{"id":637,"date":"2018-09-19T08:59:08","date_gmt":"2018-09-19T12:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/?p=637"},"modified":"2018-09-18T17:05:38","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T21:05:38","slug":"mobile-agents-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/2018\/09\/mobile-agents-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobile Agents, man!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over twenty years ago, we said it was a bad idea. Then the tables were turned, in the name of making the Internet commercially viable, and we\u2019ve been living with the consequences ever since. The current \u201cinformation economy\u201d (aka, software and services spying on users) is \u201cmobile agents\u201d in reverse.<\/p>\n

A quarter of a century ago, when the Internet was just blooming in the world, and technology innovation was everywhere, there was discussion of software agents. These were typically outlined as bits of code that would \u201cact on your behalf\u201d, by transporting themselves to servers or other computing devices to do some computation, and then bring the results back to your device. Even then, there was enough security awareness to perceive that remote systems were not going to be interested in hosting these foreign code objects, no matter how \u201csandboxed\u201d. They would consume resources, and could potentially access sensitive data or take down the remote system, inadvertently or otherwise.<\/p>\n

I know, right? The idea of shipping code snippets around to other machines sounds completely daft, even as I type it! For those reasons, among others, systems like General Magic\u2019s \u201cMagic Cap\u201d<\/a> never got off the ground.<\/p>\n

And here is the irony: in the end, we wound up inviting agents (literally) into our homes. Plugins like ghostery<\/a> will show you how many suspicious bits of code are executing on your computer when you load different webpages in your browser. Those bits of code are among the chief actors in the great exposition of private data in today\u2019s web usage. You\u2019re looking at cute cat pictures, while that code is busily shipping your browser history off to some random server in another country. Programs like Firefox do attempt to sandbox some of the worst offenders (e.g., Facebook), but the problems are exactly the same as with the old \u201cagent avatar\u201d idea: the code is consuming resources on your machine, possibly accessing data it shouldn\u2019t be, and generally undermining your system in ways that have nothing to do with your interests.<\/p>\n

With the growing sense of unease over this sort of invasive behaviour, the trend is already being slowed. Here are two of the current countervailing trends:<\/p>\n