FBI Director: The Internet Is The Most Dangerous Parking Lot Imagineable

from the james-comey:-bad-at-analogies dept

FBI Director James Comey was on 60 Minutes on Sunday, in a segment that will continue next week as well. Apparently next week is when we'll find out his views on mobile encryption and whether or not the FBI is spying on all of us, but this week, he gave us a tiny hint towards the end of the segment, in which he discusses why the internet is so dangerous. As far as I can tell, the summary is "don't open attachments" (i.e., the same advice that you've been hearing for a decade, and which has little to do with many internet threats today):

Scott Pelley: Do people understand, in your estimation, the dangers posed by cybercrime and cyber espionage?

James Comey: I don't think so. I think there's something about sitting in front of your own computer working on your own banking, your own health care, your own social life that makes it hard to understand the danger. I mean, the Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable. But if you were crossing a mall parking lot late at night, your entire sense of danger would be heightened. You would stand straight. You'd walk quickly. You'd know where you were going. You would look for light. Folks are wandering around that proverbial parking lot of the Internet all day long, without giving it a thought to whose attachments they're opening, what sites they're visiting. And that makes it easy for the bad guys.

Scott Pelley: So tell folks at home what they need to know.

James Comey: When someone sends you an email, they are knocking on your door. And when you open the attachment, without looking through the peephole to see who it is, you just opened the door and let a stranger into your life, where everything you care about is.

Scott Pelley: And what might that attachment do?

James Comey: Well, take over the computer, lock the computer, and then demand a ransom payment before it would unlock. Steal images from your system of your children or your, you know, or steal your banking information, take your entire life.

About the only thing I get from all this is that FBI Director James Comey is bad at analogies. Yes, you shouldn't click on attachments from unknown people, and you should even be careful about attachments from known folks. But that makes the internet the "most dangerous parking lot imaginable"? Perhaps the other thing I've learned is that James Comey doesn't have a very strong imagination.

Filed Under: attachments, cybersecurity, internet, james comey

Celebrating 20 Years Of Patent-Free Email Attachments

from the true-spirit-of-innovation dept

Tech innovation happens in layers. The internet was built to make computers more useful, the web was built to make the internet more useful, social media (for example) was built to make the web more useful, other online services are built to make social media more useful, and so on. This kind of incremental improvement is always faster and more efficient when the last round of innovations is open and accessible to a new generation of developers—contrary to the claims of patent-system supporters who insist that protection is necessary to promote progress.

Such claims look the most ridiculous when you consider the fundamental technologies of the digital world. The high user counts of the latest web startups are nothing compared to the underlying communication protocols that make them and every other online service possible. A big part of the reason these technologies have become so widespread, and created a reliable foundation on which others can build, is that they were free to use. Last year, after the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the world wide web, we wondered what the online world would look like today if he had locked the technology up behind a patent. A similar question is raised this month as we mark another 20th anniversary: that of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension protocol, better known as MIME, the technology that powers every single email attachment.

TechWeekEurope spoke to Nathaniel Borenstein, MIME's creator, about why he built the technology and what he thinks of its massive adoption. Like Berners-Lee, and indeed most "old-guard" internet engineers, Borenstein's attitude is one of openness and genuine, useful problem solving:

Mostly, [MIME] was a natural continuation of things I was pursuing. I wanted to live in a world where certain functionality existed.

When people asked me, "why do you work so hard on this?" I used to say that someday I'm going to have grandchildren, and I wanted to get their pictures by e-mail. A lot of people laughed, because it was inconceivable back then. No one even thought of digital cameras, so people pictured taking a print and scanning it in, and then transmitting it over their 1200 baud modem, and even that was expensive equipment.

Borenstein notes that the real challenge of developing MIME wasn't the engineering aspect, but the difficulty of getting everyone to agree to a single standard. By coming up with a clever solution and making it free and open-source, he succeeded, and now the entire world of email relies on MIME. Some might see his situation and think he got a raw deal, and that if he had patented MIME he could be pulling fat checks—but he knows it doesn't work that way:

The most common question I get about MIME is, "have you ever imagined what it would be like if you got a penny every time MIME was used?" And the answer is oh yeah, I imagined that (laughs). I did some checking up, and there's an estimate that MIME is used a trillion times every day. So if I got a penny every time, my annual income would be roughly equal to the GDP of Germany. But of course, that's just a silly fantasy. If there was any money involved, it would never have succeeded. Somebody would have been motivated to develop a similar thing for free.

This is the attitude of a true innovator. Borenstein developed MIME because he saw a problem that he wanted to solve—and he knew his solution wouldn't be of much use to anyone if he demanded an ongoing monopoly on it. Contrast that with trolls who obtain patents on abstract ideas and demand a cut from companies that are actually implementing them, and you see why the very nature of technology patents is opposed to their stated goal of promoting innovation. Today's true innovators recognize this, but the broken system forces them to pursue patents anyway, lest someone else try to patent their idea out from under them and use it to hold them back.

As we mark the anniversaries of fundamental online technologies like MIME, which have benefited the world and driven innovation by remaining free and open, maybe it's time to look at today's patent system, and update it to reflect the way technological progress really happens.

Filed Under: attachments, email, mime, nathaniel borenstein, patents