 Technology and Social Responsibility: Remember history...
|
| One of the
problems that has characterized our profession far too much is the
phenomenon of the young, eager technologist throwing common sense to
the four winds in search of the ultimate solution.
In the past, it was the slightly-mad, mid-40s to late-60s
scientist who ignored the potential hazards of his (and it was
always his; we never had mad women scientists, a form of
discrimination women should be grateful for) research in the
single-minded quest for knowledge.
There is even some validity to the argument that the atomic bomb
came about this way; the technology was too fascinating to pass up.
In fact, the truth is far more complex than that, but this is not
the forum for that discussion.
What we do have is a headlong rush to "cool technology"
that ignores the social consequences. Technologies such as
Microsoft's ActiveVirus (excuse me, force of habit, I mean ActiveX)
technology seem to be geek products designed by geeks for geeks,
with the social considerations tacked on as a bare afterthought.
Perhaps someday I will write an essay discussing this whole problem,
but today is not that day.
I believe that a great deal of our problems with virus
vulnerability on our current systems is the direct result of mid-20s
programmers having more fascination with cool functionality than
common sense. It is compounded by consumers who have no regard for
their safety, and who, if safety is imposed upon them, would demand
that it be removed. Microsoft, as the dominant seller into this
market, bows to the consumer pressure and delivers what is desired,
whether it makes sense or not.
This essay is my reaction to an interview with Bill Joy, a person
who has an excruciatingly short memory. |
|
|
Bill Joy had an article in Wired about the
hazards of technology. He was interviewed by Ubiquity, the ACM newsletter. I
found one of his comments singularly inappropriate, and submitted the following reply,
which I was promised would be posted in a subsequent issue (I will provide the
hyperlink when it is published). The title of this response was "Pots, kettles,
and degrees of blackness".
The original Bill Joy interview is on http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/b_joy_1.html
Unfortunately, Ubiquity, in an apparent attempt to not annoy Bill Joy and/or
Sun, edited my response out of recognition, including changing the title. The
salient point, which was the last paragraph, was deleted entirely. I have
decided that Ubiquity editors are seriously compromised, or perhaps just
humor-impaired, since the whole point of the essay was the last paragraph.
Without it, the response they published makes no sense. I'm reminded of the
Steve Martin line from the movie "Roxanne", which goes something like
"Irony. Oh yes. We don't get much of that around here. We had some back in
1955, but people didn't get it, so we don't see much of it these days".
I find Bill Joy's comments about Microsoft
seriously misplaced. For example, he claims that LoveBug was the consequence of
Microsoft not getting economic signals correct.
Microsoft is delivering to customers what the
customers say they want, which is wide-open, security-free environments capable
of executing "cool" graphics from the Web. The economic signals from
the marketplace are quite strong. In fact, Microsoft characterizes one
major difference between their "professional" offerings and their
"consumer" offerings being the "consumer" offerings have no
security or file protection, because consumers don't want it.
In discussing the Web-content problem with a
friend a couple days ago, he told me that it was Netscape that introduced
the concept of active scripting in Web pages; Microsoft had to play catch-up on
this one. So if there is any one party that can be accused of compromising the
security of millions of computers, it is Netscape. But we're not allowed to say
bad things about Netscape because They're The Poor Downtrodden Competitor. This
would not be Politically Correct.
I have turned off all active scripting, removed
the Windows Scripting Host from my machines, and refuse to open any attachments
that have active content, period. This makes a number of Web sites inaccessible
to me, and I can't convince various WebMasters that active content on the Web is
a first-class stupid idea. Why do they use active scripting? Because they
say it makes their Web site more attractive, or easier to use, or some such
balderdash. To me, it means they are willing to conspire to either be virus
vectors or demand that we compromise our immune systems. I consider active Web
content to be a sign of social irresponsibility.
What amazes me is the ACM site actually requires JavaScript to function, or
so it claims. Also cookies. It is unfortunate that amateur Web designers with no
sense of social responsibility are actually allowed to create sites for such
important professional societies. Worse still, the professional society is
apparently exercising no oversight whatsoever on the process, or has become
inhabited with people who clearly do not understand the technology and its
implications!
Until we start boycotting Web sites that require
that we open our computers to penetration, they won't get the message. This is
not a Microsoft problem. This is the result of hundreds of thousands of
completely irresponsible WebMasters creating an environment in which systems
must be inherently vulnerable.
But the deeply hypocritical aspect of the comments Bill Joy made is that back in the early 1980s we refused to install email on our
Unix system, because there were several massive, well-known, security
holes in the email system. This caused our sysadmin a lot of grief, but he held
the line and required everyone to get email on our mainframe, which didn't have
any known email security holes. Sun had been informed numerous times about these
security holes, and their attitude was, as I recall, "We could fix it, but
we won't, because fixing it would inconvenience our developers". Hundreds
of Sun customer sysadmins had requested, for years, that Sun fix its security
holes. They didn't. In fact, they actively refused to do so.
From the Ubiquity article:
JOY: Consider the "Love Bug"
virus, which was made possible because Microsoft didn't get economic signals;
the kind of sloppiness this represents is something that we just can't afford
in the physical world technologies. But Microsoft didn't have any economic
signals to tell it that its software should be of higher quality, nor did the
company feel that it was likely to be liable for ecological consequences of
deploying software that was well-known to have problems with viruses, or it
would certainly have acted differently.
Several of these holes let Robert Tappan Morris
get his Internet Worm into the Sun systems all over the world. It is worth
pointing out that Sun assumed no responsibility for this, and as far as I know
never apologized for it. In fact, I heard about the worm the day after it hit,
from a friend, and I said "How did it get in?" He said "The email
hole" and I said "Which email hole?" knowing of several. When Sun
knew about penetration mechanisms for at least six years (that I know
of) and hadn't fixed them, I don't think anyone from Sun is entitled to
point fingers at Microsoft.
I said essentially the following back when the
RTM worm caused the shutdown of thousands of Sun systems. In fact, I could
paraphrase what I said about Sun using the following words (these were the words
edited out by the Ubiquity editors. Can anyone explain to me why this would be
done?):
Newcomer: Consider the "RTM
Worm", which was made possible because Sun didn't get economic signals; the
kind of sloppiness this represents is something that we just can't afford in the
physical world technologies. But Sun didn't have any economic signals to tell it
that its software should be of higher quality, nor did the company feel that it
was likely to be liable for ecological consequences of deploying software that
was well-known to have problems with penetration attempts, or it would certainly
have acted differently.
How quickly we seem to forget our own history!
![[Dividing Line Image]](div.gif)
Send mail to newcomer@flounder.com
with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2000, The Joseph M. Newcomer Co.,
All Rights Reserved
Last modified: March 20, 2003
