Review of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
The &quot;bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false. As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack. It&#x27;s uncited in the book, I&#x27;ve got a copy.<p>Anyone could just fraudulently send email as generalSmith@dod.mil in 1975 and you&#x27;d have no way of knowing if it was real.<p>And then it would traverse in a nondeterministic unencrypted way over any machine that claims it can get it there with no way of knowing whether it succeeded or whether the message received was the message sent.<p>It was built by academics for tasks like remote timesharing and it ran mostly on minicomputers, not even mainframes. All the early nodes were at academic institutions. Exactly 
0 were on military bases.<p>The project goals, people involved, sites it was installed at, technologies built, all the founders, Cerf, Kahn, Taylor, Roberts, Linkletter - zero military people - 100% academics. None of this suggests military purpose<p>Look at the abysmal security the network had. Do you think email, rcp, ftp and telnet was designed for military use?<p>It was openly bridged to the Soviet research network through IIASA, you know, cause that&#x27;s how cold war things happened - open door policy to the enemy<p>Or what about the routing protocols where a rogue network switch could just announce itself and then start soliciting for traffic to pass through it.<p>In 1997, a misbehaving router singlehandedly took down the net
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AS_7007_incident" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AS_7007_incident</a> any enemy could have easily done this.<p>Look at DNS host transfer up to about 2002 - you could just query for all records dumping your entire network topology, to just anyone - extremely valuable information for your enemies.<p>Look at finger and the original whois, an email and personnel lookup tool. You could use it to get people&#x27;s schedule, all the people who work under them, what they&#x27;re doing, how to contact them, where they last logged in at - do you know what I&#x27;d really like to have as your military enemy?<p>Heck let&#x27;s cite Wikipedia as if reality matters:<p>&quot;20th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person&#x27;s last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with.&quot;<p>Sending out spies, espionage, sabotage, all unnecessary if you&#x27;re enemy is using this  technology. You could do it all from a terminal.<p>There&#x27;s zero security in any of these. The doors are unlocked and swinging open with a giant honking welcome sign blinking.<p>Edit: Apparently reality is unpopular. I&#x27;m committed to reality far more than being popular. My politics are on the far left btw, that&#x27;s why I demand such high standards from these people. They&#x27;re supposedly playing for my team. But let me tell you, they don&#x27;t seem to care either.