I’d like an operating system that lets me control cookies the way it lets me control certificates. What this means is that I want a little hacker window open on the side of my browser that shows me every cookie being requested by a site, every cookie being given to me by a site, and lets me write rules around what happens to those cookies. I’d like to be able to see at a glance what information I know about a site – IP addresses, geo-ip, cookies, who it advertises with, what other sites it is using to track my travels through the web, and what certificates it uses to secure it’s servers or expects me to present when using it’s services.
I’d also like that operating system to be a namespace manager. Initially, this means a local DNS cache that lets me have the ability to override the answers from Internet, write rules against the flow of requests and responses that my operating system and it’s applications generate, and override the DNS servers assigned to my computer by the local network or the VPN. Later this also means being able to do similar things for other namespace functions like rdf, html, and host identity.
I’d like my network to be relatively detached from my identity – this is easy in a mobile connectivity environment, more difficult in a fixed connectivity environment. This means always using something like Tor to send each site’s traffic from a different IP address, but it has to be smart enough to know when I have more than one socket open to the same destination so that the web app doesn’t break. (This wouldn’t be necessary if the Internet would stop building dumb applications and/or upgrade to smarter transport layer protocols, but that is a digression.)
So now I have all this stuff, what does it mean?
- It means that when I look up a site in DNS, I get authenticated results that it is the right response and hasn’t been altered.
- It means that when I connect to a site, I get more options than “accept” or “reject” for dealing with cookies.
- It means that when I connect to a site, my identity is based on a certificate, not a nexus of data vectors.
- It means that when I connect to a site that has advertising on it, I can control what information those advertisers get from my browser and whether or not their content is displayed on my screen.
- it means that when I go on the Internet, I’m not reduced to being a share cropper for some one else.