to the Web.

of its use.

very fast.

computer crashes

permission

give up that freedom.

network of control

things

discover

heartbeat

exported

groups with shared norms and a sense of public purpose

or private

pressure them

computer

count

digital nose count.

from afar.

and less-skilled users.

threats

at MIT

Internet

retool them.

Urging users to patch their systems and asking hackers to behave more maturely might, in retrospect, seem naïve.

operations

enforced

Internet

the Internet.

responsibility

attack

the Internet.

considered

The decentralized, nonproprietary ownership of the Internet and the computers it linked made it difficult to implement any structural revisions to the way it functioned, and, more important, it was simply not clear what curative changes could be made that did not entail drastic, wholesale, purpose-altering changes to the very fabric of the Internet.

Then it stalls.

generativity

complex social phenomenon

three layers.

somehow

one another.

connect to it.

networking

Hush-A-Phone, which was invented in 1921 as a way to have a conversation without others nearby overhearing it

were sold.

The court drolly noted, “[AT&T does] not challenge the subscriber’s right to seek privacy. They say only that he should achieve it by cupping his hand between the transmitter and his mouth and speaking in a low voice into this makeshift muffler

small ways.

phone network.

The physical layer had become generative, and this generativity meant that additional types of activity in higher layers were made possible.

services business

THE PROPRIETARY NETWORK MODEL

themselves

unchanged

tinkering

Why would the proprietary services not harness the potential generativity of their offerings by making their own servers more open to third-party coding?

model prevailed.

shopping

free-for-all

who built them.

possible.

Jennings’s work

annoyed person.

the world

FIDOnet

services

message

points

billion

from them.

network work.

controlling it.

tryout period

access

code for it.

rust that at least some third-party software writers will write good and useful code, and trust that users of the device will be able to access and sort out the good and useful code from the bad

harmful code.

approach

Its origins can be found in a 1984 paper by Internet architects David Clark, David Reed, and Jerry Saltzer.

requirements

The people using this network of networks and configuring its endpoints had to be trusted to be more or less competent and pure enough at heart that they would not intentionally or negligently disrupt the network.

persists today.

Yet the assumption that network participants can be trusted, and indeed that they will be participants rather than customers, infuses the Internet’s design at nearly every level.

an outsider.

the IDs.

User identification is left to individual Internet users and servers to sort out if they wish to demand credentials of some kind from those with whom they communicate.

contents

regulation

The person at the endpoint must instead rely on falling dominos of trust. The Internet is thus known as a “best efforts” network, sometimes rephrased as “Send it and pray” or “Every packet an adventure.”

chapter

environment

dead end.

ignore

went wrong.

from scratch

purposes

Cutting and pasting different pieces of Flexowriter tape together allowed the user to do mail merges about as easily as one can do them today with Microsoft Word or its rivals.

reprogram them.

problems

tabulators