February 14, 2000 New Thinking:
The nature of the Internet
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February 14, 2000
The nature of the Internet
By Gerry McGovern
In time, last week may have been seen as the moment when many doors began to be shut and locked on the Internet. The Internet, this wonderful experiment in openness, must face the reality that it exists within a natural world where everything that is open is open to attack.
We have hackers and we have viruses and they test and seek to infect. The classic response is to see the people who hack and create viruses as criminals, but the reality is much more complex. We won’t resolve the problems that currently face the Internet through a heavier dose of law enforcement. The law of man is not the law that hackers and viruses respond to, but rather the law of nature.
Many have claimed that the Internet behaves like an organic system, that its complex network of interactions have taken on a life of their own, that there is something beyond simple logic in relation to the way the Internet behaves. I subscribe to this view. The Internet is to all intents and purposes ‘alive’.
Viewed as a living entity, the Internet has a complex and often dependent relationship with the hackers and viruses that seek to test and probe its every core. Health in any system is never some perfect state. A healthy system is a fit system and a fit system must regularly exercise itself by defending and attacking entities that would seek to test it.
No healthy system exists in an environment where there is nothing that will test it, where there is nothing that is living off it.
Hackers and viruses cannot exist if the Internet does not exist. The hackers who test and probe the Internet are very often its fiercest proponents and supporters. They are obsessed by the Internet. They very often live for the Internet.
To class every hacker as a criminal is short-sighted and reactive. Calling in the troops to solve what ails the Internet needs to be done very carefully, lest the doctors end up killing the patient.
Continuing forward blindly, hoping that the worst hackers and malignant viruses will just go away, is equally short-sighted. The early, pioneering, romantic days of the Internet where people left ‘the key in the door’ are over.
The Internet is not a global village, but a sprawling global city that never sleeps, and where if you listen closely, you can always hear the hum of mischief.
Back in those ‘innocent’ days, the Internet was an academic nirvana where universities connected up their research centers and where academics and students logged in to share ideas.
It is unfortunate but inevitable that the perpetrators of the Denial of Service (DOS) attacks that crippled many of the largest websites last week, used universities as the launching pads for such attacks. University networks, being by their very nature more open than commercial networks, are easy prey to those who wish to spread mayhem.
While the Internet age of innocence is over we should never forget how much has been achieved by openness and co-operation. Security issues do need to be addressed in a much more comprehensive manner. However, while locking all your doors may keep you safe, linking into the network, security risk or not, is where the future lies.
Gerry McGovern
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The Internet is not a global village, but a sprawling global city that never sleeps, and where if you listen closely, you can always hear the hum of mischief.
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