Commentary

This week’s New Scientist featured a particularly fear-mongering article about internet security. Entitled “Age of the Splinternet”, it at first appears to be a hooray to the importance of net neutrality. But the subplot quickly becomes clear: the internet is a great place to be, but anything can and will go wrong, even fantastical, sci-fi doomsday scenarios …

The author begins with an illuminating history lesson on the structure of the internet. Dating back to the 1960s, the underlying system of routers was initially designed by the military as a fault-tolerant network, able to withstand a nuclear blast. The lack of central command, and the presence of autonomous nodes resulted in a decentralised, self-sustaining mesh, able to route traffic around a fault without human input.

The article goes on to praise the open, anonymous nature of the internet, making it difficult (though not impossible) for repressive regimes to censor the information their citizens can access. Then the author shifts a gear, and a dark side to this openness is revealed. We are warned that companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon are starting to - can you imagine it - “fragment” the web to support their own products and interests.

Perhaps it should not be such a shock that business and commerce continues to operate through self-interest, even on the internet. There is no problem with the way Apple restrict the apps users can install: if they didn’t do it, someone else would. The motivation is that a large proportion of users want things to “just work”, and are happier on the “less choice, more reliability” side of the equation.

The existence of the iPhone caused its flip-side to come into existence - Android - with its comparatively open policy. As long as business happens on the internet, it will want to manipulate things to make a profit; nothing new there. The “internet” as a whole is unblemished by that fact.

The cloud is described as a single point of failure. For example, when Amazon’s EC2 service croaked, businesses that relied on it were offline for the duration. Ignoring the fact that the definition of “the cloud” is precisely the reverse of a “single point” - that it is distributed and ought to be redundant (the EC2 outage was a bit of a freak occurence, due to a network engineer running the wrong command and taking out the whole farm), there is - again - no threat here. The internet - like any social system - will grow and evolve based on the demands of its users. EC2 makes up a tiny part of the internet and like any other service, has advantages and disadvantages, and nobody has to use it.

The very next paragraph does an about-turn by admitting that the cloud actually is distributed, spreading your data among many locations, and that this too is a problem. An example of this “threat” is the hack of RSA, which led to the intrusion of Lockheed-Martin’s computers. It’s not clear exactly what the problem is here, other than the fact that specialised groups of people depend on each other to get things done, and sometimes they mess up.

Beyond this point, we are taken on a ghost train ride into sheer speculation and technical folly. “Imagine being a heart patient and having your pacemaker hacked” the author warns. Even with the “evils” of the internet, we still know how to put up a firewall on our home PCs, surely also on medical devices. We may pick up a virus by randomly browing the web, but pacemakers will never be so general and will always be highly limited in functionality, through common sense and good engineering. If a pacemaker was somehow monitored over the internet, then it would not be hard to isolate this function from its critical control system.

If we’re not already quaking in our boots and reaching for the “off” switch on our broadband modems, a similar medical doomsday scenario is presented. What if the glucose levels of a diabetic patient is monitored and controlled over the internet? Wouldn’t it get hacked? Again, this is pure speculation out of the context of real constraints. The fault-tolerance levels of medical systems are far more stringent than those of general consumer devices. Not to mention the fact that nobody would design a system which gambles a human life on network availability.

Anonymity is blamed for the ability of online criminals to operate with impunity. I guess the humble balaclava, or simply “hiding from the police” aren’t sophisticated enough tactics to make it into New Scientist.

Are we offered any solutions to these terrors of the modern age? Actually, yes. The first is a good old “internet licence”, along with some kind of hardware identification system. Although the author recognises the technical challenges in such an idea, we must also consider the 100% likelihood of the system being circumvented by those it intends to control. DRM comes to mind as an example of an identification and control system which simply doesn’t work, and is prohibitively expensive to fix after the fact.

In summary, it would be fair to say that the article finds a balance between encouraging openness of the internet, and preventing misuse. But a prominent message prevails, which is that nonetheless, the internet is a dangerous place and therefore must be controlled. The solution really is in basic common sense and best practices.

Armed with fully patched software and treading wisely, there is no cause for concern. Business will continue to bend the internet to their own ends (as it does in the real world). Criminals will continue to attempt to exploit it (as they do in the real world). We can’t prevent these things from happening, but we can use our heads to drastically reduce our chances of going splat on the imformation superhighway.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the US state of California was a fairly quiet place, mostly made up of natives. Then suddenly people turned up from all over. In two years, the population of San Francisco ballooned to twenty-five times its former size.

People from all over the world risked a dangerous ocean voyage to get there. They either sailed around the tip of South America, or camped along a cholera-infested route from coast-to-coast along the California Trail.

The massive influx of settlers changed the state of California forever …

Why all the fuss and bother? The answer is that something highly scarce and therefore valuable was found in riverbeds and streams: it was of course the Gold Rush of 1849.

At first, anybody could turn up (assuming you could get there) and pan for gold, tax free. It was a free-for-all.

Panning for Gold

There really isn’t much gold in the world: all the gold ever extracted would only fill 82 cubic feet.

Gold mining is not exactly a walk in the park. First you have to find some. According to the colourfully-titled Hard Rock Miner’s Handbook, “it takes 25,000 claims staked, to find 500 [sites] worth diamond-drilling to find one mine”.

Then you have to dig your mine - up to 4km underground - which is unbearably hot and subject to “major seismic events”.  Once you cart your ore back to the surface, the extraction process involves a dangerous cocktail of cyanide, sulphuric acid and mercury.

You could certainly say that gold is scarce, both in terms of quantity and extraction costs.

All this is worthwhile though, because once you’ve got it, gold is fantastically durable to the elements. Glowing nuggets of it can theoretically be found lying about in their natural state.

This durability means that 24 carat (pure) gold is fairly uniform stuff, so is highly fungible (easily traded like-for-like). It is also incredibly dense, so a small volume of it conveniently represents a high value.

These properties make gold a highly suitable symbol of value. If you could embody the value of human endeavour into a coin, it would be a gold one.

A quantity of gold could also be said to be a “proof of work”. It is a proof of work because it is relatively easy to prove that a certain amount of work was done to extract it. Therefore the value it represents can be easily established.

Bitcoin

Another proof of work is a solution to a difficult mathematical problem. The Bitcoin system of “digital currency” relies on this fact. A Bitcoin is “mined” by means of a computationally-intensive search for solutions. A solution (or ‘block’) yields a number of Bitcoins. These Bitcoins are demonstrably unique, and can be cryptographically linked to their owner. They can then be traded for goods, services or even exchanged for another currency.

A Bitcoin block could be likened to a nugget of gold in economic terms. It’s fungible, easy to verify and relatively difficult to “mine”. Therefore it’s much like a commodity, assuming there continues to be a demand.

With the current hype surrounding Bitcoin, there certainly is a demand. The price for a Bitcoin on the digital exchanges has risen many times over this month: a bubble, no doubt.

However Bitcoin is not just for speculators: a number of online retailers accept Bitcoins in exchange for goods and services. Why? Several quoted advantages of Bitcoins are that they are (currently) anonymous and therefore (currently) tax-free. Some of the more sensationalist articles claim Bitcoins are “dangerous” and that governments will have to ban them (how?).

Gold Rush Over

However, the Gold Rush is already over for Bitcoin. It is no longer a “free” commodity, like gold was during the Californian Gold Rush of 1849. Ordinary CPUs are no longer capable of generating Bitcoins in a reasonable timescale: the FAQ quotes a period of ‘years’. Now, only massively-parallel hardware such as GPUs can possibly mine for them (whether they can do so profitably is another matter). Over time, the yield of Bitcoin extraction will wane, until no more can be produced.

Only 21,000,000 Bitcoins can ever be produced by the year 2140, with a restriction to allow only one block to be generated every 10 minutes. Those who got in early essentially have all the Bitcoins already. Assuming demand keeps up, the price for Bitcoins can only rise as the supply drops. Therefore, it could be the case that many of the early-adopters are now holding out to sell later on.

Ordinary currency exchanges won’t sell you Bitcoins. However there are a number of independent Bitcoin exchanges which will (if you can trust them). With all the hype and speculation, these exchanges are highly volatile (like any real currency admittedly).

The only way to get in on the market now is to either buy at a high price, or wait for prices to go down (implying confidence for Bitcoin has also dropped, effectively making it worth less).

Another way to join the market is to sell your own goods or services for Bitcoins. Of course you’d be limited to customers who are already in the market. But these customers are going to want to hold onto their increasingly scarce Bitcoins.

The Bitcoin Market

Modern currencies are backed by a government fiat: a law that says everybody must accept it. Therefore, if you have some of the currency you are reassured of its value.

Of course, Bitcoin is not a fiat currency. So, some argue that the Bitcoin currency “is not backed by anything”. The organisers challenge this criticism by saying it’s backed by the goods and services sold by merchants that accept it. This small cohort of merchants tend to be internet services or online gaming companies.

Some small web retailers are accepting Bitcoins in exchange for material goods. These retailers appear to be quirky individualists, perhaps revealing the cross-section of those who are holding out for Bitcoin.

To be fair, Bitcoin was always intended to be an online-only currency. You can’t exactly print them out to pay for your lunch. By nature they are a peer-to-peer concept, relying on a circle of cryptographic trust.

But as the price rockets and people wonder what’s going to happen next, is confidence going to go up? As a retailer, I’d hesitate to accept Bitcoins, because I’m not convinced the next person will want them. The Bitcoin market seems quite closed and quirky, and too small and narrow to hedge against big movements.

If Bitcoin survives, it will become a sealed market, where only a few can afford to buy them (due to their scarcity and deflationary nature). Those few will buy and sell goods and services from each other. Nobody else will be able to get in because no more can be mined, and the barrier to entry will be too high.

Out of curiosity, I recently installed the controversial Green Dam Youth Escort software on my (soon to be replaced) home computer.  This is the content filter software mandated by the People’s Republic of China, billed as providing a “green, healthy and harmonious internet environment”. 

It is currently aimed at restricting online pornography but could be used for … (sinister flourish) … other purposes. From July 1st 2009, all personal computers sold within mainland China (included imported ones) must contain this software either preloaded or packaged for easy installation.

This is clearly a far-reaching move, particularly because most people are unlikely to toy around with the software pre-installed in the factory, and are certainly unlikely to re-install the operating system (there is no option to uninstall GDYE in Windows Add/Remove Programs - perhaps native Chinese speakers can find an option somewhere within the program).

When launching the quaint, dated installer program, a cartoony splash-screen pops up which is clearly encourages us to “think of the children!”. This reminds me of the youth-centric motive behind this software - it must be installed on all computers bought within China, but there must be a way for adults to control its behaviour otherwise why limit it as a ‘Youth Escort’?  Unfortunately, I cannot test this with my limited powers in Chinese linguistics (how many people do you know who can even say the words for ‘hello’, or ‘yes’, let alone read them in their native typography?)

The remainder of the installation process is - for those unable to read Chinese - an exercise in intuition and guesswork.  Sometimes there are a choice of three buttons - presumably OK, Cancel, and … ? - labelled with characters my home computer is not even set up to display.

There is a licence agreement which, if you scroll down, has a translation in English.  This is a third-party package included with the GDYE - namely the Intel Open Source Computer Vision Library.  The original text of the licence shipped with this framework is faithfully reproduced (there is no licence agreement provided in English for the content filter itself).

The inclusion of this “Computer Vision” library is - at first - perplexing.  It is an image-processing toolkit, specifically aimed at “facial recognition, motion tracking and mobile robotics”.  A little imagination leads to fears that the software uses the on-board webcam most laptops today ship with, to identify the user of the computer.  But the truth is not as sinister - Green Dam ostensibly uses this library to detect images of nudity displayed in a web brower for example, and block them.

As the installation proceeds, several more chinese prompts are displayed and then there is a promising disappearence and system reboot as we gather the software has been successfully installed. Perhaps the contents of my home computer are now being long-hauled back to China?

I try a few URLs to test the pornographic filter (pure imagination of course, I don’t have them committed to memory).  I cannot get them to load in Firefox: successful block. I call up a few sites that are outside the advertised jurisdiction of GDYE’s content policies but may be considered sensitive by the Chinese government - Wikipedia, Amnesty International, Twitter, BBC News (including some pages about Tiananmen Square).  All loaded as I’d expect, however this is not surprising, as the sophisticated and comprehensive Golden Shield Project already exists in China to block censored information at the network level.

In a moment of disturbed clarity I run a command to find out whether the program has opened an information pipeline between my computer and China.  There were no unusual internet addresses listed, although this does not prove that the program does not periodically ‘phone home’, or whether a hidden back door has been left open on the latch.

From this very brief experiment, Green Dam appears to be just another page in the vast encyclopedia of Chinese censorship techniques.  Although the dam has its holes, these are more than adequately patched by a raft of strategies on many levels in China today.

I decide I’ve had enough fun with my colourful escort for today, so I take my usual route to remove a recently installed program.  But it’s not listed.  In all fairness, no less can be expected from a government-mandated content filter. I’m not sure which software I’d prefer installed on my computer - a virus hell-bent on identity theft distributed by a motley crew of hackers, or a program colourful in name and appearance originating from the Chinese government to protect children.

I’m glad I kept my recovery CD.

Up to now, I’ve always declined to set up security questions on my Yahoo Mail account, simply because I have no fears of forgetting my password. I’ve never really thought much about the whole thing. But to my annoyance, today I was forced to select two security questions and answers, before I could even log into my account. Through pure annoyance I nearly lapsed into parody (Question: “Do I really give a F—?