Physicists speak of dark energy, the label applied to the expansive oomph permeating the universe. The Internet has its own dark energy: the legions of nerds who code for fun, challenge, and uncertain profit. They do not make a business plan or solicit lawyers and VCs before jumping in, and they have no particular political or economic power. Yet they are the ones who developed the Internet in a backwater and declined to patent its protocols. They are the ones who took the hobbyist platforms of the first PCs and turned them into powerhouses that, together with the Internet, gave us one pleasant surprise after another: the electronic spreadsheet, instant messaging, Internet telephony, Wikipedia. But two problems threaten the Web’s dark energy.
First, the trust in reasonable behavior embedded within our open, generative networks and utterly reprogrammable PCs–for example, consider that neither network participants nor software authors are accredited or, for the most part, identified–is too readily abused. People find their connections disrupted and their PCs turned into zombies, and they seek security. Millions of PCs, especially in corporate and school environments, are then locked down.
To deal with this problem, technologists need to develop better code to help us deal with bad apples while preserving an open environment. If a small but broad fraction of Internet users were to agree to pass along their PCs’ anonymized vital signs and running processes, we could learn how new code is affecting those PCs’ performance. We’d also get a sense of how trustworthy new code is, partly on the basis of how long it’s been around and who’s actually using it. This could help identify annoying applications that fall short of being outright viruses, such as screen savers that generate pop-up ads. Such strategies could also help detect Internet filtering around the world.
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