Anyone remember CIX, AOL or Compuserve from the early-to-mid 1990s? You’d log on and have a nice, safe (But expensive) set of forums and chat rooms isolated from the chaos of the mainstream internet.
Whatever happened to them?
Well, they died. A long time ago. I don’t think many mourned their passing, really. AOL became just another dialup ISP, famed for those free shiny coffee coasters they put through everyone’s door. CompuServe were bought by AOL. CIX just became specialists in conferencing.
Now a “cybersecurity expert”, Professor Alan Woodward, has reinvented the wheel. And the BBC think it’s news.
Yes, he’s proposing that in the name of security, we reinvent those walled gardens of the 90s. The ones that died because they were expensive and couldn’t innovate at the speed of the internet.
Because, of course, if we rip it up and start again the hordes of programmers who wrote the current systems, replete with security holes, are not just going to make exactly the same mistakes again and recreate the same problem.
I’ve seen far too many “Security Internet” and “Internet Two point Oh” proposals over the years. Unsurprisingly, none of them have come to anything and those that survived have done so simply by becoming another ISP or web hosting provider. It’s no wonder we’re in a mess, if this is the best we get from an expert in the field.
We’re already there – what i facebook, google+, livejournal but walled garden social spaces. this is a cycle people go through between freedom and security. Before AOL/CIX was Prestel and the french telephone directory service which was just as wild west as the net is now.
In due course these walled gardens will come down again as people recognise the downsides of giving these companies all your data.
In time DRM will move from the corporate to the individual.
tools will evolve that give you privacy and security and only allow data to be disclosed if you choose it and whom you choose it.h
Even LiveJournal, in response to declining usage, have opened up. You can now use OpenID to comment on posts, RSS feeds to read posts on LiveJournal and even read external feeds via RSS. I would expect to see Facebook do the same should their market share ever start dwindling for any point.
First rule of the Internet – link and be linked.
(Ooh, I’d forgotten about Prestel! Bit before my time but I did use it briefly.)