Trusted Internet

I hate to tell this story. It dates me.

When I returned to college after a year off I went to the Comp Sci department and asked if I could, pretty please, have an account on the internet.

“No!” the administrator objected, horrified. “The internet isn’t for civilians!”

I am so old that when I was in college every cable company, telephone company and public library was not offering hot and cold running internet access. You couldn’t duck into Starbucks and Twitter with your latte. Yes, there was an internet, but to get on it you had to go through channels.

In those days the people used the internet because they needed it to communicate about their real jobs. Their real jobs were not about defrauding people, or even day trading. These people had posters of Unix shells on their office walls, and more technical knowledge than I will ever have. They all achieved internet access by passing a gatekeeper.

In those days I did not receive emails offering to enlarge or decrease my body parts. No one in Africa sent me blessings nor offered to share their trust funds with me. In those days the gatekeeper of whatever tiny community granted the internet access would have yanked their privileges.

Now the internet is so vast that there could never be enough gatekeepers to supervise its traffic. Instead of human administrators we rely on secure socket layers to keep our information safe, and to assure us that our interlocutors have been vetted by someone. But as Melih Abdulhayoglu points out, the internet is rife with fraudsters. His dream is for everyone on the internet to have an SSL certificate. Businesses should have extended validation certificates, showing their bona fides, like officers carrying their commissions into battle, to prove that they were who they said their were.

I just need to point out that secure sockets are great, but we still need to use our heads.

In 1984 Larry Pournelle sent a spam on the baby internet, something about a science fiction book. He entered a command wrong, and I received 100 copies of that email. So did all the programmers in Birkenstocks, who universally derided him. They did not want their meager bandwidth clogged by spam, however inadvertent.

Yesterday I read that United’s stock had taken a bath because someone with a short attention span had posted a story about United Bankruptcy filing to Bloomberg News. The people who read it must have had short attention spans, too, because instead of reading the dateline, they started issuing “sell” orders. Had they read the dateline they would have realized that the story was six years old.

The internet magnifies. Mistakes and fraud both travel swiftly and widely. I’m all in favor of enhancing internet security, but we must accompany that security with critical faculties. Even if we trust, we still have to verify.