The first time Jonathan Zittrain gave a speech on the future of computing, he greatly surprised his audience. The year was 1985, and Zittrain was a magazine columnist and the “system operator” of an online forum for users of Texas Instruments computers. As a leading figure in the community, Zittrain was invited to speak at a big convention in Chicago. The surprise was that Zittrain had recently turned fifteen. No one had ever met him in person: when he was appointed system operator, sight unseen, he was thirteen.
Now Zittrain is older and more worried, as is evident from the title of his provocative and engaging book. Zittrain tells us that whatever the Internet’s glorious adolescence, its middle age will be sharply shaped by the problem of computer security. “Today’s viruses and spyware,” he writes, “are not merely annoyances to be ignored.” Zittrain has a graph showing the number of security incidents over the last decade, and it resembles the Dow Jones average over the 1990s. He predicts a coming crisis, grave measures, and, as “security problems worsen and fear spreads,” broad acceptance of “some form of lockdown.”
There are more secure systems than Job’s hardware and Gates’ software. Consumers don’t want a general lockdown. They want and will pay for more secure systems.