Announcements and Demos

  • Please welcome Jonathan Zittrain, Professor at Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences! He just finished teaching CS 42: Controlling Cyberspace.

Technology as Owned vs. Unowned

  • Most technologies are owned, but the Internet is unowned.

  • Some examples of owned technology:

    • IBM System 360, used in an actuary, bank, insurance company, programmed by the vendor (IBM); part of its business model was to keep it apart from the consumer

    • Friden Flexowriter, like a standard typewriter but also made indentations in a tape that could be fed back into the machine to retype automatically; could cut and paste to create mail merges

    • Brother Smart Word Processor, only dealt with data, not programmable, no room for surprise

    • CAT scan, operates exactly as designed except for one unowned piece, the personal computer PC

  • In 1977, at the West Coast Computer Fair, Steve Jobs presented the first reprogrammable machine, the Apple II, to 10,000 “computer freaks”

  • Within two years, the first digital spreadsheet (VisiCalc) was developed by Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin and the Apple II started flying off the shelves

  • The Apple II was unowned in the sense that it accepted contributions from others and if something went wrong with it, it wasn’t clear that it was Apple’s fault; this model became the model for all that followed

  • It’s not up to you, for example, to put the 7th blade in your razor!

Unowned Technologies

  • Technologies that now are unowned didn’t necessarily have to end up that way, but they did.

  • Some key features of unowned technologies:

    • origins in a backwater

    • ambitious but not fully planned

    • contribution welcomed from all corners

    • success beyond expectation

    • influx of usage

    • success is threatened

  • In the early 20th century, AT&T owned the telephone networks. Technologies like the Hush-A-Phone, a telephone silencer, were initially frozen by licensing battles with AT&T, who feared that it would damage their network. Neither could you buy a telephone; you had to get it from the telephone service provider.

  • Soon CompuServe emerged as a leader in the network space. Their model was very much after owned technology; if you wanted a new category of actions for users, you had to petition them to put it on the home screen.

  • Enter ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet as we know it. Its founders didn’t expect to make any money off it and didn’t have the resources to roll it out everywhere. IBM even said in 1992 that it would be impossible to build a corporate network using TCP/IP.

  • Think of packets on the Internet like beer in Fenway Park. It can get almost all the way from the vendor to the buyer, but the last distance it travels is through a number of other spectators. They have no real contract with the buyer, but they pass it along anyway. Similarly, there are entities on the Internet that handle packets properly despite having no relationship with the sender or the receiver.

Hourglass Architecture

  • The Internet has been said to have an Hourglass Architecture in which Internet Protocol is the bridge between software applications and hardware devices.

  • We haven’t messed around with the Internet all that much since its inception. We didn’t implement a lot of features for it, but instead left that up to the end devices and applications to implement them.

Clarke’s Third Law

  • Consider these words of wisdom:

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

    — Arthur C. Clarke

    Witchcraft to the ignorant…Simple science to the learned.

    — Leigh Brackett

  • Part of CS50 is to help you to understand what others consider magic! Try it out, take it for a spin, see if you can change the world.

  • One such person who changed the world was Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the first protocol for the World Wide Web. So too did Peter Tattam, creator of Trumpet Winsock, the first implementation of Windows network software.

  • Unowned technologies like the World Wide Web are what enabled other unowned technologies like Wikipedia to exist.

The Cycle

  • Although certain technologies have begun as unowned, we see that they often become owned as their success is threatened.

  • As success is threatened, companies will go to great lengths to protect it. When the music industry first started producing compact discs (CDs), they didn’t imagine that the data could ever be copied from those discs. They went so far as to add borderline malicious rootkits to the CDs so that any attempt to copy the data would be thwarted.

Security

  • This is also a lesson in trust and security. Malicious software has only gotten more sophisticated, beginning with the likes of the Storm Worm and progressing to the hardly detectable Stuxnet.

  • An amusing anecdote: the Cap’n Crunch Bosun whistle emitted a ton at the exact frequency that AT&T recognized as an idle line. If you blew it into the telephone receiver, you could get free long distance! Because theirs was an owned technology, AT&T could quickly fix this vulnerability. Vulnerabilities in unowned technologies, for example viruses, malicious links, or even remote access tools (RATs), cannot be so easily fixed.

Technology as Hierarchy vs. Polyarchy

  • In addition to unowned vs. owned, there is another axis by which we might measure technology: hierarchy vs. polyarchy. Hierarchy means there’s only one choice whereas polyarchy means everyone is on his own.

  • In the quadrant of polyarchy and unowned, we have trouble protecting ourselves because not everyone will always be aware of what’s going on. Consider the malicious software warnings you’ve gotten and probably ignored.

  • In the quadrant of hierarchy and owned, we have entities like the government who, despite their best efforts, aren’t really able to improve security because they really don’t have any control over it. Consider the Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) that don’t really have any power or the Focus Group on Next Generation Networks (FGNGN) that proposed a much more complicated version of the Internet that will probably never come to fruition.

  • In the quadrant of polyarchy and owned, we have the corporate sector. Companies such as RSA Security offer solutions like two-factor authentication. This quadrant is perilous because it has some inefficiencies and inequalities built in. Consider the App Store by which iPhone and Mac software is curated: they decide not only what is "safe," but what is not offensive, not resource-intensive, and more. Consider the Nook and the Kindle, both of which control the content that you read.

  • In the final quadrant, that of hierarchy and unowned, there is an opportunity for renewal. Consider Wikipedia, which polices itself because of a distributed population of unpaid, caring administrators. Consider mesh networking, which could prevent a single entity from being able to pull the plug on the Internet. Consider the work of the Berkman Center to pre-cache linked pages so that their content can still be viewed even if the original host goes down.

A Final Question

  • As a CS50 grad, who are you in this riddle? You have a tool with which you can change everything. Use it to forge systems that distribute power rather than focus it.