Author Archives: tyler.hugenberg

I don’t have tons of time to discuss the article but I found it while studying and it is pretty interesting. It links together artificial and real scarcity with IA. It seems to make the point that scarcity will always be around, just not ‘physical’ scarcity.

Decline of Scarcity

In class we discussed an internet attack DDoS, or distributed denial of service. I found this article, Spamhaus vs Cyberbunker  on arstechnica, a very interesting look into massive scale DDoS attacks.  Summarizing the article, Spamhaus is a major anti-spam company while Cyberbunker is a major spam, among other questionable things, hoster. Due to Spamhaus blacklisting them, Cyberbunker decided to retaliate through internet warfare.

Because Cyberbunker has unbelievable resources they generated an attack reaching 300 Gb/s in bandwidth. This kind of attack would take down all but the most prepared web services. Cyberbunker has the motto about hosting which goes something like anything goes ‘except child porn and anything related to terrorism’. With Cyberbunker generating so much traffic the backbone tier 1 routers could go down. This could disrupt THE ENTIRE internet. In my opinion, this is terrorism. The internet is such a precious resource I believe we need to take an active role in protecting it.

The United States government is happy to go abroad and foil terrorist and other illegal efforts. Should they get involved in this battle? If we were to get involved, would it be to directly undermine the government (the Netherlands) since they fail to control Cyberbunker? Possibly a third option, if a country is unwilling or unable to disrupt its own terrorist activities, should we take action onto that country?

While perusing hacker news I came upon this blog post BBC Attacks the Open Web. In a quick summary, the web was created with open ideals, HTML is the leading example.  Companies, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and the BBC,  who have publicly stated similar goals along the lines of promoting of creativity and the sharing of information are attacking their own ideals in search of profits. The BBC in 2010 tried to support DRM for their online HD broadcasts because the license-holders of the content threatened to disallow BBC from using their content. So they are not entirely to blame. Their full submission can be seen here.

I think this relates directly with our classroom discussions. This API, Encrypted Media Extensions, would allow web content to be distributed in a controlled manner. As we have discussed, creators need to be rewarded for their creations, but in order to continue improving, access to this material needs to be relatively unrestricted. As we also discussed, DRM does not expire. Even the ludicrous American copyright law, expiration 75 years after death, does mean there’s an eventual end to the restrictions.

What would this mean for the future of the web? If content could be easily encrypted and people had to start paying for the majority of internet content, I think it could get really ugly. I know I would be out of a job if I couldn’t find free quality content with a quick Google search. If I had to pay for most everything on the web I would never make any money.