I've been aware of ecology as long as I remember, because my aunt was a professor of plant ecology, and I read Dune when it first ran as a serial in Analog in 1963. Viewing the Internet as an ecology seemed natural to me. In 2001, I noted Monoculture Considered Harmful, and I co-signed Dan Geer's Sept. 2003 paper that made the M-word palatable in polite conversation: CyberInsecurity The Cost of Monopoly. Lately, I've been on about net neutrality, which is about preventing a different monopoly and monoculture (more on that later).
So imagine my surprise when Dan tells me that we were all scooped on the monoculture story.
Scooped by none other than Jamais Cascio, co-founder of Worldchanging:
In biology, a local environment where only a single organism propagates is called a "monoculture." Usually found in agri-business, particularly forestry, monocultures are very efficient and profitable. An entire stand of trees in a "managed forest" will be of consistent size, wood type, even color, minimizing the waste and maximizing the profit from that acreage. Sometimes the plants are cloned from a standard model. Trees that aren't the right "crop" for the area are eliminated, as they take up space and sap resources that would otherwise go to the desired species.Natural monocultures are less common, but are not unknown. Extremely aggressive species, introduced into a region where their natural predators are unknown, can quickly overwhelm the ecological niches, driving the native competitors to the margins, or to extinction.
The problem with monocultures is that they are extremely sensitive to attack. Monoculture stands are identical plants with identical defenses. Unlike a diverse stand of trees, a disease or infestation can rip right through a monoculture, leaving the entire forest worthless and dying. In a heterogenous stand, diseases and infestations can be stopped when they don't have an immediate host to jump to; in a monoculture, every adjacent tree is a new host, waiting and vulnerable.
The same can be said for computing environments.
Melissa took advantage of the fact that an increasing number of computers run the same set of Microsoft programs. From the virus' perspective, all of these computers had the same "biology" -- they were the same species. As long as the virus got passed from compatible host to compatible host, it could continue to propagate and thrive. The only way it would stop would be if it found itself on a host that wasn't compatible, that didn't have the right set of Microsoft programs. A Mac, for example, or a network using Lotus Notes, or a user with Word 5 instead of Word 97.
Heterogenous environments can be safer from infectious attacks because they don't provide a wealth of identical hosts through which a virus can replicate and spread. In a diverse ecology, each of the different species will have a different set of defenses and different kinds of vulnerabilities. This is not a new revelation; for years, it was standard procedure in the aeronautics industry to have redundant pieces of flight software, in many cases written by entirely different teams, so that they wouldn't fail in the same way.
The Ecology of Computer Viruses, By Jamais Cascio, salon.com, April 7, 1999
Some of his points back then may no longer be true. For example, he says it's more cost-effective to standardize on a single software platform. Not anymore; the risk of infection outweighs the cost of supporting multiple operating systems. And it's not clear that a monoculture Unix or Mac environment would be as insecure as the current monoculture Windows environment, because Internet Explorer (IE) has some basic design flaws that aren't inherent in those other environments. Nonetheless, the main point remains that diversity is security, and multiple OSes would be much more secure than any one OS.
What does this all have to do with worldchanging, other than Jamais being involved in it? The Internet is a worldchanging medium, and given the increasing homogeneity of other media, especially in the U.S., we'd best keep the Internet as open as we can.
-jsq
