[liberationtech] Isaacson: The internet is broken. Starting from scratch, here's how I'd fix it.

[Bill Cox]

Conceptually, securing the Ineternet seems simple.  Strong security
requires a minimal attack surface.  That can never happen once a device
boots Linux, and runs a TLS stack over a network.  Such devices are rarely
secure.

Instead, every electronic device that processes sensitive data could have a
secure chip that costs under $1 for ensuring data security, and runs a
provably secure program.  When sensitive data is transmuted, encrypt it
directly to the public key of the destination secure device.  When
sensitive data is stored in a database, its privacy and integrity could be
ensured by these secure elements.

On a lighter note, if you just want to improve the Internet, tell all your
Web developer friends the following.  I promise it will result in a fewer
pissed-off users:

On the login screen to your web site, clearly state the password
requirements.  If you require an upper-case letter, lower-case letter, a
digit, and disallow spaces, state that on the login page.  This will reduce
the number of users who have to go through password recovery dramatically.

On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 8:31 AM, Thomas Delrue <thomas at epistulae.net> wrote:

> On 12/15/2016 11:14 AM, Steven Clift wrote:
> > By Walter Isaacson CEO at Aspen Institute
> >
> > My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After forty years,
> > it has begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous
> > and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation,
> > bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement.
> >
> > See:
> > https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-broken-
> starting-from-scratch-heres-how-id-fix-isaacson
>
> You're right, the internet is broken but...
> A great start to fixing the internet would be to stop using closed sites
> (of which LinkedIn is one). This would go a ways to bringing us back to
> a truly _distributed_ system, as the internet was intended to be,
> instead of an internet that is centralized in the hands of a few, very
> powerful corporations that hold us in a feudal lock.
>
> I'm not visiting that link... but instead, I suggest you read this first:
> http://en.collaboratory.de/w/Power_in_the_Age_of_the_Feudal_Internet
>
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