[whoisyc]

Universal connectivity was the internet’s biggest promise and it turned out to be its biggest flaw. It turns out if you allow literally anyone on this planet to walk up to your front door, you will end up with the world’s criminals, psychopaths, you know, the ones in a more civilized time would be driven out of town by townsfolk wielding pitchforks, all hanging out on your porch figuring out how to pick your lock, or just to spray paint your house for the lulz and cred.

Look around and you will see every piece of cybersecurity knowledge assumes your porch will be inhabited by bad actors and there is nothing to stop them, so you absolutely need to harden your server as if you are a bank. Have you ever lived somewhere you genuinely don’t need to lock your front door to feel safe? I have, it was amazing, and it depresses me to no end to see the polar opposite to be what is expected on the internet. We were promised a world of peace and unity and total freedom of information but instead we got the tyranny of the petty cyberdelinquent, with no way to enforce prosocial values as we ought to do in a sane society. “On the internet no one knows you are a dog” was a warning, but we would be in a much better world if it’s only dogs we have to share an internet with. When humans get low they can get way lower than the worst dogs ever born.

We are already seeing a Brazilification of the internet. Crime is rampant, so you live in a gated community with private security if you can afford it. On the internet the name of this private security operation is Cloudflare. I hate one private company becoming the de facto gatekeeper of the internet but I cannot blame any individual website (including the one in the article) for using Cloudflare. It’s the thin orange line between a somewhat usable service and getting knocked off the internet by smart fridges every other day because some kid somewhere on the planet got bored.

How will this end? I honestly don’t know.