Currently, I am reading the fascinating look at where the internet is headed, entitled, The Future Of The Internet: And How To Stop It.
So far, this novel is extremely compelling and easy read. Within the first fifty pages within the introduction, Jonathan Zittrain covers technological history all the way from the early days of IBM in the 1800s to the launch of the first generation iPhone in 2007.
This book is covering the ITGS Social & Ethical Issue Triangle topic of Security. Questions are raised over the advantages of closed software operating systems versus open ones which are prone to viruses. Are we willing to sacrifice freedom within the operating system in order to exist within the realms of your computer worry-free, or are we willing to put up with nasty and harmful viruses on our PCs in exchange for applications? The Xbox 360 with its’ closed operating system is compared to the iPhone (This book was written around when Apple issued a software update, bricking peoples’ iPhones which had been Jailbroken ). This book is concerned about how technology can be exploited. A wide range of examples from a wide spectrum of technological history are visited throughout the first fifty pages.
The most fascinating part of this book so far is when the first computer virus attacked computers around the world. In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris Jr. infected a computer at MIT from a Terminal in New York. This virus spread from computer to computer, as it read each contact list and continued to send the virus onwards. However, Morris claimed that this was an attempt to see how many computers there were on the network, and that this wasn’t a worm rather than a bug. Morris recieved $10,000 in fines and transferred from Cornell to Harvard, and later started a website which was bought by yahoo for a large sum of money.
One of the reasons I like this book is that instead of looking at only current and relevant issues, we can see across the history of computing, increasing my understanding of technology overall in the process. While I’m not at the point where the book covers its’ concern about the future of the internet, Zittrain has so far written a compelling and interesting look at security within computers and electronics.
For more information on the ideas this book is trying to present, click HERE to see the official website of the organization.