It’s not just China that’s whacking the Internet, its under constant attack by hackers and spammers and mis-configured routers. See this insightful article in the Washington Post quoting the people who know:
“The Internet is stuck in the flower-power days of the ’60s during which people thought the world would be beautiful if you are just nice,” said Karl Auerbach, a former Cisco Systems Inc. computer scientist who volunteers with several engineering groups trying to improve the Internet…
“The problem with the Internet is that anything you do with it now is worth a lot of money. It’s not just about science anymore. It’s about who gets to reap the rewards to bringing safe technologies to people,” said Daniel C. Lynch, 63, who as an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute and at the University of Southern California in the 1970s helped develop the Internet’s framework…
“All this was an experiment. We were trying to figure out whether this technology would work. We weren’t anticipating this would become the telecommunications network of the 21st century,” said Vinton G. Cerf, 62, who with fellow scientist Robert T. Kahn, 66, helped draft the blueprints for the network while it was still a Defense Department research project.
Even as he marveled at the wonders of instant messaging, Napster and other revolutionary tools that would not have been possible without the Internet, Leonard Kleinrock, 71, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who is credited with sending the first message — “lo,” for “log on” — from one computer to another in 1969, began to see the Internet’s dark side. “Right now the Internet is running amok and we are in a very difficult period,” Kleinrock said.
Consequently, an effort is underway to engineer a more robust and resilient Internet2.
Meanwhile back in Flower-Power land, the ersatz civil libertarians and misguided idealists insist all is well. If only they knew the half of it.
Spammers and crackers have been ‘attacking’ the internet for years. I’m not sure that any sane person would think that somehow the internet will become magically secure.
There have been a lot of innovative ideas and trends coming out of the internet, including all of the rich(er) content (a.k.a. “ajax”-built applications, like googlemaps and gmail, etc.) being made available, and the next generation of social networking applications. (no, not friendster, the stuff that has come after it)
I don’t think that the internet has shown this much promise since 1998, actually.
It’s not a question of magic, it’s to do with engineering.
And while there are many fine applications being developed at any given time for the ‘Net, that doesn’t mean that the people who have to keep it running aren’t having trouble doing their job.
Which is the point, really.
My personal theory is that there are only a handful of people who can run large telecommunications or data networks. This population can only grow arithmetically (while current network growth is geometric) because those of us who can (Let me assure you that our host is one!), were usually trained at the beginning of time. Meaning that we are being shunted aside either by companies seeking younger (cheaper) hands, or we’re just too damn tired. There’s never been much time to teach what we know, which was taught to us in expensive classes and emphasized over years of experience. Bell System Practices are a *good* thing, and having to re-invent them with every new technology is a *bad* thing.
Speaking of mis-configured routers, one of my favorite war stories involves a large university, where one of the dormies decided to turn up a linux box. He got it running, attached it to the campus network and also to his DSL line. Then he turned on RIP. Yep, for quite some time, *all* the traffic for a major university got routed through a 256k SDSL connection.
Hi Jon, thanks for the kind words but I don’t deserve them. It never ceases to amaze me how good a job the people who keep the Internet running are doing in the face of incredible odds. Somehow we’re going to have to make their jobs easier or this thing is going to come to a screeching halt.