Pufff, there is a tremendous bias on 'raw functionality' in that statement: the Internet was so well done BUT FOR SECURITY issues, which were never taken into account.
This detail has difficulted development to a huge extent.
One could say that the Internet was so well done for 'utopian citicens'. Not that it is bad, but we have learnt a lot for the future from those mistakes. I hope we have learnt.
The routing protocols, DNS etc (which are essential for the Internet) have so many gaping security holes that today we wonder how naive one can be when designing communication protocols...
>One could say that the Internet was so well done for 'utopian citicens'.
Even for utopian societies, some of the Internet's security problems would still be problems. The main issue is that for the most part, the protocol assumes that information provided by another source is correct. This could clearly be used mallisiously, but it also allows small, innocent mistakes to take down the network.
For example, back in 2008, Pakistan decided to block youtube within their country. While this specific example would not happen in a utopian society, there could be valid reasons that a sub-network would want to disable or redirect requests going to a different server.
What happened was that one of the ISPs, instead of simply blocking outgoing requests to youtube, advertised itself as youtube. This change propogated through the network, and youtube went down globally.
Still, when these issues do come up without any malice, they should be relatively easy and painless to fix.
This detail has difficulted development to a huge extent.
One could say that the Internet was so well done for 'utopian citicens'. Not that it is bad, but we have learnt a lot for the future from those mistakes. I hope we have learnt.
The routing protocols, DNS etc (which are essential for the Internet) have so many gaping security holes that today we wonder how naive one can be when designing communication protocols...