Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The New Net: UUU for Universal Ubiquitous Users

Author Douglas Russkoff says we must abandon the Internet and move on (see his remarks at Shareable.net). He is more correct that he knows. Trouble is, nobody commenting on his article can get from point "A" to point "B" with any efficiency whatsoever. From WWW to UUU. What's UUU?

The first nation/state that explicitly outlaws cyber crime and issues Letters of Marque and Reprisal to licensed, bonded cyber privateers will then be able to set up a defacto secure and safe successor to the World Wide Web (WWW), maybe called UUU (Universal Ubiquitous Users—sorry, it's the novelist in me rearing his creative head) portal. It will require a secure successor technology to TCP/IP. My nomination for that nation/state is Australia for numerous geographic and cultural reasons. I'd hoped for the USA, but I'm not holding my breath.

Is Russkoff's "New Net" inevitable? I believe the answer is a strong "Yes" for the following reasons:

  1. We will have a full-blown cyber war where at least one party to the conflict brings down the whole Internet quite permanently. That party will probably be a minor player who doesn't depend upon the Internet for their core commerce. Someone like North Korea.
  2. The TCP/IP standard is too flawed to be fixed.
  3. In the meantime, until the Internet gets well and truly smoked, a "first mover" nation/state could legalize cyber privateers and thereby create a big enough economic base to dictate a demonstrably superior new and secure standard communications protocol. The market will follow this standard because people like me (and most of Douglas Russkoff's readers) will buy hardware based on that standard as fast as it becomes available.
I don't see another path to a viable "New Net," because politicians have taken over any hope of rational thinking about standards and security. Which is why we must do this ourselves. There is a precedent from my own past: FidoNet.

Back in the 1980s, I had a client run out of money and pay me in laser printers. I had a garage full of them. So I went and traded the laser printers for a bunch of PCs, which I then set up on some extra phone lines in my home/office with FidoNet bulletin boards. Man, did those puppies get busy in a hurry! So hey, Australia! Want to be the pre-eminent cyber power on the planet. AND the home country for THE NEW NET? The only guys who will attack you are North Koreans, and chances of one of their nukes coming within a thousand miles of your shores are infinitesimal. Plus you've got good enough Aussie hackers that you could probably take out their entire CCS (Command and Control System) anytime you want to.

Eat Chinese tonight and toss some hackers on the barbie for me. I even posted a few Chinese attack server IP addresses for your target practice.

G'day, mates! "Woof, woof!" in memory of my wonderful FidoNet BBSs.

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Implementation suggestions for THE MORGAN DOCTRINE are most welcome. What are the "Got'chas!"? What questions would some future Cyber Privateering Czar have to answer about this in a Senate confirmation hearing?