Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: I hate Napster, Gnutella, Freenet...
Author: Ken MacLeod Posted: 4/7/2000; 1:10:33 PM Topic: I hate Napster, Gnutella, Freenet... Msg #: 16025 (In response to 16020) Prev/Next: 16024 / 16026 You can change this by accepting the user empowerment challenge: to put as much capability to communicate and collaborate, peer to peer or otherwise, in the hands of as many members of your community as possible, as quickly as possible.I agree with you from the user's perspective, and the organization's perspective too (as a group of individual users).
The problem is technical, not political. It's the explosion of protocols and remote APIs that increase risk. To bluntly say, "open up my computer or our organization to any new protocol/API du jour" is akin to saying, "let's ignore security". (or, "let's try to keep up with the explosion", which is effectively the same thing).
The technical solution, which provides the same political benefit, is to actually reduce the number of protocols/remote APIs and build applications on "core protocols/APIs".
Security analysts, or paranoid users, usually have an easy time analyzing new applications based on well-known and well-proven protocols.
P.S. This has nothing to do with firewalls, actually. This technical issue is the same whether it's your personal computer at home hooked up through an ISP or your work computer connected through your organization's ISP, with or without a firewall.P.P.S. This could lead to a discussion of whether or not we have suitable core protocols available, but that's a different topic.
P.P.P.S. remote APIs == RPCs == SOAP, XML-RPC, CORBA, DCOM, Java RMI
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