The internet is broken, and it's going to be hard to fix it

• 27 May 2014
• by: Bruno Bandeira
• in: Curiosities,Internet,Technology
• Tags: conserr, dificil, internet, quebrada
• note: no comments

We are completely lost. Everything we use daily is broken and it's going to be pretty hard to fix. We suffer from spying by government agencies and flaws that affect almost everything we use on the internet. And the situation is really worrying, or at least seems very complicated, by the tone of a great text written by Quinn Norton.

Norton is a journalist who has been writing for some time about hacking and security in general. In the lengthy article, she highlights how the internet was kind of made anyway and basically everyone's fault.

Computers have become extremely complex and no one knows exactly what they are trying to do. They actually try to do several things at once, and no one can explain how it works. Software talks to the operating system, the internet is a bunch of boxes trying to communicate with each other. It's all a huge mess, all programmed by people with little time or money, who often release software when they think it's good, so they can go home to play with their kids, or just sleep.

A good example of how everything is broken, says Norton, is the issue of security updates:

“People say 'you need to apply this, it's a critical fix!' and leave out the '…because the developers have shit so much that their children's identities are probably being sold to the Estonian mafia by some hackers.'”

Basically, the software is so wrong and with so many security holes that it needs to be updated all the time to prevent these flaws from being exploited. We accept this with ease and often apply this correction without even questioning what it means. But at the end of the day, it's just another example of how everything is done anyway, how software is released without being tested as it should, and how the whole world is broken.

Of course, it's not just the developers' fault. Ordinary people are to blame. But what can they do? not many people have the computer they use the most – whether at work, at an Internet cafe, or a public library – and cannot install software or even security updates. What is the best option for them? Probably none, and there's no way to give them even a false sense of security.

It showed a pretty apocalyptic scenario for internet security, and apparently at any moment our information could end up in the hands of some criminal organization halfway around the world. What to do?

“Yes, geeks, executives, agents and military shit the world. But in the end, it's people's job, working together, to clean it up.”

How can we do that? Hard to say. But it's a good reminder of how things aren't as good as they seem, and how cases like Heartbleed may be more common than we think. You can read Quinn Norton's full text on Medium.