{"id":2015,"date":"2016-09-24T13:26:23","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T12:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=2015"},"modified":"2016-09-24T13:54:53","modified_gmt":"2016-09-24T12:54:53","slug":"yahoo-this-will-happen-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=2015","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo! This will happen again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Yahoo!\"The breach of over 500 million accounts<\/a> at Yahoo! has caused a number of my friends to deride the company for not applying sufficient protections of private consumer data.\u00a0 While it\u2019s hard to argue with that claim, one thing is certain: this will happen again<\/strong><\/span>.\u00a0 Maybe not to Yahoo! but to some other giant web site, like Amazon or Facebook or Google or Twitter.<\/p>\n

We have concentrated so<\/strong> much trust into so small a percentage of sites that if any one of them has a breach, it can impact hundreds of millions of people.\u00a0 Americans have previously spoken of banks that are too big to fail.\u00a0 Social networking sites are similarly so big that when they have an incident, it perturbs our lives in all sorts of ways that we only begin to understand after the fact.<\/p>\n

These sites have an interest in maintaining their customer interest, and the network effect helps them: the more people who visit Facebook, the more people Facebook will attract.\u00a0 This is how the Internet and telephone networks came to be in the first place.<\/p>\n

This vast concentration of consumers into a small number of sites also has its upsides: because they are regularly attacked, they have developed very strong expertise to fend off bad guys.\u00a0 That\u2019s something the average consumer \u2013 and even most enterprises \u2013 will never have.<\/p>\n

This form of market concentration is not an easy problem to solve.\u00a0 Imagine a world in which we all had software that sat on in our homes instead of in Facebook\u2019s cloud (for instance).\u00a0 If the software were all the same, then one bug would impact everyone in much the same way as if the software were centrally located.\u00a0 The only question is how long it would take for an exploit of a vulnerability to propagate, and how long it would take someone to notice.<\/p>\n

We know that such distributed software is a problem because one of the key vectors for infection these days is unused and out of date virtual machines or WordPress instances<\/a>.\u00a0 This puts aside all the issues of cost of maintaining a WordPress site.\u00a0 How much does it cost you to maintain your Facebook account today?<\/p>\n

One approach would a healthy exchange of social information across a reasonable number (perhaps in the thousands) of well managed sites.\u00a0 That requires a rethink about how we consider privacy and who is responsible.\u00a0 It also requires that incentives be aligned for that sharing to occur.\u00a0 We would in essence be suggesting that Facebook advertisers go elsewhere.\u00a0 That doesn’t seem like something Facebook would want to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The breach of over 500 million accounts at Yahoo! has caused a number of my friends to deride the company for not applying sufficient protections of private consumer data.\u00a0 While it\u2019s hard to argue with that claim, one thing is certain: this will happen again.\u00a0 Maybe not to Yahoo! but to some other giant web … Continue reading “Yahoo! This will happen again”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,9],"tags":[530,533,532,497,531,496],"class_list":["post-2015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-security","tag-attack","tag-centralized-management","tag-distributed-attacks","tag-economics","tag-incentives","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2015"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2021,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015\/revisions\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}