{"id":18034,"date":"2012-12-03T11:20:18","date_gmt":"2012-12-03T16:20:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18034"},"modified":"2019-02-18T08:42:13","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T13:42:13","slug":"the-feudal-technopeasant-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/12\/03\/the-feudal-technopeasant-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"The feudal technopeasant internet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.schneier.com\/blog\/archives\/2012\/12\/feudal_sec.html\" target=\"_blank\">Bruce Schneier<\/a> on the less-than-appealing state of user security in today&#8217;s internet:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It\u2019s a feudal world out there.<\/p>\n<p>Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and iPads; and we let iCloud automatically synchronize and back up everything. Still others of us let Microsoft do it all. Or we buy our music and e-books from Amazon, which keeps records of what we own and allows downloading to a Kindle, computer, or phone. Some of us have pretty much abandoned e-mail altogether \u2026 for Facebook.<\/p>\n<p>These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them &mdash; or to a particular one we don&#8217;t like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it&#8217;s becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.<\/p>\n<p>Feudalism provides security. Classical medieval feudalism depended on overlapping, complex, hierarchical relationships. There were oaths and obligations: a series of rights and privileges. A critical aspect of this system was protection: vassals would pledge their allegiance to a lord, and in return, that lord would protect them from harm.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I&#8217;m romanticizing here; European history was never this simple, and the description is based on stories of that time, but that&#8217;s the general model.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s this model that&#8217;s starting to permeate computer security today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bruce Schneier on the less-than-appealing state of user security in today&#8217;s internet: It\u2019s a feudal world out there. Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10,15],"tags":[160,1272,328,58,94,334,92],"class_list":["post-18034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-liberty","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-feudalism","tag-google","tag-internet","tag-microsoft","tag-security","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4GS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18034"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46971,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18034\/revisions\/46971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}