, just which trends truly represent "the future".
The facts and statistics in history and economics appear to be 'politically incorrect' for every type of political belief system. Liberal, Left, Libertarian, Conservative, doesn't matter, there's some factor out there that hasn't been incorporated. I think the Google people say something like "unless you're God, bring data".
GDP, if you are an American, has not been related to wages for a very long time. The median American has not received a real wage increase in over four decades.
If you're a libertarian, which some are here, this should worry you.
The rational actor school says it's because we're all rational actors and the alternative outcome was clearly preferable.
There are other, and frequently far more convincing, models, which suggest that humans frequently make poor decisions out of near-term exigencies, coercion, underappreciated risk (pretty much just what we're talking about here), or any number of other reasons.
See: Fallacy of composition, Logic of Collective Action, Tragedy of the Commons, Prisoners' Dilemma, Red Queen's Race, Complexity Trap, among others.
Well, sure it did. It was the best we had, after all, and folks were trained to do it. But compared to today's transactions, it is really a step backwards.
> 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.
I wish you were less right. I'm working on this "whole world connected" system and the things I see developed in IoT devices are just too scary (like sending your wifi ssid and password unencrypted to some distant server about every minute). Only way for some damage mitigation will probably be some kind of IPS/Firewall hubs so that all your "smart" devices are isolated.
When someone connects 1000 different devices into one system, he now has 1000*x potential holes into this system. Requiring that every connected device is perfectly secure is just not realistic. Even those with biggest budgets can't be totally secure, so what do we expect from some small manufacturer with two programmers and tight deadlines? We need to have good firewalls for IoT devices.
I've speculated before about the idea of having ISP service packages include CPE that by default supports UPnP only on a VPN interface that's automatically configured and matched with an ISP-resolvable domain name for the customer's use.
To your point here, it seems reasonable to have that VPN interface also apply an outbound traffic firewall that defaults closed - that'd put a hard stop to the kind of trivial yet horrific exposure you describe, and making automatic firmware updates require extra effort to work seems like a relatively small price to pay. (After all, it's not as though device providers who fail to scruple at that kind of atrocity are going to be putting out security updates on a regular basis...)
I think the problem is that we have one network doing many things that need to have builtin redundancy both in terms of messaging and data storage. So putting a bank's entire database into Azure or AWS isn't wise in my opinion. Rather, I think the network either needs to be fragmented to serve different sets of customers or the end points need to be improved to the point that onsite hosting becomes the norm again. Centralization is much like specialization in that it can be adopted to the point of diseconomy.
>Rather, I think the network either needs to be fragmented to serve different sets of customers or the end points need to be improved to the point that onsite hosting becomes the norm again.
Hosting in the cloud is a bet that Azure/AWS can protect your data from physical damage/loss as well. It isn't just a cost-reduction to hire less sysadmins and desk support. They have ginormous amounts of cash to build quality data centers in stable-Earth locations that still have excellent internet connections.
Really, the answer is more data centers and cloud hosting companies with replication and cold-storage agreements between them (where sane).
But for a lot of companies out there, this is overkill. One cloud provider is more security/safety than they'd likely ever get building their own data center.
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.