---

Bad Neighbourhood

In 1970-1971 I used to live in a really bad neighbourhood. In the space of two years I was held up three times, twice by the same guy. (One's sense of etiquette fails in such circumstances--what do you say: "New gun?") Once I found a discarded sofa cushion outside my apartment building and, being perennially short on seating for guests, rescued it from the trash man. After bringing it inside and whacking it to liberate some of the dust prior to vacuuming, I heard a little "ker-tink" sound on the floor. Three times. These turned out to be caused by .22 calibre bullets whose entry holes were visible upon closer examination of the pillow. I know not whether this ballast was added while it was sitting on the sidewalk or in the apartment of the neighbour who threw it away. The sound of gunfire wasn't all that rare on Saturday nights there, then.

Getting Out of Dodge

Looking back on that time, I don't recall any sense of chronic fear or paranoia, but there's a low level edginess which slowly grinds you down. Now, I could have gotten a large, intimidating dog, put bars on the apartment window and motion detectors inside with triple deadlocks on the door, a concealed carry permit and suitable heat to pack, Kevlar vest for going out after dark, etc., etc. Instead, immediately I received a raise which permitted it, I decided to get out of Dodge, as it were, trading 50% higher rent for a sense of security which freed me to worry about career-related matters instead of whether my career was about to be abruptly truncated due to collision with rapidly moving metallic projectiles.

The Internet Slum

I've come to view today's Internet as much like the bad neighbourhood I used to inhabit. It wasn't always that way--in fact, as recently as a few years ago, the Internet seemed like a frontier town--a little rough on the edges, with its share of black hats, but also with the sense of open-ended possibility that attracted pioneers of all sorts, exploring and expanding the cutting edge in all directions: technological, economic, social, political, and artistic. But today's Internet isn't a frontier any more--it's a slum. (I use "Internet" here to refer to the culture of the Web, E-mail, newsgroups, and other services based upon the underlying packet transport network. I have nothing against packet switching networks in general nor the Internet infrastructure in particular.)

One Fine Day at Fourmilab

What's it like living today in the Internet slum? What comes down that pipe into your house from the outside world? Here's a snapshot, taken on March 31st, 2004, a completely typical day in all regards. The Web site racked up 682,516 hits in 56,412 visits from 44,776 distinct sites (IP addresses), delivering 14.8 gigabytes of content. That's, of course, not counting the traffic generated by the Distributed Denial of Service Attack underway since late January 2004. Whoever is responsible for this attack bombarded the site with a total of 1,473,602 HTTP request packets originating from 1951 hosts all around the world. These packets were blocked by the Gardol attack detector and packet blocker I spent much of February developing instead of doing productive work. Well, the attack this day was only half as intense as during the first wave in January. Entirely apart from this recent denial of service attack is the routine attack against Earth and Moon Viewer in which robots attempt to overload the server and/or outbound bandwidth by making repeated requests for large custom images. This attack has been underway for several years despite its impact having been entirely mitigated by countermeasures installed in October 2001; they still keep trying. This day a total of 3700 of these attacks originating from 342 distinct hosts were detected and blocked.

Moving from the Web to that other Internet mainstay, E-mail, let's take a peek at the traffic on good old port 25. This day I received 8 E-mail messages from friends and colleagues around the globe. Isn't E-mail great? But that's not all that arrived that day. . . . First of all, we have the 629 messages which were blocked as originating at IP addresses known to be open SMTP relays which permit mass junk mailers to forge the origin of their garbage. Open relays, whether due to misconfiguration or operated as a matter of principle by self-described civil libertarians, are the E-mail equivalent of leaving a live hand grenade in an elementary school playground. A peek at the sendmail log shows a total of 6,444 "dictionary spams" attempted that day. These are hosts which connect to your mail server and try names from huge lists of names culled from directories used by spammers in the hope of hitting a valid address which can be sent spam and then re-sold to other spammers. A total of 275 E-mail messages made it past these filters into the hands of sendmail for delivery, being addressed to a valid user name in my domain, usually the E-mail address which I take care not to publish on any of my Web pages. Of these, a total of 259 were correctly identified as spam by Annoyance Filter, the adaptive Bayesian junk mail filter I spent two months developing in 2002 instead of doing productive work. A total of 8 junk mail messages were "false negatives"--misclassified as legitimate mail by Annoyance Filter (in all likelihood because I hadn't recently re-trained the filter with a collection of contemporary spam) and made it to my mailbox. This day's collection of junk mail included a total of 74 attempts to corrupt my computer with destructive worm software, thereby to enlist it in further propagating the corruption. Since the machine on which I read mail uses none of the vulnerable Microsoft products these programs exploit, they pose no risk to me, but consider how many people with computers which are at risk without the filtering tools and the more than 35 years of computing experience I bring to the arena withstand this daily assault. This day there wasn't a single criminal fraud attempt to obtain my credit card number or other financial identity information; this was a light day; usually there's one or two. Absent the open relay block list and Annoyance Filter, I would be forced to sort through a total of 896 pieces of junk mail to read the 8 messages I wish to receive. Isn't E-mail great?

Ever since 1996, when a dysfunctional superannuated adolescent exploited a vulnerability in the ancient version of Solaris I then ran on my Web server to break into the server and corrupt my Web site, I've kept the local network here at Fourmilab behind a firewall configured with all the (abundant) paranoia I can summon. A firewall not only protects one against the barbarians, but monitoring its log lets you know which tommyknockers are knocking, knocking at your door and what keys they're trying in the lock. One doesn't bother logging the boring, repetitive stuff, but it's wise to keep an eye peeled for new, innovative attacks. On this day, the firewall log recorded a total of 1915 packets dropped--the vast majority attempts to exploit well-known vulnerabilities in Microsoft products by automated "attack robots" operated by people who have nothing better to do with their lives. That's about one every 45 seconds.

The Tunnel in the Basement

Imagine if there were a tunnel which ran into your basement from the outside world, ending in a sturdy door with four or five high-security locks which anybody could approach completely anonymously. A mail slot in the door allows you to receive messages and news delivered through the tunnel, but isn't big enough to allow intruders to enter. Now imagine that every time you go down into your basement, you found several hundred letters piled up in a snowdrift extending from the mail slot, and that to find the rare messages from your friends and family you had to sort through reams of pornography of the most disgusting kind, solicitations for criminal schemes, "human engineered" attempts to steal your identity and financial information, and the occasional rat, scorpion, or snake slipped through the slot to attack you if you're insufficiently wary. You don't allow your kids into the basement any more for fear of what they may see coming through the slot, and you're worried by the stories of people like yourself who've had their basements filled with sewage or concrete spewed through the mail slot by malicious "pranksters".

Further, whenever you're in the basement you not only hear the incessant sound of unwanted letters and worse dropping through the mail slot, but every minute or so you hear somebody trying a key or pick in one of your locks. As a savvy basement tunnel owner, you make a point of regularly reading tunnel security news to learn of "exploits" which compromise the locks you're using so you can update your locks before miscreants can break in through the tunnel. You may consider it wise to install motion detectors in your basement so you're notified if an intruder does manage to defeat your locks and gain entry.

As the risks of basement tunnels make the news more and more often, industry and government begin to draw up plans to "do something" about them. A new "trusted door" scheme is proposed, which will replace the existing locks and mail slot with "inherently secure" versions which you're not allowed to open up and examine, whose master keys are guarded by commercial manufacturers and government agencies entirely deserving of your trust.

You may choose to be patient, put up with the inconveniences and risks of your basement tunnel until you can install that trusted door. Or, you may simply decide that what comes through the tunnel isn't remotely worth the aggravation it creates and dynamite the whole thing, reclaiming your basement for yourself.

Day Zero

As of 00:00 UTC on December 1st, 2004 (Day Zero), I shall leave the Internet. The www.fourmilab.ch site, which I have maintained for the last decade (the first public visit was on November 28th, 1994) will close on that date. From the debut of the site through February 10th, 2004 the site received more than 825 million hits from users around the world. The final hit count will be posted on this page once the site is taken down.

Questions and Answers

The following questions and answers may clarify what I'm doing on December 1st, 2004 and why.

What do you mean, precisely, by "leaving the Internet"?

As of December 1st, 2004, the www.fourmilab.ch site (and all its aliases, such as www.fourmilab.to, www.fourmilab.org, etc.) will be closed. Accesses to the site will be referred to a version of this document, updated to reflect the closure. There have been no Fourmilab mirror sites since the North American mirror was closed in 2002; hence, other than authorised mirrored and cached copies, the documents and interactive Web resources at the site will cease to be available after its closure. The Fourmilab FTP server, which simply provides an alternative protocol to access the same files, will also close.

Simultaneously, the inbound E-mail server at fourmilab.ch will be taken down. All E-mail to the fourmilab.ch domain will bounce back to the sender and be silently discarded to /dev/null by the mail server here. I will also close the Web mail account I have been using to send and receive mail while traveling.

I will continue to use Internet resources for research, news, information, electronic commerce, and financial transactions; I am simply ceasing to publish my work on the Internet or use it to receive mail and other kinds of communications.

You're getting rid of your E-mail address! How can I contact you?

Write me a letter or send a FAX. I'm in the book.

But won't list your favourite technical initiative fix all these problems?

Alas, I have come to the conclusion that the cure will be worse than the disease, so much so that I wrote a 25,000 word document sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers. I am neither interested in observing this transformation nor participating in what the Internet will become.

Doesn't this mean "the terrorists win"?

That may be. I do not rely on bumper-sticker slogans to guide important decisions in my life. Sometimes the terrorists do win. Violence often settles things. Sometimes you move out of a bad neighbourhood because you have better things to do than put up with what goes on there. Perhaps if enough like-minded people move out, we'll create our own suburb where we feel comfortable without bars on our windows and locks on our doors. Sometimes I have fantasies about this--when I'm feeling down I call it "Internet Gated Communities", when in an optimistic mood, "The Faculty Club".

Do you see your abandoning the Internet as becoming a trend?

As always, I'm not an early adopter but simply among the first wave to pile on. Donald Knuth, who's always at least a decade ahead of everybody else, abandoned E-mail on January 1st, 1990, saying "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things." Harry Schultz, one of the wisest observers of the financial and geopolitical scene, advised abandoning E-mail in favour of FAX more than a year ago. While few people have explicitly announced their retirement from the Internet, I suspect that more and more parents are loath to provide Internet access to their children, knowing that their mailboxes will be filled every day with hundreds of disgusting messages. People of all sorts simply walk away from the Internet after suffering the repellent pop-ups and attacks by spyware installed on their computers. You won't see this as a downturn in people on the Internet, at least right away, but keep your eye on the second derivative.

How will I report bugs in / get support for / find updates to software now published on your Web site?

You won't. All software published on the Fourmilab Web site will be considered discontinued and frozen at its last release as of Day Zero. No bugs will be fixed, nor support provided, nor updates issued subsequently. Of course, since these are all open source software, a multitude of talented, dedicated developers will spring into action to support and extend these packages. And if you believe that, please contact my office in Nigeria which has an excellent selection of bridges in prime locations around the world available for immediate purchase with only a modest finder's fee. (Whenever somebody starts prattling about the "enormous open source developer community", ask yourself how many individuals there are who have written a thousand or more lines of free software regularly used by a thousand or more people.)

Does this mean you're abandoning the open source software movement?

I do not and never have participated in "movements". With few exceptions, participants in this "movement" are socialist morons so ignorant they sincerely believe themselves to be anarchist entrepreneurs. One need only read a random discussion on Slashdot to discover that this "community" is made up of self-described individualists and iconoclasts who are rescued from thinking all precisely alike only by their inability to think at all. They consider innovation to be making copies of commercial software long after the prototypes have attained overwhelming market share. In any case, I do not enjoy associating with people who hate the way these folks do.

Aren't you going to miss observing and participating in the emergence of the first global wired community?

Yeah, and if you want to get an idea what that's going to look like, here's a little experiment you can try. Turn off your spam filter and read all the spam you get in a day, including visiting the Web sites they direct you to. Now imagine that, multiplied by a factor of about a hundred. Welcome to the electronic global slum! I am one of those despicable people who believe that IQ not only exists but matters. From the origin of the Internet through the mid 1990s, I'd estimate the mean IQ of Internet users as about 115. Today it's probably somewhere around 100, the mean in Europe and North America. The difference you see in the Internet of today from that of ten years ago is what one standard deviation (15 points) drop in IQ looks like. But the mean IQ of the world is a tad less than 90 today, and it's expected to fall to about 86 by 2050. So, when the digital divide is conquered and all ten billion naked apes are wired up, you're looking at about another standard deviation's drop in the IQ of the Internet. Imagine what that will be like. I'd rather not, thank you.

What about the other Web sites you're hosting?

These sites will continue to operate as before, and will remain on-line until at least December 31st, 2005 (barring disasters which would have taken them down even in the absence of this announcement). After Day Zero, however, I will not pay much attention to these sites, nor actively defend them against external attacks, nor necessarily back them up as assiduously as before. As with any hosting arrangement, those responsible for these sites should keep their own independent backups capable of restoring the site from scratch either here or on a different hosting service.

You also host two Global Consciousness Project "eggs". What happens to them?

The two GCP "egg" sites will be taken down on Day Zero and the hardware random event generators they monitor disconnected and returned to the Global Consciousness Project for use at another site.

By removing the content on your site from the Web, aren't you contributing to the impoverishment of the Web?

When repeated stick-ups cause a convenience store owner in a bad neighbourhood to pack it in, that harms the majority of law-abiding customers more than the crooks. But nothing obligates one to put up with chronic abuse. I'm sure the Web will survive without my scribblings.

If you can't take the heat on the Internet why not just move to a commercial hosting service?

It isn't a question of not being able to take the heat. While I regret the time I've wasted over the years defending my site against attacks by nihilist, immature individuals and criminals of various persuasions, I've never for a moment doubted my ability to do so. But I've tired of living in a slum, especially one which seems to be deteriorating at an accelerating pace. I am leaving the Internet because I do not wish to participate in a culture that coarsens and brutalises those who inhabit it. This is a moral issue, to which paying somebody to host a Web site is completely irrelevant. Think of it as an author who doesn't wish his books to be sold in pornographic book stores.

My application depends upon your HotBits random data generator. Whatever shall I do?

You'd better get started building your own random data generator or find another source on the Internet of such data. Using a free service creates no obligation to you by the provider of that service. This is why adults who require reliable service contract and pay for it.

Are you giving up the fourmilab.* domains? Can I take them over?

To avoid having the good will I've built up in the Fourmilab name be exploited by bottom-feeders (mass mailers, pornographers, drug peddlers, etc.), I will retain the name registrations for the foreseeable future, or at least until everybody forgets the original site ever existed. I'd say give it a year or two. All Web requests to these domains will be directed to a revised version of this page.

Can I set up my own mirror of your Fourmilab site?

No. The contents and structure of this site are Compilation © Copyright 1994-2004 by John Walker, All Rights Reserved, and may not be reproduced in any manner. Some individual components of the site (programs, documents, scripts, etc.) are in the public domain or available under various free software licenses and may be redistributed pursuant to them, but the site as a whole (or part which resembles the structure of the entire site) may not. The name Fourmilab and the Fourmilab logo with the ant are trademarks of John Walker and may not be used in any manner by any other person.

Will you make the content of your site available on CD-ROM or other media?

No. Doing so would invite its unauthorised publication on the Internet. I may publish some of my books and documents in paper editions.

Will the anarchist merchandise you peddle on CaféPress remain available?

Nope. The Evil Empires and No EU! shops will close on Day Zero. Get 'em while you can!

Are you really going to quit SETI@home before getting to 15,000 work units?

Wherever the count stands when Day Zero rolls around is where it ends, whether ET's phoned home by then or not.

How will you occupy your time after leaving the Internet?

Dunno. Perhaps I will concentrate on the cultivation and perfection of vegetable marrows.

I'm a journalist. I'd like to interview you.

Umberto Eco, explaining why he does not have an E-mail address, said, "I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages." I have reached an age where I am no longer interested in providing momentary titillation to consumers of mass media. Oh, and did you have a question?

Will you miss the book recommendations?

Yes--very much--thanks to all of you who've sent them over the years.

Are you abandoning computers? Are you becoming a Luddite?

No. I worked with computers for 27 years before I connected to the Internet and, with good health and luck, hope to continue to use computers at least as long after cutting the connection. Moving out of a bad neighbourhood doesn't mean you've given up on houses and plan to live in a cave.

So that's it, then?

Yep. Late in his career Robert Heinlein remarked to a bookseller that he was thinking about changing his name. When asked why, he responded, "Because I think I've insulted everbody I can as Robert Heinlein." This should about do it for me.