I thought I'd take a break to make a commentary on the direction of computer hardware today.
Every new generation of computer hardware adds new complexity that most people will never fully understand. However, at the moment we can still say we OWN our hardware. We can install whatever software we want, we can add to it and customize it (forgoing warranties). However, pressures are mounting to create computers that we don't really own. It's not too hard to imaging a future where we get our computers for bellow cost and we're forced to purchase overpriced software from certain vendors. No more free (as in beer or freedom) software at that point! Think it's far fetched? Just extrapolate the game console market to computers and whala..
Say goodbye to your privacy and security. Every transaction and every keystroke, you'll have NO idea who's watching.. Marketers? Big Brother? Only the vendors will know. It would a dream come true for government and advertisers. How long did it take us to realized telecoms had bedded down with the government.
Our computers and software will be "black boxes". And if we want the newest coolest games, or software to read documents, we'll have no choice. The low cost and innocent offer will be hard to turn down. What average Joe wouldn't buy a computer that will play the best games and work with pervasive monopolized software for $50?
I realize that there would be a lot of pressure against this, but we have to make sure there is enough!
Slashdot led me to this, which inspired this post:
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/2013733.html
"They also point out a number of other areas of concern, including compatibility with software licensing models (already an area of contention for multicore processors) and privacy/security issues related to vendors having access to customers' hardware."
Here's an interesting patent:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=358234.358271
"Hardware protection against software piracy"
I'm sure there more. Share if you find them.
Goals
I'd like to offer up these goals for the network. What goals are missing? Please respond with your thoughts on how these goals are already met by an existing network, or how they could be met by a new network.
- Security of transactions. Uploaders, Downloaders, and Data Facilitators must be protected from their transactions.
- This goal must be maintained assuming some fraction of participating nodes are subversively working in collusion, and that all network traffic between participants is visible to the attacker.
- This is the highest priority and no compromise outside of the necessity for practicality will be made at the expense of this goal.
- Note, security from participation is NOT a goal. That is the goal of a darknet.
- Protection of Data Facilitators excludes the use of public exit points from the network. These serve as legal and technological attack points.
- Specific entry points for data should also be avoided. These also serve as legal and technological attack points.
- Anyone at anytime can participate in the network given a computer and Internet connection. It should be a public network, not a private darknet.
- Darknets require existing relationships with others already participating. This would exclude a large portion of the population that would like to participate but know of no other people already participating or willing to participate.
- Trust is dispersed over a user defined number of nodes.
- Trust is based on the probability that some faction of nodes known are NOT evil. This faction is defined by the user on a per access basis.
- The plain text of the transaction must not be revealed until it has passed through enough nodes that the user is comfortable with the probability it has passed through a trustworthy node as compared to the risk of the transaction.
- This is one of the biggest problems with many anonymous peer to peer networks. Requests and transactions are plain text to immediate nodes. The legal recourse is that you could simply be passing the request through from someone else. However, for some networks an immediate node could perform statistical analysis of the transactions to yield a fairly strong certainty of a user's general network activity.
- No centralization.
- Centralization is very tempting, especially given the previous goals. There are many benefits including performance, reliability, and security. However, centralization provides a small number of attack points to cripple or completely disable the entire network.
- Proper centralized servers can also be expensive, requiring solicitation for donations, or other money making schemes such as advertisements.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment