Thursday, April 21, 2016

The Power of a Million Little Things


The short lifetime of information technology has seen humanity leap years forward into the future. With the help of computer pioneers like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Linux Torvalds, Bill Gates, and Ian Murdock, computers have launched us into an age where the rudimentary, repetitive, and mundane tasks can be automated with the power of machines. As these computers became more advanced, they became exponentially faster while simultaneously becoming physically smaller over time. Portable laptops are now being surpassed in number by smartphones and tablets; Servers can be out-performed by home-brew computer systems, and entire homes can be remotely controlled with a $30 Raspberry Pi and a little creativity.

Once a humble link between two college computers hundreds of miles apart, the internet is now a super-massive network of veins and arteries that span the globe, pumping precious data through the countless devices that dot its millions of branches and crossroads.

After fifty years since its birth, the Internet is no longer limited to just datacenters forwarding traffic from one place to another. It is now an Internet of Things. Every routing and gateway device that exists has the ability to pass traffic to its intended destination seamlessly in cooperation with its neighbors, and as the number of devices grows, so do the speeds at which this information travels. To us, it is indistinguishable from instantaneous.

This computer revolution has given humanity a new means of communication and information sharing that has led to an incredible understanding and a desire to cooperate with the world. Thanks to the advent of social media and mobile applications powered by smartphones, information and news is a mere click, tap and a swipe away. It has always been the intention of free-thinkers and advocates of the open-source communities that information, the internet, technology, and knowledge should always be easily and readily accessible to everyone. Thanks to the Internet of Things, that time is now.

What has become known in many circles as “the hacker ethic” explains that people with knowledge and understanding of technology have a responsibility to use their knowledge for the good of the world. According to Steven Levy, it operates on its basic principles of information sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers, and world improvement. Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux kernel in 1991, dared to think that all of this power deserved to be shared freely with the world. It is rather poetic that the free and open internet uses Linux now more than any other operating system in the world.

So much of the internet has come to be dominated by the sheer number of things that exist on it. As it should be, it is largely owned by the people who use it. Even in countries where internet access is heavily censored, there is The Onion Router (TOR) to help their citizens to break through that veil of censorship. TOR also operates in tandem with the internet of things to tunnel traffic through many devices called ‘nodes’ that protect and anonymize the user to allow them to access the greater internet, and not just what their government restricts them to.

               The internet of things has already done much to make the internet more free and accessible to everyone. It has taken ownership of it from corporate organizations and placed it in the hands of the world. It has freed us from censorship. It delivers anything and everything we want to know instantly. Yet for all it is now, it has only just begun.



Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet
http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

The American IP Mapping Horror Story



The Taylor-Vogelman family, owners of the Vogelman Farm just outside of Wichita, Kansas, have been the victims of internet harassment for well over a decade. They have had their homes assaulted and damaged, received very insidious threats both by mail and through digital media, been raided by the FBI and federal marshals, visited by the IRS, and a large number of additional emergency services responding to suicide threats, child abuse and endangerment, runaway children, identity theft and credit fraud.

The owner, Joyce Vogelman, is actually described by locals as a very kind, ordinary person who is neither a criminal, fraud, tax evader, nor suicidal. So why is this woman cursed by all of this grief?

IP Mapping