(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Charlie Stross is talking about the technical roots for why computer crime is possible - "the architectural sins of the founders".

My vote for what he didn't cover is in the comments, and that is The Crawling Horror Of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol With A Thousand Young.

Comments

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

Shub-Internet - The harsh personification of the Internet: Beast of a Thousand Processes, Eater of Characters, Avatar of Line Noise, and Imp of Call Waiting; the hideous multi-tendriled entity formed of all the manifold connections of the net.

Iä! Iä! Shub-Internet fhtagn!

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

I have explained why we block port 25 more times in the four months I've been doing tech support here than I ever thought about why you would before.

He has no clue.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Stupid. He's talking about 60's and 70's hardware decisions in 2000 terms. He's speaking like it's foolish to worry about a few kilobytes here and there, but at the time these decisions were made those few kilobytes were very expensive and those cost would have slowed down the development of the entire computer industry. If Stross had a time machine and could enforce his goofy hardware fetishes, we'd probably be working on the equivalent of 386's today.

SMTP, on the other hand, is a legit case of dropping the ball. Back in the late 90's, it was perfectly feasible to build authentication and flood control into a revised mail protocol, but there was were several major corporations fighting it because they wanted the ability to mass-mail without restriction. Now those corporations spend billions on email security, and their mass mailings float in the junk folder with viagra ads.