With the birth of the microprocessor society embarked on a shared journey into global cyberspace. The excitement remains intense, as are all journeys into the unknown. But this trip into the future is different. When the Titanic sailed on her maiden voyage the disaster was limited to about 2,000 passengers and crew. The journey into cyber society threatens the world. Like any maiden voyage, the adventure is founded on blind trust. The Titanic was considered unsinkable but it proved wrong when an iceberg damaged the hull below the waterline flooded the engine room. All hope of salvation sank with 1,500 passengers and crew.
Such is the fallacy of hope based on blind trust. Flawed assumption endanger life in any new adventure. The pioneer takes short cuts with new technology. The engine room of cyberspace confronts this same problem faced by the Titanic. Three decades after the Titanic sank, as WWII closed, von Neumann pioneered his pioneering architecture for digital computers. He designed the single hull of a Turing machine. His design was adequate when computers began in locked rooms but when stretched into the General-Purpose Computer, the engine room is exposed to another kind of flood. Turing’s α-machine is only perfect for a single mathematical function. It was and remains a single tape design. However, von Neumann decided to share the physical computer between many different programs loaded into the same physical memory. As time passed, a privileged operating system and a superuser were added and the shared memory became a monolithic hull for many functions compiled into one. By sharing the computer hardware and any accessible equipment including devive drivers and network communications the General Purpose Computer became a magnet for cybercriminals.
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