50 years after internet conception, dark side stirs fear
50 years after internet conception, dark side stirs fear
San
Francisco (AFP) - On October 29, 1969, professor Leonard Kleinrock and a team
at the University of California at Los Angeles got a computer to
"talk" to a machine in what is now known as Silicon Valley.
The event gave birth to a network that later became known as the
internet -- hailed at first as a boon to equality and enlightenment, but with a
dark side that has emerged as well.
As UCLA marks the anniversary, Kleinrock is opening a new lab
devoted to all things related to the internet -- particularly mitigating some
of its unintended consequences on the internet which is now used by some four
billion people worldwide.
"To some point it democratizes everyone," Kleinrock
told AFP.
"But it is also a perfect formula for the dark side, as we
have learned."
So much is shouted online that moderate voices are drowned out
and extreme viewpoints are amplified, spewing hate, misinformation and abuse,
he contended.
"As engineers, we were not thinking in terms of nasty
behavior," said Kleinrock, 85.
"I totally missed the social networking side. I was
thinking about people talking to computers or computers talking to computers,
not people talking to people."
The new Connection Lab will welcome research on topics including
machine learning, social networking, blockchain and the internet of things,
with an eye toward thwarting online evils.
Kleinrock expressed particular interest in using blockchain
technology to attach reputations to people or things online to provide a gauge
of who or what to trust.
For example, someone reading an online restaurant review would
be able to see how reliable that author's posts have been.
"It is a network of reputation that is constantly up to
date," Kleinrock said.
"The challenge is how to do that in an ethical and
responsible fashion; anonymity is a two-edged sword, of course."
- Businesses being bad -
He blamed many of the internet's ills on businesses hawking
things that are outdated or unneeded, violating privacy to increase profit.
Instead of clever lone hackers that vexed the internet in its
early days, bad actors now include nation states, organized crime and powerful
corporations "doing big, bad things," Kleinrock lamented.
"We were not the social scientists that we should have
been," Kleinrock said of the internet's early days.
He regretted a lack of foresight to build into the very
foundation of the internet tools for better authenticating users and data
files.
"It wouldn't have avoided the dark side, but it would have
ameliorated it," he said.
He remained optimistic about the internet's woes being solved
with encryption, blockchain or other innovations.
"I do still worry. I think everyone is feeling the impact
of this very dark side of the internet that has bubbled up," Kleinrock
said.
"I still feel that the benefits are far more significant; I
wouldn't turn off the internet if I could."
- What kind of beast? -
In the early days, US telecom colossus AT&T ran the lines
connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a
research arm of the US military.
A key to getting computers to exchange data was breaking
digitized information into packets fired between machines with no wasting of
time, according to Kleinrock.
A grad student began typing "LOG" to log into the
distant computer, which crashed after getting the "O."
"So, the first message was 'Lo' as in 'Lo and
behold,'" Kleinrock recounted. "We couldn't have a better, more
succinct first message."
Kleinrock's team logged in on the second try, sending digital
data packets between computers on the ARPANET, so named because funding came
from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established in 1958.
Credit for creating the internet is a topic of debate, since
there are a series of key moments in its evolution including arrival of
protocols for how data is routed, and creation of the World Wide Web system of
online pages.
The name "internet" is a shortening of the
"internetworking" allowed when one computer network could collaborate
with another, according to Marc Weber, curatorial director at the Computer
History Museum in Silicon Valley.
"The billion dollar question is, what kind of beast has the
internet become?" Weber asked.
"It has become the default main way for humans to
communicate, and that is not small."
While marking its 50th anniversary, the internet as we know it
is a "rowdy teenager" in the eyes of Internet Society chief
technology officer Olaf Kolkman.
"The internet has done more good than harm," Kolkman
said.
"The biggest challenge we have in front of us is that while
we cope with big problems enabled by global connectivity that we don't throw
the baby out with the bath water."
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