The Internet simply ended up having to swallow far more than it was designed to handle. The dot-com boom paved the way for it becoming essential and inseparable to our livelihoods.
Michal Zalewski's The Tangled Web is an excellent technical book on how the technologies that power the web are interconnected, and how they're all a vulnerable mess of hacks. On the surface, it looks like everything is running smoothly, but on the inside, everything we've architected is subpar for our current needs. It's amazing that the web is hanging by its nooks and crannies, but the constant series of gaffes that is infosec and most people's refusal to accept it, speaks for itself.
Who knew that one day, a handful of nerds and social outcasts would end up maintaining core infrastructure that the entire Western economy depends on so dearly?
Of course, people have realized this and have been hard at work building new protocols, abstractions and mechanisms on top of current cruft. It's still a mad, mad, mad, mad ecosystem out there, though.
The author's sentiments go completely off rails by the end of this, however. It's almost eery. What is there to possibly trust?
Alan Kay made an excellent point. In order not to dilute it, I quote him verbatim.
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."-- Alan Kay.
Tim Berners Lee was trained to be a physicist. He wasn't aware of the things computer scientists had learned in the last few decades. He was a clever man who came up with a clever idea, but it wasn't engineered to scale.
I think Kay is right, and more ambitious tech firms are definitely running up against this wall. The fact that Google wrote a new Javascript engine tells me that Kay's proposal, where the web should have been like an operating system on which you could run programs in a separate address space and with limited access to underlying system calls - is coming to pass, except in this OS the assembly is Javascript.
Comments
The Internet simply ended up having to swallow far more than it was designed to handle. The dot-com boom paved the way for it becoming essential and inseparable to our livelihoods.
Michal Zalewski's The Tangled Web is an excellent technical book on how the technologies that power the web are interconnected, and how they're all a vulnerable mess of hacks. On the surface, it looks like everything is running smoothly, but on the inside, everything we've architected is subpar for our current needs. It's amazing that the web is hanging by its nooks and crannies, but the constant series of gaffes that is infosec and most people's refusal to accept it, speaks for itself.
Who knew that one day, a handful of nerds and social outcasts would end up maintaining core infrastructure that the entire Western economy depends on so dearly?
Of course, people have realized this and have been hard at work building new protocols, abstractions and mechanisms on top of current cruft. It's still a mad, mad, mad, mad ecosystem out there, though.
The author's sentiments go completely off rails by the end of this, however. It's almost eery. What is there to possibly trust?
Alan Kay made an excellent point. In order not to dilute it, I quote him verbatim.
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."-- Alan Kay.
Tim Berners Lee was trained to be a physicist. He wasn't aware of the things computer scientists had learned in the last few decades. He was a clever man who came up with a clever idea, but it wasn't engineered to scale.
I think Kay is right, and more ambitious tech firms are definitely running up against this wall. The fact that Google wrote a new Javascript engine tells me that Kay's proposal, where the web should have been like an operating system on which you could run programs in a separate address space and with limited access to underlying system calls - is coming to pass, except in this OS the assembly is Javascript.
The www is fine. TBL shouldn't be blamed for the horrible mess that it turned into as people kludged it to do things stupidly and inelegantly.
Yenc binaries on Usenet are stupid an inelegant yet petabytes of stuff have been shifted around on Usenet servers.
Humans are creative and capable of trashing almost any RFC no matter how well written it was.
...nerds and social outcasts...maintaining core infrastructure...
You say that like it's a bad thing?