From: Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@endtech.com)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2000 - 08:28:42 PST
More Joyspeak on parallel Webs.
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Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 16:21:13 -0800 (PST)
From: Norman Martin <Norman.Martin@eng.sun.com>
Subject: prescriptions for a more civilized Net
To: kristena@sco.com, mr.pamidi@eng.sun.com, norman.martin@eng.sun.com,
thomas.goguen@eng.sun.com, tony.hampel@corp.sun.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
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http://newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/us/st/a16361-2000feb13.htm
Report From the Cyberfront. A pioneer offers prescriptions for a more
civilized Net
By Bill Joy Newsweek, February 21, 2000
The net is confronting a classic problem: what kind of trade-offs are
we willing to make to prevent certain behavior? Right now, it's the
boom phase, the Wild West. But as we depend more and more on the Net,
we will need more civility on the frontier. Last week I was talking
to Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO. He said: "There are great things you
can do only on the Net because of its openness, but I think that the
unrestricted ability to be anonymous encourages bad behavior." We
will have to decide how anonymous people can be. Does the right to
privacy include the right to anonymity? Faced with obscene phone
calls, we added caller ID; I think we will choose to have similar
facilities on the Net. Some ideas:
Pay as you go. Today, attackers can send junk mail free of charge-and
so they do. Resources that aren't metered tend to be wasted. If they
had to pay for each thing they sent, there would be fewer attacks. It
would be harder to steal people's accounts if it cost the victims
money-if such thefts happened a lot, there would quickly be a vibrant
market for better security products.
Stagger pricing. We can defend the Net without compromising its
openness and innovation by introducing several classes of service.
A premium service-a FedEx for the Net-could be built from dedicated
circuits; a first-class service might be available if you identify
yourself and pay, for which you'd receive a certain level of quality;
a free and anonymous bulk service would still be available, preserving
the innovative frontier of the Net but without delivery guarantees.
User ID. For all but bulk service, we will need to identify who is
doing what; otherwise, how can we do accounting or have rules?
Without identity, we will have no idea whose packets are flooding the
server. We will put ownership marks on packets for the same reasons
we put license plates on cars: to identify owners and enforce the
rules of the road. And for the higher-paid classes of service we will
need digital driver's licenses to authorize and account for access to
these resources.
Secure the hardware. Personal computers today are very often
insecure. PCs were not designed with secure network use in mind.
Fortunately, more secure Net access appliances and Net-enabled cell
phones are coming soon. These "personal communicators" will be far
more secure: they can use tamper-resistant identity chips, protected
by a password or by biometrics, and will be suitable places for
keeping digital money.
Joy, an early Internet architect, is Sun Microsystems' chief
scientist.
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