Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Yes, a lot of thought went into the principles of effective communication between users. However, on the subject of security or protection against hackers, for instance, or viruses, the prevailing attitude of the original web designers was, "Ah, no one would want to use the web to hurt another user, so who needs protection?"
As we've all seen, that attitude turned out to be a bit naive, though understandably, as the original designers had no idea the web would be utilized as it has been. But if they had built-in even modest security protocols, many of the problems we deal with today, related to viruses, hackers, botnets, etc, could have been easily avoided. And, I think, much of the problems related to intellectual property and copyright issues would also be less of an issue than they are today.
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Bear in mind where the Internet we use today began: as ARPANET, an project funded by the US government to develop a computer network that could suffer damage and still function, by automatically routing around failed nodes. This was back in the days when people still expected a possible nuclear dustup, with sites going off the air because they no longer existed.
Early manifestations like Usenet suffered growing pains, because of an implicit assumption that everyone participating had a right to be there and knew how to behave. Back in the days when Usenet sites were mostly universities and the participants mostly professors and grad students, that was a reasonably assumption. As access expanded, it became less reasonable.
Newsgroups still exist, but many have migrated to private servers devoted to particular interests where controls can be applied.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Had the folks involved in designing what became the Internet known the manner in which it would expand and the uses it would be put to, they might have made different decisions.
They didn't, and they didn't. Deal with it.
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Dennis