Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
I was referring to the very clever principle to have a dumb neutral net and place the smartness in the equipment that connects to the net. That is the principle that have stimulated innovation. Your approach would have lead to a totally different deveopment and would not have been innovation friendly.
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True, the method
the author suggests would have led to the development of internet and computing "appliances," limited-customization boxes (like electric typewriters, cable boxes, playstation, etc) that would do specific tasks, and be more secure from outside attack and tampering, giving us a web less prone to virus attacks and hacking.
Development would have still happened, assuredly much more slowly... however, it might have been more orderly as well. But all of that is speculation at this point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
The realized that the could not predict how the net would be used so they took that into account in the design.
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It wasn't so much an effort to leave it simple, so others could develop over it... but of making it simple, because that's all the original designers needed, and they weren't worried about what others would develop over it. This is what the book maintains our security, hacking and virus problems are a result of: Lack of security planning, or more accurately, avoidance of security planning due to naive assumptions about human nature.
(Not finished the book yet, so I won't go into Zittrain's "solutions" yet.)