Unquiet Machines

For 86 years we have reaped the benefits of networking and now the check for those decades of hubris is due.

The first day that man did not have to physically interact with machine to control it was the final day of information security on Earth. Stibitz hooked a Dartmouth teletype to a Bell Labs computer and killed cyber defense before it could be dreamed, before hacking a computer with anything but an axe was possible. ARPANET drank the safety of millions to burp up Usenet. Quake feasted on the medical records of the yet-unborn. Millions, billions, trillions of dollars danced on generations of engineer tears.

Any computer exposed to the Internet is infinitely attackable. There is no minefield you can lay down, no moat that can stymie the all-consuming army that launches a thousand thousand sallies in the time a sentence can be scratched onto digital paper. They claw and gnaw at the tower of shelled reptiles that underlies modernity, as we defend turtles with turtles and hope that a thicker shell might keep the teeth of the alligator at bay.

All digital access control is duct tape over "anyone can spew packets at us for as long as they like" being a core architectural principle of the Internet. There is no true cyber barricade; protection can only be sought in the material realm where air and guns and paper and men hold sway and the thieves and spies must tread soil and linoleum to seek the prizes.

The CVEs laugh at me. They laugh at us all.