renehollan's Journal: A rant to remember

I thought this rant worth preserving.

An unlocked door does NOT imply a "big honking sign that says 'enter'".

Ah, but it certainly does, as far as the Internet is concerned. You are making the traditional mistake of comparing cyberspace to meatspace, where your statement would be true.

The internet may not have been intended to be designed in the spirit of an open community, but that's how it turned out: it was used as a collaborative research tool for the exchange of information. Things were made available with the implicit cultural assumption that copies were free to be taken and examined. The meatspace analogy would be a community where the norm was that people were free to wander into any house, and look around, just not damage anything. If there was a door, just jiggle the lock if it's stuck. People asking about FTP passwords weren't rebuffed, they were told about "anonymous" and were gently asked to leave their "email address at the door", as it were.

While some security was available, in terms of password-protected telnet access, the general rule was that you didn't put stuff on an internet connected computer that you'd mind becoming public.

This culture extended to the development of the WWW: it was designed as a way to facilitate the sharing of information enhanced with links to related stuff: all pages were equal. The concept of "deep-linking" didn't make sense -- it mattered more that you could get to a page of interest.

Fast forward to commercialization, constrained-navigation (so you're forced to see ads), and the desire to use the open community's communication mechanism for virtual private communication (VPN, duh, but also plain old SSL and IPSec encrypted traffic). Enhanced privacy, security, and constrained site navigation are exceptions, not the rule. There are legitimate reasons to support these, you can beef up security if you wish, but, and this is the kicker, when it comes to "old-net culture", the onus is on you to lock things down and not presume that the norm is "stay away unless invited". Rather than a community of homes, the analogy is a mall of stores, public libraries, and free art exhibits, inviting and open to all.

This is why I wrote "If you don't understand the Internet, stay the fuck away."

Here was a peaceful, cooperative community, that helped provide the means for secure communication to those that wanted it, and wound up getting culturally hijacked by people who refuse to accept that there are certain customs to follow if you really want people to not look and stay away.

We gave them an "Http-Referrer" field for <insert deity here>'s sake. How arrogant of the "thou shalt not deep link" hounds to not use it. It's like someone building a two-way road and a bunch of idiots insisting on driving on the "wrong" side because it's the "right" side where they came from. Funny, Yanks drive on the left in the U.K., Brits drive on the right in the U.S.A. Perhaps when someone whines about the curious seeing what they oughtn't in an ignorantly open site, the data should be blown to a bunch of mirror sites, like car parts thrown from an auto collision.

You know, those that designed the internet protocols should have patented them (you can patent a protocol, I think), and used the clout to take away the right to play on the net from those that refused to adapt to the lingua franca's idioms. Of course, they probably would have to assign such patents to the DoD and others, so that dream is a bit foolish, but the lesson should be learned: if you don't want others to pollute and poison what you make, you need to protect it from those that would try while making it available to all others (which is why the GPL is so brilliant a concept, though it appear we need to get some clue-clubs to help enforce it).

O.K., I'm out of breath, so this rant is over. Mod me down as you will.