Интернет - опасное место для игр (english)

Used to Be, the Internet Was a Safe Place to PlayBy John SchwartzTHEWASHIINGTON Whyare newspapers full of reports of hackers defacing government web sites andnasty viruses wreaking havoc on computers worldwide?In no small part it is a cultural problem that goesback to the 60s origins of personalcomputing and the Internet. Many Internet pioneers were bearded longhairs,academics and engineers whose techno-hippie

ethos suffused their new world.They knew one another, were part of a community Trust was the rule. The earlyInternet was much more about openness and communication than walls and locks.The faults it was supposed to correct were in the machines, not in us corrupted packets, not corrupted morals. Once upon a time, there was the time ofinnocence, says Clifford Stoll, whose work tracking down European hackersbecame a popular book,

The Cuckoo s Egg. Once upon a time,computers were not used except in academia, where there really is nothingthat s mission-critical. Once upon a time, computers were mainly playtoys for the techno-weirds techie playtoys. In that environment, hacking was part of the fun ofwhat Stoll has called the early Internet sandbox. In that environment, there seems to be a cachetof Hey! I wrote a virus! Hee-ho! In that environment, it seems funny to breakinto somebody else s computer.

Itseems somewhat innocent to read somebody else s e-mail. It started with hacking telephone systems. Thefounders of Apple Computer Steve Jobsand Steve Wozniak got their start inbusiness peddling blue boxes, devices that allowed users to hackthe telephone network and make long-distance calls for free. These phonephreaks were seen by some as cultural heroes free spirits striking a blow against the suits,

the evilcorporations seen as the enemies of spontaneity and creativity.Once computer systems were connected by networks, remote hacking was an attractive challenge, Internet pioneer VintonCerf recalls via e-mail. Much of the motivation was like picking locks orscaling walls just to see if you coulddo it. Harm was not the objective, most of the time. It was a big open playscape for theseguys, says Katie

Hafner, who has written books about the history of theInternet and about hackers lives. The net was built as a completely opencommunity People would actually be offended if files were protected. There were some early nods to security issues the fledgling ARPANET, the precursor totoday s Internet, required passwords. It was funded by the military, after all.But the subtext was this was an open community because this

was an experiment, Hafner says.It was built by guys like Jon Postel, the Internetpioneer who died last year. Postel had a vision of an Internet that didn t needa center to survive, a network that could be governed by standards andconsensus without ever putting anybody in charge. Utopian? Sure. Vulnerable?Uh-huh.That culture rejected attempts to create complex,cumbersome computer

operating systems that incorporated security from theground up. Computer security expert Peter Neumann says, Viruses existonly because of the shortsightedness of subsequent developers who almostcompletely ignored the security problems that some designers hadeffectively solved.The problem is that the Internet caught on in thebiggest possible way. The anarchic, don t-tell-us-how-to-run-our-lives ethicthat defined the burgeoning network has retained

that early vulnerability.Broader penetration of the Internet into society meant broader penetration ofsociety into the Internet it became more like the real world, and the real worldis a tough place.A big wake-up call came in 1988 when Robert Morris Jr then a Cornell University student,released a computer program that single-handedly crashed systems

across theInternet. His father, a famous programmer and security expert, was of thegeneration that had hacked for fun. Morris Jr. didn t mean to bring down theInternet. His mischief was kind of in the spirit of the net, saysHafner. But by then the Internet was no longer a playscape.If the net s problem is anarchy, the problem withpersonal computers is monarchy

Bill Gates. Microsoft is indeed the evilempire when it comes to robust infrastructures, says Neumann.Two viruses that recently swept through the world scomputers, Melissa and Explore.zip, took advantage of the fact that so manymillions of PCs run on a suite of Microsoft s programs. The company s latestofferings include security options butthe options are turned off at the factory. The security measures make computinga little clunkier, and cut

users off from some of the bells and whistles thatMicrosoft writes into its programs. It s as if consumers said they wantedfaster cars, and so the vendors maximize speed by providing fastercars, but with no brakes and no air bags! says computer security expertEugene Spafford of Purdue University.Today s Internet is a mirror of society Conceived in aspirit of trust and good practical jokes, today it s about money.

The frontieris getting settled by corporations worth billions, all of which are promisingto sell us our future.It will be interesting to see if a network strongenough to survive nuclear attack can survive its own success.