Repeated Warning: The Age of Internet Innocence will soon pass with Open Sockets
How to stop it: Filter out all invalid packets at the source (i.e. client computer, or at least ISP level).
You still can't avoid this: We have insufficient IP addresses, and will definitely have to switch to another protocol.
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This problem shows malicious Murphy's Law in Action:
[In an irrational society,] If someone can take advantage of something, then rest assured that someone eventually will.
McLuhan said it: The dormant medium will "reverse" into another medium. [i.e. Our anonymous Internet may reverse into another medium that allows traceability and Government control.] Goodbye the Concordat [http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/InfoWar/concordat.html], hello to the independent space colonies.
When building the New Colony or similiar project, a lot of effort will have to go into it, not just the hardware engineering issue of laying fiber optic cables or whatever the cutting edge communications medium, but also the soptware planning and systems design, which I call the Infostructure.
It has to fulfill and perform trade-offs with many criterias, including:
1) Efficiency
2) Ease of automation (very important if you don't want to have people wasting their time pressing buttons on the console panel the whole day long)
3) Minimum exploitability
4) Expandibility (can upgrade it easily to another better system)
5) Redunancy (high immunity to accidents and faults)
The proper design of these systems, as much as the Infrastructure, can decide upon the failure and success of the colony, especially during times of conflicts. In the future, we will most likely have to redesign the entire network topology and protocols of that era, and even the electricity generation system for redunancy's sake.
I hope most of you reading this will place more effort into thinking of the Infostructure because a lot of us had assumed that if technology can solve all problems by itself: it *won't*.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:06 MDT