The Self-managing, 'Unbreakable' Internet?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2009) — High-powered internet applications typically need teams of experts to maintain them. Not any more, say European researchers who have built a system to create applications that manage and fix themselves.

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The Self-managing, 'Unbreakable' Internet?


Can you guys imagine what kinds of possibilties this could have? How many times do we hear about on here about "TPTB plotting to destroy the internet because of the opportunities it gives the masses to pass along sensitive information?"

With this sort of technology implemented, such fears could be squashed, and we could have a more reliable and dependable internet that is less prone to DOS attacks and other problems lovers of the internet have to deal with.

Pretty neat, huh!?


-Sliadon

I figured the internet readers of ATS would be all over this?

Guess not.


-Sliadon

I think I understand the gist of their argument, but it's not clear that these self repairing pieces of software would have creative abilities, such as creating wholly different programs. If humans are still needed for that, than there will still be inevitable human loopholes, viruses, etc. The software made by humans might learn to protect itself better, however.

... crickets chirping ..


Seriously - looks very interesting - anything that might proect the interent from TPTB is a great idea.

I just stumbled across it I developed something similar on paper a while back with my colleagues at a software consulting firm. It can indeed work, but it has a time and place. You wouldn't necessarilly use this topology for a internal business application, but you could most certainly use it for a web site.

Imagine if we get to a point where the cost of having a public facing web site is you must lease "virtual space". There wouldn't be a server (or cluster of servers) somewhere in a data center that house your data. Instead hundreds of thousands of servers would have a small portion of your data. These servers would be linked across this self managed ptp network each communicating to retrieve data. When you ask your browser for a web page, it simply makes a call into the cloud asking for the information. All of the available nodes in the most efficient routes available will reply and the information would be displayed back to you. DDOS attacks would be much harder to pull off because such a network could automatically drop the offending nodes.

All in all I think it is a great concept. Web 3.0 in the works.

After thinking for a moment, this raises interesting social concerns. If you have a server in this kind of web that just happens (at any point in time) to have 300 images of child pornography, 500 Terrorist financial transactions, and a few encrypted black mail emails that are in transit; does this make you as owner of the server complicit in the transfer of this information? Common sense says no, since you would not be in control of what data is stored and unstored on your server. In fact, you couldn't be if the security model is to work. In a sense, every computer in this cloud would become a router with caching and immune from prosecution for the traffic being routed.

[edit on 10-14-2009 by rogerstigers]

Originally posted by rogerstigers
After thinking for a moment, this raises interesting social concerns. If you have a server in this kind of web that just happens (at any point in time) to have 300 images of child pornography, 500 Terrorist financial transactions, and a few encrypted black mail emails that are in transit; does this make you as owner of the server complicit in the transfer of this information? Common sense says no, since you would not be in control of what data is stored and unstored on your server. In fact, you couldn't be if the security model is to work. In a sense, every computer in this cloud would become a router with caching and immune from prosecution for the traffic being routed.

[edit on 10-14-2009 by rogerstigers]

Your added in part at the end is a really good point Roger! I'm sure that there would still be some way though to trace originating IPs and identifying the root. The software is aimed at repairing itself if/when needed and from my understanding it wouldn't conflict with Security issues in normal use


-Sliadon