Thread: George Gilder was interviewed recently by VAR Business magazine (In connection with his new book). the link was posted on the Gilder thread. A little of the interview concerns Q, so you all might like to see it.
varbusiness.com
The portion concerning Q follows:
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VB: Could you elaborate on your remarks at the Xplor
conference and the issue of our moving away from centralized
intelligent networks and towards a more dispersed model based
on the Internet, as you discuss in Telecosm? How will that impact
Internet computing as we know it today?
Gilder: It's a model where the network in the center has to be as
dumb as a stone. You've got a dumb network in the center and,
increasingly, the intelligence migrates outside to the desktop, to
the palmtop or whatever. This means a change in the model
that's currently emerging for Internet commerce and a lot of
Internet operations. For example, take AOL. AOL is trying to put
quite a lot of intelligence in the middle of the network and in order
to do transactions as an AOL member you have to go through
the AOL conduit, the AOL network. If you go to the same kind of
material by some alternative route, you lose the benefits of being
an AOL member and you lose the authentication that the AOL
servers give you as you perform transactions at the same sites
you might otherwise access through AOL. In other words, AOL is
trying to combine conduit and contact. This violates the
telecosmic model that says the network should be as dumb as a
stone and the intelligence will mostly be on the edge of the
network.
AOL's going to find that, as bandwidth grows, it's going to be
harder and harder to keep up with all the new fiber, WDM DOM
systems being created worldwide. It's going to be increasingly
artificial and a bottleneck to channel everything to AOL's big
servers to create a trusted environment with an ID and a
password and credit and debit access and all those functions. I
believe that the next step in the evolution toward the center of the
network dumb-as-a-stone/fringe-of-the-network-smart is that
security will migrate to the device itself, whether it's the desktop
computer, or a digital cellular form factor, such as the QualComm
PDQ phone that will be launched next year with 2 megabit per
second wireless links to the Net.
Anyway, this is partly a pitch because I'm on the board of a
company called Wave, which I think really has a very good
solution to this problem. It's called Empathy. It puts on a chip, a
hardware implementation of all your memberships. All the
algorithms that you need to perform transactions and establish
your identity in a variety of different environments can be
downloaded into a single encryption, metering, authentication
and credit chip that can be incorporated in a super I/O chip in a
PC, for example, or another device. So all this migrates to
hardware in your own device. This confers a lot of advantages.
For instance, security. It's worth it to hack at AOL if you can set
up a super computer to do millions and trillions of tries and break
into the AOL system to collect lots of credit card numbers. But it's
not worth it to break into a single metering chip that has one
person's information. So the security is artificially exacerbated by
locating [critical data] at a centralized point. If it's distributed
security, it's in everybody's device and it's not worth the trouble to
break into each one.
Once you have security at the end and the network's as dumb as
a stone you can upgrade to a private network connected across
the Internet with end-to-end encryption established in the device
itself, the Empathy chip. I talked about this model when I wrote
Life After Television [1992] and it's just now coming to fruition.
We're ready now with this Empathy device in league with
VeraSign, HP and other companies. We'll see what happens to
it. But the key is keeping conduit and contact separate, and
that's dictated by the model of the dumb network and the
intelligent edges.
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Best,
JS |
