{"id":25183,"date":"2014-04-16T08:28:04","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T13:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25183"},"modified":"2014-04-16T08:28:04","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T13:28:04","slug":"qotd-the-wizards-of-the-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/04\/16\/qotd-the-wizards-of-the-web\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The wizards of the web"},"content":{"rendered":"

You would have thought this would have sunk in by now. The fact that it hasn\u2019t shows what an extraordinary machine the internet is — quite different to any technology that has gone before it. When the Lovebug struck, few of us lived our lives online. Back then we banked in branches, shopped in shops, met friends and lovers in the pub and obtained jobs by posting CVs. Tweeting was for the birds. Cyberspace was marginal. Now, for billions, the online world is their lives. But there is a problem. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of the people who use the internet have even the faintest clue about how any of it works. \u201cSSL\u201d, for instance, stands for \u201cSecure Sockets Layer\u201d.<\/p>\n

I looked it up and sort of understood it — for about five minutes. While most drivers have at least a notion of how an engine works (something about petrol exploding in cylinders and making pistons go up and down and so forth) the very language of the internet — \u201cdomain names\u201d and \u201cDNS codes\u201d, endless \u201cprotocols\u201d and so forth — is arcane, exclusive; it is, in fact, the language of magic. For all intents and purposes the internet is run by wizards.<\/p>\n

And the trouble with letting wizards run things is that when things go wrong we are at their mercy. The world spends several tens of billions of pounds a year on anti-malware programs, which we are exhorted to buy lest the walls of our digital castles collapse around us. Making security software is a huge industry, and whenever there is a problem — either caused by viruses or by a glitch like Heartbleed — the internet security companies rush to be quoted in the media. And guess what, their message is never \u201ckeep calm and carry on\u201d. As Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University says: \u201cAlmost all the cost of cybercrime is the cost of anticipation.\u201d <\/p>\n

Michael Hanlon, “Relax, Mumsnet users: don’t lose sleep over Heartbleed hysteria”, Telegraph<\/em><\/a>, 2014-04-16<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You would have thought this would have sunk in by now. The fact that it hasn\u2019t shows what an extraordinary machine the internet is — quite different to any technology that has gone before it. When the Lovebug struck, few of us lived our lives online. Back then we banked in branches, shopped in shops, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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":[831,41,15],"tags":[109,129,58,385,334],"class_list":["post-25183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-hack","tag-internet","tag-malware","tag-security"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6yb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25183","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=25183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25184,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25183\/revisions\/25184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}