The Philosopher of Palo Alto

I just finished reading John Tinnell's The Philosopher of Palo Alto. Based on Stanford Library's extensive archive of Mark Weiser's papers, and interviews with many participants, it is an impressively detailed and, as far as I can tell, accurate account of the "ubiquitous computing" work he drove at Xerox PARC. I strongly recommend reading it. Tinnell covers Weiser's life story to his death at age 46 in 1999, the contrast between his work and that at Nick Negroponte's MIT Media Lab, and the ultimate failure of his vision.

Tinnell quotes Lucy Suchman's critique of Weiser's approach to innovation:

Under this approach, Suchman claimed, a lab "[provided] distance from practicalities that must eventually be faced" — but facing up to those practicalities was left up to staff in some other department.

To be fair, I would say the same criticism applied to much of the Media Labs work too.

As I was at the time a member of "staff in some other department" at Sun Microsystems and then Nvidia, below the fold I discuss some of the "practicalities" that should have been faced earlier rather than later or not at all.

Library of Congress Storage Architecture Meeting

.The Library of Congress has finally posted the presentations from the 2019 Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections workshop that took place in early September, I've greatly enjoyed the earlier editions of this meeting, so I was sorry I couldn't make it this time. Below the fold, I look at some of the presentations.

The Island of Misfit Toys

The Berkman Center's Johnathan Zittrain has a New York Times editorial entitled From Westworld to Best World for the Internet of Things starts:

Last month the F.B.I. issued an urgent warning: Everyone with home internet routers should reboot them to shed them of malware from “foreign cyberactors.”

Below the fold, some details and a critique of  Zittrain’s proposals for improving the IoT.

The Internet of Things is Haunted by Demons

This is just a quick note to get you to read Cory Doctorow's Demon-Haunted World. We all know that the Internet of Things is infested with bugs that cannot be exterminated. That's not what Doctorow is writing about. He is focused on the non-bug software in the Things that makes them do what their manufacturer wants, not what the customer who believes they own the Thing wants.

Bufferbloat

This is just a brief note to point out that, after a long hiatus, my friend Jim Gettys has returned to blogging with Home products that fix/mitigate bufferbloat, an invaluable guide to products that incorporate some of the very impressive work undertaken by the bufferbloat project, CeroWrt, and the LEDE WiFi driver. The queuing problems underlying bufferbloat, the "lag" that gamers complain about and other performance issues at the edge of the Internet can make home Internet use really miserable. It has taken appallingly long for the home router industry to start shipping products with even the initial fixes released years ago. But a trickle of products is now available, and it is a great service for Jim to point at them.

BITAG on the IoT

The Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group, an ISP industry group, has published a technical working group report entitled Internet of Things (IoT) Security and Privacy Recommendations. It's a 43-page PDF including a 6-page executive summary. The report makes a set of recommendations for IoT device manufacturers:

In many cases, straightforward changes to device development, distribution, and maintenance processes can prevent the distribution of IoT devices that suffer from significant security and privacy issues. BITAG believes the recommendations outlined in this report may help to dramatically improve the security and privacy of IoT devices and minimize the costs associated with collateral damage. In addition, unless the IoT device sector—the sector of the industry that manufactures and distributes these devices—improves device security and privacy, consumer backlash may impede the growth of the IoT marketplace and ultimately limit the promise that IoT holds.

Although the report is right that following its recommendations would "prevent the distribution of IoT devices that suffer from significant security and privacy issues" there are good reasons why this will not happen, and why even if it did the problem would persist. The Department of Homeland Security has a similar set of suggestions, and so does the Internet Society, both with the same issues. Below the fold I explain, and point out something rather odd about the BITAG report. I start from an excellent recent talk.

Updates on the Dyn DDoS

In the aftermath of the Dyn DDoS attack too much is happening to fit into a comment on Tuesday's post. Below the fold, a roundup of the last two day's news from the IoT war zone.

You Were Warned

Four weeks ago yesterday I posted The Things Are Winning about the IoT-based botnet attack on Krebs On Security. I wrote:

And don't think that knocking out important individual Web sites like KrebsOnSecurity is the limit of the bad guys capabilities. Everyone seems to believe that the current probing of the root servers' defenses is the work of China but, as the Moon Worm showed, careful preparation isn't necessarily a sign of a state actor. There are many bad guys out there who could take the Internet down; the only reason they don't is not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Last Friday's similar attack on Dyn, a major US DNS provider, caused many of its major customer websites to be inaccessible, including Twitter, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, Spotify, Netflix, PayPal and github. Dyn's DNS infrastructure was so overloaded that requests for name-to-IP-address translations were dropped or timed out. The LOCKSS team uses github, so we were affected.

It is important to note that these attacks are far from the largest we can expect, and that it is extraordinarily difficult to obtain reliable evidence as to who is responsible. Attackers will be able to produce effects far more disruptive than a temporary inability to tweet with impunity. Below the fold some commentary and useful links.

The Things Are Winning

More than three years ago my friend Jim Gettys, who worked on One Laptop Per Child, and on the OpenWrt router software, started warning that the Internet of Things was a looming security disaster. Bruce Schneier's January 2014 article The Internet of Things Is Wildly Insecure — And Often Unpatchable and Dan Geer's April 2014 Heartbleed as Metaphor were inspired by Jim's warnings. That June Jim gave a talk at Harvard's Berkman Center entitled (In)Security in Home Embedded Devices. That September Vint Cerf published Bufferbloat and Other Internet Challenges, and Jim blogged about it. That Christmas a botnet running on home routers took down the gaming networks of Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's Playstation. That wasn't enough to motivate action to fix the problem.

As I write this on 9/24/16 the preceding link doesn't work, although the Wayback Machine has copies. To find out why the link isn't working and what it has to do with the IoT, follow me below the fold.

Bruce Schneier on the IoT

John Leyden at The Register reports that Government regulation will clip coders' wings, says Bruce Schneier. He spoke at Infosec 2016:

Government regulation of the Internet of Things will become inevitable as connected kit in arenas as varied as healthcare and power distribution becomes more commonplace, ... “Governments are going to get involved regardless because the risks are too great. When people start dying and property starts getting destroyed, governments are going to have to do something,” ... The trouble is we don’t yet have a good regulatory structure that might be applied to the IoT. Policy makers don’t understand technology and technologists don’t understand policy. ... “Integrity and availability are worse than confidentiality threats, especially for connected cars. Ransomware in the CPUs of cars is gonna happen in two to three years,” ... technologists and developers ought to design IoT components so they worked even when they were offline and failed in a safe mode."

Not to mention the problem that the DMCA places researchers who find vulnerabilities in the IoT at risk of legal sanctions, despite the recent rule change. So much for the beneficial effects of government regulation.

This post will take over from Gadarene swine as a place to collect the horrors of the IoT. Below the fold a list of some of the IoT lowlights in the 17 weeks since then.

Gadarene swine

I've been ranting about the way we, possessed by the demons of the Internet of Things, are rushing like the Gadarene Swine to our doom. Below the fold, the latest rant in the series, which wanders off into related, but equally doom-laden areas.

Trade Pacts and Trade Secrets

I already pointed out that:

The TPP chapter leaked by Wikileaks mandates that countries “judicial authorities shall, at least, have the authority to [...] order the destruction of devices and products found to be involved in" any activity that circumvents controls that manufacturers build into their software or devices. This makes the equipment white hats use to find vulnerabilities in, for example, things in the IoT subject to destruction.

Now, Glynn Moody at Techdirt points to a column in The Globe and Mail by Dan Breznitz, professor of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Breznitz explains that the TPP not merely greatly increases the intellectual property protections for both copyrights and patents, but also for trade secrets. Below the fold, details of some of the ways in which added protection for trade secrets is a catastrophically bad idea.

DRM in the IoT

This week, Phillips pushed out a firmware upgrade to their "smart" lighting system that prevented third-party lights that used to interoperate with it continuing to do so. An insightful Anonymous Coward at Techdirt wrote:

And yet people still wonder why many people are hesitant to allow any sort of software update to install. Philips isn't just turning their product into a wall garden. They're teaching more people that "software update"="things stop working like they did".

Below the fold, some commentary.

Securing WiFi routers

Via Dave Farber's IP list, I find that he, Dave Taht, Jim Gettys, the bufferbloat team, and other luminaries have submitted a response to the FCC's proposed rule-making (PDF) that would have outlawed software defined radios and open source WiFi router software such as OpenWrt. My blogging about the Internet of Things started a year ago from a conversation with Jim when he explained the Moon malware, which was scanning home routers. It subsequently turned out to be preparing to take out Sony and Microsoft's gaming networks at Christmas. Its hard to think of a better demonstration of the need for reform of the rules for home router software, but the FCC's proposal to make the only reasonably secure software for them illegal is beyond ridiculous.

The recommendations they submitted are radical but sensible and well-justified by events:

1. Any vendor of software-defined radio (SDR), wireless, or Wi-Fi radio must make public the full and maintained source code for the device driver and radio firmware in order to maintain FCC compliance. The source code should be in a buildable, change-controlled source code repository on the Internet, available for review and improvement by all.
2. The vendor must assure that secure update of firmware be working at time of shipment, and that update streams be under ultimate control of the owner of the equipment. Problems with compliance can then be fixed going forward by the person legally responsible for the router being in compliance.
3. The vendor must supply a continuous stream of source and binary updates that must respond to regulatory transgressions and Common Vulnerability and Exposure reports (CVEs) within 45 days of disclosure, for the warranted lifetime of the product, or until five years after the last customer shipment, whichever is longer.
4. Failure to comply with these regulations should result in FCC decertification of the existing product and, in severe cases, bar new products from that vendor from being considered for certification.
5. Additionally, we ask the FCC to review and rescind any rules for anything that conflicts with open source best practices, produce unmaintainable hardware, or cause vendors to believe they must only ship undocumented “binary blobs” of compiled code or use lockdown mechanisms that forbid user patching. This is an ongoing problem for the Internet community committed to best practice change control and error correction on safety-critical systems.

As the submission points out, experience to date shows that vendors of home router equipment are not motivated to, do not have the skills to, and do not, maintain the security of their software. Locking down the vendor's insecure software so it can't be diagnosed or updated is a recipe for even more such disasters. The vendors don't care if their products are used in botnets or steal their customer's credentials. Forcing the vendors to use open source software and to respond in a timely fashion to vulnerability discoveries on pain of decertification is the only way to fix the problems.

The Cavalry Shows Up in the IoT War Zone

Back in May I posted Time For Another IoT Rant. Since then I've added 28 comments about the developments over the last 132 days, or more than one new disaster every 5 days. Those are just the ones I noticed. So its time for another dispatch from the front lines of the IoT war zone on which I can hang reports of the disasters to come.  Below the fold, I cover yesterday's happenings on two sectors of the front line.

The Panopticon Is Good For You

As Stanford staff I get a feel-good email every morning full of stuff about the wonderful things Stanford is doing. Last Thursday's linked to this article from the medical school about Stanford's annual Big Data in Biomedicine conference. It is full of gee-whiz speculation about how the human condition can be improved if massive amounts of data is collected about every human on the planet and shared freely among medical researchers. Below the fold, I give a taste of the speculation and, in my usual way, ask what could possibly go wrong?

Time for another IoT rant

I haven't posted on the looming disaster that is the Internet of Things You Don't Own since last October, although I have been keeping track of developments in brief comments to that post. The great Charlie Stross just weighed in with a brilliant, must-read examination of the potential the IoT brings for innovations in rent-seeking, which convinced me that it was time for an update. Below the fold, I discuss the Stross business model and other developments in the last 8 months.

The Internet of Things

In 1996, my friend Steven McGeady gave a fascinating and rather prophetic keynote address to the Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society. In his introduction, Steven said:

I was worried about speaking here, but I'm even more worried about some of the pronouncements that I have heard over the last few days, ... about the future of the Internet. I am worried about pronouncements of the sort: "In the future, we will do electronic banking at virtual ATMs!," "In the future, my car will have an IP address!," "In the future, I'll be able to get all the old I Love Lucy reruns - over the Internet!" or "In the future, everyone will be a Java programmer!"

This is bunk. I'm worried that our imagination about the way that the 'Net changes our lives, our work and our society is limited to taking current institutions and dialling them forward - the "more, better" school of vision for the future.

I have the same worries that Steven did about discussions of the Internet of Things that looms so large in our future. They focus on the incidental effects, not on the fundamental changes. Barry Ritholtz points me to a post by Jon Evans at TechCrunch entitled The Internet of Someone Else's Things that is an exception. Jon points out that the idea that you own the Smart Things you buy is obsolete:

They say “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” but even if you physically and legally own a Smart Thing, you won’t actually control it. Ownership will become a three-legged stool: who physically owns a thing; who legally owns it; …and who has the ultimate power to command it. Who, in short, has root.

What does this have to do with digital preservation? Follow me below the fold.