Monday, December 24, 2018

Elephant in the Datacenter

I hear conversations at eateries discussing virtual wires to move packets between software endpoints. I believe the problem of moving  packets or making a remote procedural call  (across administrative domains) is already solved. What is not solved is the policy around the movement and invocations. We need to solve this problem if we are to tackle the elephant in the room.  When I listen to end users of technology, their discuss their pressing problem and that is phishing, robocalls, invasion of privacy and at extreme fear of constant surveillance because of AI. The intrusion they are concerned about is not from rogue states but rogue software that runs within our trusted perimeter. This is not going to be solved at the lower levels of the compute stack. This needs a Layer 8 security solution whose enforcement takes place at all seven (or five) layers below.

I spent the last year trying to understand the appeal of blockchain as a data structure and now I am convinced that is how we should look at blockchain. It is a data structure like a class in Java or struct in C. We should use it when we want to store data with access permissions of the owner of the data. When that happens, we will be uploading our photos and storing our documents with a checkbox which says private and that would cause the platform's software to store the datum in a blockchain that is personal to the person who uploads. It is like a vault in the bank where not even the banker can access the contents without your private key.

This massive misallocation of capital to copy cat ideas only happened because of ridiculously low  cost of money. In a rising rate environment, hopefully we will see capital being allocated on issues to which society is waiting for resolution.

Happy Holidays

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