From whence comes the real dangers to the internet?

[Dave Farber <dfarber () me com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
> Date: June 16, 2010 7:37:45 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
> Subject: From whence comes the real dangers to the internet?
> Reply-To: karl () cavebear com

> Today Intuit's Quickbooks web application is dead.  Their payroll systems may be offline as well.  Small business by 
> the thousands are unable to run their accounts, issue or process purchase orders, or pay their bills.  My own small 
> company has already seen sales that may been lost because we can not issue timely invoices.  The cumulative impact 
> across the small business community could easily be in the $billons.
>
> Earlier this week AT&T/Apple had the iPhone registration fiasco.
>
> These kinds of things are becoming increasingly common.
>
> Last week Stewart Baker wrote about dangers to the internet from actors with evil intent.
>
> I would submit that the internet more at risk from ourselves than it is from any terrorist or "cyber warrior".
>
> It is appearing as if the BP oil blowout was caused by shoddy procedures and corners cut to save money.
>
> When it comes to taking shortcuts BP is not alone.
>
> In the internet software business we have far too many providers who create weak products that are under-tested and 
> for which users have neither adequate means to detect or isolate failures nor backup procedures in case of failure.
>
> And it is rare to find anyone who has looked at the cross-linkage between our technologies and wondered "how do we 
> bring it all back if something fails?"
>
> Walt Kelly said "We have met the enemy and it is us".  I suggest that when we look at the vulnerability of the 
> technical machinery of our society that we are more at risk from our own foibles than from active attack by evil 
> doers.
>
> We really ought to look at the net and our net applications not so much with an eye to protecting them against evil 
> people as with an eye to protect them against ourselves and Murphy's Law.
>
> We ought to begin changing the architecture of the internet to build-in many of the tools that old Ma Bell found 
> useful - from easy things like remote loopbacks, clear test points, and clearly defined demarcations of authority to 
> more complex things like the creation of a information base in which the pathology of the internet can be described - 
> particularly in terms of symptoms indicating possible causations and procedures to resolve among those possible 
> causations.
>
> If we had things like that we would not only be better prepared against future failures, human mistakes, and the 
> often destructive resonance of old devices when they meet the new, but we would also be better prepared against 
> actual attacks.
>
> I believe that in our national planning, such as our National Broadband Plan, that we need to give a lot more 
> attention than we have to matters of maintenance, testing, troubleshooting, repair, and recovery from failures.
>
>               --karl--



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