I once was sitting on a bench in a park, long ago
An old man was next to me on the bench, and we got talking. When I told him that I worked in computing he said "I've heard they only use 0s and 1s".
And that got me thinking: on one level it is true, but it misses an important point.
And so I explained to him that while it is true on one level, that there was another way to see it.
You could equally say "A house is only made of bricks." Again, it is true, but the bricks are used to make walls, the walls to make rooms, and the rooms to make a house.
You could even say "A brick is made of grains of sand" and therefore conclude that houses are 'only' made of sand.
The internet is layered in a similar way. (What follows is a simplification)
At the lowest level you have wires carrying electricity at changing voltage. One voltage, within certain tolerances, represents 0, and another voltage represents 1.
The next level up only has to worry about those zeros and ones, it doesn't have to worry about voltages, and thinks it is just sending zeros and ones across the wires.
However, these zeros and ones may not get sent entirely faithfully, and sometimes a bit gets flipped, or one gets inserted or deleted, for instance because of noise on the line.
So a higher level is involved in getting those bits sent reliably. A long 'message' gets split into packets, and numbered, and sent individually.
The receiving end checks that all packets arrive, and are intact, asks for repeats of missing or damaged packets, and reassembles the message.
So the level above doesn't have to worry about reliably sending messages, and can just send messages.
A yet higher level is responsible for what the bits 'mean'. Depending on the context, a particular group of bits might represent the letter 'x', or represent the colour of a pixel in an image.
And a yet higher level is responsible for intermediating with the user, dealing with requests for information (e.g. the click on a link), and receiving and displaying the results.
So each level has a different set of responsibilities, and a different set of semantics, but builds on the lower layers.
All those layers I have described are about messages, or documents.
But one question is where to put 'identity', the indication of who you are, so that responding machines can determine what you are allowed to see.
And the other side of the same coin: where to put 'security', how to stop other people knowing more about you than you want.
Very early versions of the internet protocols (I'm talking about the 1960's here) had planned to put some aspects of this in a very low level of the internet stack.
You can argue that this is a good place for it: to connect to the internet, you have had to log in to your computer; your computer knows it really is you.
Identity should be transitive: you shouldn't have to repeatedly identify yourself.
However, at that time, it was deemed too expensive (and I suspect that hardware wasn't really powerful enough to support it).
So they left it out.
The mistake they made was not leaving the hooks so that it could be added later, when computers would become cheaper and more powerful.
The early internet was used in academic environments, and identity and security were deemed less important. They didn't anticipate spam...
So identity and security ended up as an afterthought.
Where did it all end up getting put? Right at the top of the stack of layers, in the application layer, or just underneath.
This is why Google is now forcing everyone to use https, adding the security aspect at the web connection level.
And why every damn website where you can log in asks for a password, adding identity separately to each website.
Is this too late to fix?
Everyone has two matched keys:
('Keys' are very large numbers, 300 digits or more; 'locking' means scrambling the message using those large numbers)
I lock a message with my private key (so it can only be opened with my public key).
I send the locked message to you.
You get a copy of my public key: if it opens the message, you know it was really from me.
No more spam!
I lock a message with your public key (so it can only be opened with your private key).
I send you the locked message: I know that only you can open it to read it.
Combine those two things:
I lock a message:
I send it to you:
We can use the same process instead of passwords when logging in to websites.
You want to create an account at an online shop. You click on the "Create an account" button.
The site asks you to for a username, which you provide, and click OK.
The site checks the user name is free, and sends a message to your browser that you want to register.
The browser asks if you want to register. You click Yes.
The browser and the site exchange public keys.
You fill in your username, and click on Log in.
The site sends a random message to your browser, locked with the public key it has registered for that username, and locked with its own private key. It asks your browser to tell it what the message is.
Your browser knows it is really from the site (and not someone pretending).
The browser asks if you really want to log in with that username, and if so decodes the message and sends it back, this time locked with your private key and the site's public key.
The site therefore knows it is really you and lets you in, without typing in a password!
The other side of the identity coin is anonymity.
The internet was founded on anonymity, and that was seen as a good thing.
However, there are some bad aspects: the rudeness in comments (and the trolls, and the bots) can be traced back to anonymity,
Nevertheless, you don't want to have to identify yourself every time you go to a website, and you don't want companies (or governments) following your every move on the web.
We all know about cookies.
Cookies are small pieces of information deposited on your computer by websites that they can read later.
But even without cookies, we can be tracked using several techniques.
At work once, we were given a questionnaire to fill in that we were guaranteed was anonymised.
Unfortunately the first two questions were:
These two questions would have uniquely identified me. I didn't fill it in.
In fact 85% of US citizens are uniquely identifiable by postcode+date of birth+gender.
I expect that the percentage is even higher in the Netherlands, since the postcode is more specific here.
Similarly with browsers: your IP, plus certain other discoverable aspects of your computer can uniquely identify you: they often don't even need cookies.
A recent article in the New York TImes showed that they could acquire an 'anonymised' dataset of 50 billion mobile phone positions, of 12 million people.
Within minutes they located 'down to a few feet' where Donald Trump had been, where his security personel live, and the routes they take between home and work, and using that could discover the security personel's names and family details.
The data came from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps - anything from weather apps to local news apps to coupon savers.
Many sites, and emails, use a technique of including a tiny (one pixel) image.
That gets loaded from a server somewhere, that then records that you have visited that site, or opened that email, and from where, and how many times...
Google advertises this as a service so you can see how many people visit your site and where from. It also allows Google to track individuals as well...
Not particularly new [e.g.
petrol stations], but now more widely distributed.
Enabled by the dramatic lowering of cost of computers, and their rising power.
The Raspberry Pi is 1 million times faster than the Elliott, one millionth of the price, and one two-millionth the size.
So slowly but surely more and more things are getting connected to the internet.
Connected now: central heating, lights, doorbells [leaking information], cars. Toys.
But... the computers were not powerful enough to do proper security.
So slowly but surely more and more things are getting connected to the internet.
Connected now: central heating, lights, doorbells [leaking information], cars. Toys.
But... the computers were not powerful enough to do proper security.
George Santayana:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
So slowly but surely more and more things are getting connected to the internet.
Connected now: central heating, lights, doorbells [leaking information], cars. Toys.
But... the computers were not powerful enough to do proper security.
George Santayana:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Pemberton's Corollary:
Those of us who CAN remember the past are condemned to watch others repeat it...
One person sweeps the
entire internet in 16 hours.
"The completed scan proved our assumption was true. There were in fact several hundred thousand unprotected devices on the Internet making it possible to build a super fast distributed port scanner."
[Although the person doing this was only doing it out of interest, shortly after this talk happened DDoS hackers did it and released the results]
Someone broke into a casino, via an aquarium.
Someone shows how to break into a car, via the internet-connected radio, and completely take over the control of the car.
Conclusion: internet connected devices are not safe. Once you've got in, you have access to far more devices, because devices are trusted behind the firewall.
Advice: keep your internet of things devices on a different network to your computers.
Born in 1880, a middle child in a family of 20(!) children.
1880: nearly no modern technologies; only trains and photography. No electricity.
In such a large household, as is to be expected, each child had a task, and it was my grandfather's to ensure that the oil lamps were filled.
It must have been indeed an exciting time, when light became something you could switch on and off.
This may well explain my grandfather's fascination with electricity, and why he set up a company to manufacture electrical switching machinery.
Trains and photography were paradigm shifts: they change the way that you think about and interact with the world.
But they often replace existing ways of doing things, taking companies with them.
1609, an Englishman, Henry Hudson, working for a Dutch
company, discovering the island of Manhattan. Then, and for centuries after,
all trans-Atlantic shipping was done with sailing ships.
The Fighting Temeraire tugged
to her last Berth to be broken up, by Turner, 1838
(The Temeraire was an important sailing ship from the Battle of Trafalgar 1805.)
When steam ships were introduced they were not reliable enough to travel trans-Atlantic distances, they couldn't travel far without breaking down, and they were inclined to blow up.
But steam ships were able to find a niche in lake and river transport, where the distances were short, and where they had the advantage of being able to travel against the wind and on wind-still days.
Once in the niche they could improve reliability until they were able to travel trans-Atlantic.
Once that happened, all shipping switched to steam, and all the companies producing trans-Atlantic sailing ships went out of business; not one survived into the 20th century.
Who would have thought that Kodak didn't see this coming?
From Lorna Doone (taking place around 1700):
"The roads are much improved, and the growing use of stage waggons (some of which will travel as much as forty miles [64 km] in a summer day) has turned our ancient ideas of distance almost upside-down"
Going back to my grandfather.
He was born in a world of only two modern technologies, but in his life of nearly a hundred years, he saw vast numbers of paradigm shifts:
electricity, telephone, lifts, central heating, cars, film, radio, television, recorded sound, flight, electronic money, computers, space travel, ... the list is enormous.
We are still seeing new shifts: mobile telephones, cheap computers that can understand and talk back, self-driving cars, ...
Does that mean that paradigm shifts are happening faster and faster?
Yes.
Kurzweil did an investigation, by asking representatives of many different disciplines to identify the paradigm shifts that had happened in their discipline and when. We're talking here of time scales of tens of thousands of years for some disciplines.
He discovered that paradigm shifts are increasing at an exponential rate!
If they happened once every 100 years, then they happened every 50 years, then every 25 years, and so on.
Year Time to next =Days 0 100 36500
Year Time to next =Days 0 100 36500 100 50 18250
Year Time to next =Days 0 100 36500 100 50 18250 150 25 9125
Year Time to next =Days 0 100 36500 100 50 18250 150 25 9125 175 12.5 4562.5
Year Time to next =Days 0 100 36500 100 50 18250 150 25 9125 175 12.5 4562.5 187.5 6.25 2281.25 193.75 3.125 1140.63 196.875 1.563 570.31 198.438 0.781 285.16 199.219 0.391 142.58 199.609 0.195 71.29 199.805 0.098 35.64 199.902 0.049 17.82 199.951 0.024 8.91 199.976 0.012 4.46 199.988 0.006 2.23 199.994 0.003 1.11 199.997 0.002 0.56
That may seem impossible,
but we have already seen a similar expansion that also seemed impossible.
In the 1960's we already knew that the amount of information the world was producing was doubling every 15 years, and had been for at least 300 years.
We 'knew' this had to stop, since we would run out of paper to store the results.
And then the internet happened
So sometime in the nearish future paradigm shifts will apparently be happening daily? How?
One proposed explanation is that that is the point that computers become smarter than us: computers will start doing the design rather than us.
What if computers are no longer in our service?
What if they are no longer in our service and spot the cause of the climate crisis.
We need to plan.
But we respond very slowly, look at Kodak, look at climate change...
Humans are dreadfully bad at avoiding crises.
The question is, which will get us first: the climate crisis or the AI crisis?