The Open Internet - RIP

Though he doesn't get written up in the trade rags, my colleague Terry Gray has been one of the true heroes of Internet engineering for many years, and when Terry speaks you can always expect well-reasoned deep thinking about the evolution of technology.

Yesterday Terry gave a wonderful but totally depressing talk titled "The new state of the network - how security issues are reshaping our world" (truth in advertising - I suggested the title to him).

Terry recapped how the basic tenet of designing the Internet was always to place the least impedance possible to the flow of packets from one end point to another, and to assume that all other details will be handled at the edges in the computers at the ends.

But now, driven largely by the huge failures of Microsoft to provide security at those very end points, we are being forced to put up devices to specifically get in the way of that free flow of packets - firewalls, private address routers, etc. And then we end up inventing new ways of getting packets to flow through those blocks (VPNs, for example).

Terry noted that while networking is about connection, security is about isolation, and that insecurity equals liability, and liability will trump innovation.

I hope we can have one hell of a wake...