Chapter 20 Epilogue - The Age of Optimism

Don't you believe in exponential growth? At present, the website address of the World Wide Web doubles every 15 days, and a new homepage (homepage) appears every 4 minutes.In the short time since the English hardcover edition of , I've been able to use these Internet vocabulary freely, because everyone knows a lot about the Internet, although few people really know it. .Some people criticize me and should explain a little more in the book.Let me take this opportunity to make amends. In 1963, a man named Larry Roberts (Larry Roberis in this book) designed the Internet.Note that I never mentioned his name, which is indeed an omission on my part.Sutherland (whose name appears four times in this book) who chaired the Computer Research Program at the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the time invited Roberts to Washington.They designed this network as a message delivery system that would never make mistakes, and transmitted information by packet switching, which was called the ARPA network at the time.We have discussed information packets in the book, but what was not made clear is that each information packet is independent and contains a large amount of information, and each information packet can be transmitted from A to B via different transmission paths .

Now, suppose I want to transmit this text from Boston to San Francisco for you.Each packet (let's say it contains 10 letters, the sequence number of the packet, plus your name and address) can basically take a different path.Some go through Denver, some go through Chicago, some go through Dallas, and so on.Suppose that when the packets are in sequence in San Francisco, it turns out that packet number 6 is missing. What happened to bag 6? The military allocated funds to fund the ARPA network at the height of the Cold War.The threat of nuclear war worries everyone.So, let's say that when Packet 6 was passing through Minneapolis, an enemy missile happened to land on that city. Packet 6 is thus missing.As soon as the other packets determine that it's gone, Boston will be asked to retransmit it (this time without going through Minneapolis).

That is, since I always have a way of finding available transmission paths, the enemy would have to wipe out most of the United States if they were to prevent me from transmitting a message to you.Yes, it is important to understand that the system will slow down while finding available transmission paths (if more and more cities are destroyed by the enemy), but the system will not die, because it is this decentralized system The structure allows the Internet to be as superfluous as it is today.Whether through laws or bombs, there is no way for politicians to control this network.The message was sent out anyway, either through this route or through another route.

The rapid development of the Internet has taken everyone by surprise.If you are a veteran of the Internet and often complain that the network speed is too slow, don't forget that many countries rely on narrowband channels to connect to the Internet.The bandwidth of these networks will quickly widen, and the performance of the system will continue to improve.During this time, when the number of people connected to the Internet increased faster than the telecommunications infrastructure improved, the network speed occasionally slowed down.But don't worry, the network doesn't crash, it just slows down.Is someone eavesdropping?

The only danger comes from governments and politicians who want to control the Internet.All over the world, there are people who try to censor the content of online communications under the banner of sanitizing the Internet for children.To make matters worse, many countries, including the United States, hope to actually find a way to "eavesdrop" on the Internet.If that's not creepy enough, you'd better be on your toes. If the web fails to provide the best security and privacy guarantees, then a serious failure will occur.Because of the nature of digitalization, the digital world should be much safer than the analog world, but only if we want to make it safe, and we must consciously shape a safe digital environment.

Yes, drug dealers, terrorists, and pornographic writers use the Internet too.But, come to think of it, these bad guys are better equipped and better equipped to fool the government with encrypted communications than you or I.So, US export laws and other laws are stupid, if you prohibit the export of cryptography then only criminals will use cryptography.As a result, instead of protecting the general public, you put the public at greater risk.Lords of Washington, think clearly. We can look at the issue of privacy from three angles.First, when I send you a message, you want to know that it is indeed from me.Second, you don't want anyone eavesdropping on you when messages are going back and forth between us.

Third, once the message is on your desk, you don't want someone trespassing on to read it (for example, while you're busy with other things online).All three situations are important.Failure to do so will lead to trouble, and we must also have the right to privacy in cyberspace (a term that appears only once in this book). The theme of "bits and atoms" is very touching.Comparing the past to the present never works. In February 1995, because Ramzi Yusuf, who was suspected of planning the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, was extradited back to China, a Pakistani Islamic missionary also asked the US government to let them extradite Madonna, Michael and Jackson to Tehran Go, to be tried for violating the fundamental teachings of Islam.The U.S. State Department did not take this request seriously at all, and readers who saw this short message in the newspaper laughed it off.

Something happened a month later.The Thomases of Milpitas, Calif., run an electronic bulletin board without messing with anyone, in full compliance with community ethics and local laws.One day a postal worker in Tennessee got on-line with their electronic bulletin board and didn't like what he saw on it.The California couple was charged with violating Tennessee law and was tried and sentenced. They were successfully extradited to Tennessee. I visited a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when I was doing a tour to promote the English-language hardcover edition of .To my surprise, the parents of Jack Baker, a 21-year-old University of Michigan student arrested a few days earlier, were also there.

Baker posted a fictional story in the alt.sex newsgroup (I've never visited the address and don't know how to get in touch with it) and a guy in Moscow read it, And hate it. (Don't ask me what he was doing in the alt.sex newsgroup, it's like a guy who walks into the dark of an Amsterdam sex shop and feels violated.) Unfortunately, this Russian reader happens to be Mich An alumnus of Ann University, his grievances led to Baker's arrest at 11 o'clock in the middle of the night.As a result, Baker was thrown into jail, without bail for a month, and his glasses were confiscated.Wait a minute, I thought we Americans wouldn't do this kind of thing.

We did this because this young man made the mistake of using a woman's real name and as a result his behavior was seen as deeply threatening and he was given an extreme and absurd sentence of imprisonment without bail.Judge Evan Cohen dismissed the case on June 21, 1995, describing Baker's story as "nothing more than a bit of wild and tasteless fiction." When I hear this, I feel like our laws are like struggling fish on deck.These dying fish are gasping for air, because the digital world is a very different place.Most of the laws are made for the world of atoms, not the world of bits, and I guess for us the laws are a warning sign.There is no place for national law in the law of cyberspace.Where is the computer space?If you don't like US banking laws, then put the machines on an island off the coast of the US.You don't like American copyright laws?Just set up the machine in China.Laws in cyberspace are universal. Since we cannot even reach an agreement with other countries on auto parts trade, it is even easier to deal with computer laws.A world without borders is like mothballs evaporating directly from a solid state. I expect that nation-states will disappear without a trace of chaos before the global computer nation takes control of the political airspace.Undoubtedly, the role of the state will change dramatically, and there will be less and less room for national development in the future.

Today, every country is the wrong size, neither small enough to be localized nor big enough to be globalized. In the past, the meaning of a neighborhood was determined entirely by its geographical proximity. When you walked across a country's border, you were likely to be shot for crossing the border.Rivers, oceans, and even stone walls form boundaries.Although the boundaries of the city are unclear, it always seems self-evident where the city ends. It is also because of this self-evident situation that a certain form of local self-government has developed.Our entire history has been about space and place, geometry and geography.Whether the origin of the conflict is religious, economic, or other non-physical factors, the areas where the fighting is fought are absolutely material.Winners temporarily establish kingdoms, and losers may disappear.The state is a very materialistic booty. Not so with cyberspace.The distance between each machine is the same, and cyberspace has no physical boundaries at all except the confines of the Earth itself.Just as the media has grown larger on the one hand and smaller on the other, so has the same situation been observed with regard to the management of the world as a whole. None of these phenomena happened overnight, but there are indications that in some societies they are happening much faster than in others.I don't mean the physical society, but the society like finance, academia, which is now at the top of the globalization and networking of computers.In fact, today the global financial community is the only community that is exempt from the cryptography of US export laws.Have you heard of anyone shipping gold bars around lately? The globalized nature of the digital world will gradually erode the boundaries of the past.Some people feel threatened, and I rejoice.No need to leave home anymore 20 years ago, my wife and I bought a house on a small Greek island, and the pharmacist on the island confided to me one day that he was worried about his 13-year-old son being so addicted to the computer.The father is deeply distressed because he believes that if his son learns to use computers, there will be no work to do on the island, and he will, like so many Greeks in the past few years, search for a way out. Uprooted. It was hard for me to explain to him that, of his son's many interests, that in computers was actually the one that was most likely to keep him in his hometown.More and more entrepreneurs have established a "global cottage industry" on the Internet.This sounds a bit plausible, but it is not. In the past, if you wanted to create a global business, you had to be huge, with offices all over the world.As a result, it is not only possible to process the company's bits, adapt to local laws and customs, but also control the circulation of products. Today, thanks to the Internet, three people in three locations can form a company and enter the global market. As the white-collar workforce is gradually replaced by automation, more and more people will be employed by themselves, and many companies will also start to outsource to complete their jobs.Both trends point in the same direction.By 2020, the largest group of employers in the developed world will be "theselves", can you bet? It was interesting for me to observe the different levels of acceptance in different countries translated into 30 languages.In some places, such as France, this book is out of tune with the local cultural institutions, so it seems to be more bland than Avita mineral water.In other countries, such as Italy, the book was well received and sparked lively discussions.The thing that makes me happiest, however, is not where the book hits the bestseller list again, but the thousands of e-mails that flood in this year: older people thanking me for describing how their kids are doing. something to do or to do in the future.Young people thanked me for my enthusiasm.But the most satisfying and successful thing for me is that my 79-year-old mother now sends me emails every day.