Dangers of the inexorable internetworking

The Internet can make our existences better only if we learn how to accommodate it, says William H. Davidow in Overconnected: Where to draw the line at being online . In his view, we are at the peak of the evolutionary pyramid, facing what H. G. Wells called the ‘inexorable imperative,' to adapt or perish. “Wells was referring to the natural world, but in the twenty-first century we have no choice but to adapt to an environment transformed by our own inventions. This new environment is filled with opportunity, but whether we seize it or let it hold us hostage is our decision to make,” observes Davidow.

Morris worm

A chapter titled ‘The ghost in our midst' chronicles “the most overlooked event in the growth of the network,” which happened early one autumn evening in 1988, when a brilliant, introverted Cornell University computer science graduate student named Robert Morris typed a few commands into a campus computer, hit return, and went out to dinner. “Morris had just launched what he intended as a harmless experiment: a computer program whose sole purpose was to slowly copy itself from computer to computer around the Arpanet, the Internet's precursor. The idea was to have one copy of the program live secretly in each computer it invaded.”

Rather than taking hours to show results, the experiment progressed so rapidly that when Morris came back to his computer after dinner, he could not log in. “To his horror, he found that the program had reproduced itself with such unanticipated swiftness that computers all over the network – which linked thousands of military, corporate, and university computers around the nation, including those at Cornell – had become jammed.”

Tightly coupled

The incident, notes Davidow, is one of the best illustrations of how a tightly coupled system such as the Internet can lead to an accident of disastrous proportions. Extrapolating to current situation, he cautions that with nearly six-hundred-million hosts (that is one for every ten souls on the planet), a modern Morris worm that hit only 10 per cent of the computers would be taking down entire corporate web sites, banking systems, and airline reservation sites; and that all of Google's thousands of computers in Mountain View, California, could freeze up.

The brilliant, flexible, and scalable design of the Internet has created the ghost in our midst, reads a sombre statement in the book. Internetworking, a technology created to enable scientists to share computing resources on computers operating on different networks, created a foundation for a deep stack of applications that would affect almost every aspect of our lives, reminisces Davidow. First it was e-mail; then it was the World Wide Web, powered by browsers and hypertext; and then came search, he recounts. “With these tools in place, almost any activity we engaged in could be powered by the Internet – local commerce, world trade, government, financial transactions, shopping, social networking, identity theft, music, news, movies, gaming, terrorism, and so forth.”

Sources of vulnerability can surface in the most unlikely places, warns the author. He mentions, as example, Google, which started with two Stanford graduate students noodling over new ways to search for information on the Internet. “From that largely academic computer science problem emerged a company that now has Microsoft, and much of the rest of the computing industry, on the defensive.”

Whether Google too will someday find itself vulnerable to some innovation emerging from an unlikely quarter remains to be seen, says Davidow; and he hastens to add, “But, given the complexity of Google's global reach and given what I now know about complexity and unpredictability, it would not surprise me…”

Instructive exposition of a topic that vexes regulators.