"Modern computing security is like a flimsy house that needs to be fundamentally rebuilt"

Image courtesy NY Times

Zeynep Tufekci has an interesting take on the latest cyber security news in her column entitled The Looming Digital Meltdown. The money quote is this: "Modern computing security is like a flimsy house that needs to be fundamentally rebuilt." Her focus is the chip-based vulnerabilities disclosed last week, but she's talking about cyber security in general. And her point is hard to argue with.

Tufekci has been thinking both deeply and broadly about these topics for quite some time. She's the author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, and her TED talk "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads" gets right to the point about the economic incentives that enable the Internet's stalker economy.

The theme of Tufekci's column is that vendors, driven by consumer demand and the frenzy to be first to market, have sacrificed security for speed and convenience. She rightly asserts that this is a solvable problem--and maybe would have already been solved if we simply held our vendors accountable (as we do with airplane travel, for example, or with consumer products).

But I think users have been complicit. By users, I mean people who use Facebook, and who buy smartphones, and who are inevitably attracted to "free" apps and services. I put the word free in quotes because the cost is real but not always evident. The stalker economy, which leads to exploits such as ADINT where by using the same techniques available to advertisers one can easily track friends, relatives and even strangers. We've ceded this power to the technology providers in order to have easy access to social networking apps and other "free" services.

And profit-driven technology is proving more powerful than traditional safety systems. Witness the fact that Uber Can Find You but 911 Can’t. Would we ever have designed such an outcome consciously?

Maybe there's hope on the horizon: Mark Zuckerberg says one of his goals for 2018 is to fix Facebook.

Meanwhile, here on earth, we're left to live with the chip-related vulnerabilities (known as Meltdown and Spectre). There's much hand-wringing that the proposed fixes will slow our systems down--maybe by as much as 30%. But MIT has developed an ad-blocking system that improves web page download times by up to 34%. That sounds like a fair tradeoff to me.