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Mono-culturesThe other side of my life, the one that doesn't involve "Taming Technology," involves the study of nature, particularly flying critters. Over the years, I've learned a great deal about ecology, habitat, evolution, etc., and there are some lessons from the REAL world that can be applied to our little virtual environment. All this talk about viruses and infections made me think about something that's been bouncing around in my tiny little brain for a while. And it's a lesson that we ought to learn from nature. The concept is the danger created by "mono-cultures." When you have a large number of any single organism, be it plant or animal, in one small location or habitat, you subject it to very high risk. You make it easier for disease to spread through the community, and you've put all your eggs in "one basket," so to speak. If there's a failure in one part of your habitat, the failure easily and quickly spreads to the entire system. Let's look at two examples. The American Elm has largely died off in this country because of a little problem called Dutch Elm Disease. It spread so rapidly because many cities had street after street planted with lots of beautiful elm trees. Maybe the occasional oak or maple was thrown in, but it was largely elms. And when this sickness struck, it took out every elm in its path. Today, few cities have many American Elms. And the ones that do, have an active effort underway to keep their remaining treasures healthy. Because we've provided a concentration of one particular plant, a mono-culture, we've made it easier for the Dutch Elm disease to cut a wide swath, easily moving from tree to tree, and when there is damage, we see it on a wholesale level. Now, let's move on to flying critters. The Whooping Crane is one of two cranes we see in North America. The other is the more populous Sandhill Crane. While there are thousands and thousands of "sandies," there are fewer than 200 Whooping Cranes. They breed in northwest Canada and migrate to a tiny little preserve near Corpus Christi, Texas. These extremely endangered birds, ALL of them, spend the winter within a stone's throw of a highly industrialized part of the Gulf coast, with oil pipelines, tankers and barges constantly in the vicinity. One of the fears in the ornithological community is that one relatively minor environmental disaster could wipe out the world's population of these rare birds. In fact, there are efforts underway to establish populations in Florida, just to avoid this catastrophe. In this situation, we have a high concentration of Whooping Cranes, and they are all concentrated in one habitat. Disease or a run-aground barge could wipe them all out. This is another frightening example of having your eggs all in one basket. Let's expand this to a more familiar part of our reality. If 80% of us had the same brand of lock on our door, or owned the same burglar alarm, does it not seem reasonable that break-ins would be a really big problem? The evil-doers of the world would only have to get the hang of one security system, maybe even have only one or two well-used burglar tools, and they would be able to open any house they wanted. Happily, we do have LOTS of diversity in the home security market. I think we can agree this is a good thing. So what's this got to do with technology? Can anyone see the parallels to our virtual world? Not meaning to besmirch any particular software company, but we have a world where an enormous percentage of users have the same operating system, use the same email package, and write letters with the same word processor. We have found ourselves in this position because of the need for "standards." But we also have exposed ourselves to danger from the mopes of the world who have nothing better to do than write viruses, and practice their breaking and entering skills. I DON'T use Microsoft products when I have a legitimate choice. While this attitude goes back to my days at Novell, it also is a function of having used WordPerfect since 1985. I also enjoy being an iconoclast. I avoid Internet Explorer, use Netscape for my browser and Netscape for my email. So I am able to sail through life relatively unscathed by all the worries about the latest viruses and Trojan horses that infect Microsoft's browser, email and word processing products. Obviously, by using Windows, I still have risks, but not as many as the rest of you. I recently described software that extracts passwords from certain programs. At the time, WordPerfect wasn't listed as one of the products that was "breakable." Microsoft's were. I'm sure it's not a function of the quality of the respective products. But since "everyone" uses Microsoft products, that's what hackers and programmers are going to focus on. Who wants to even TRY to write a WordPerfect macro virus? The issue isn't Microsoft vs. WordPerfect. The issue is diversity. Variety is important in our cyber-habitat because it reduces the damage that infections can do. It spreads the potential damage around, and forces the mopes to write multiple variations on their viruses to achieve maximum damage. It makes them work harder. And I'm guessing that they really don't want to work that hard. So hopefully the mopes will give up, start ecommerce companies and become billionaires. Diversity is a good thing for the environment. By avoiding mono-cultures and concentrations of organisms, nature naturally limits the spread of any diseases and disasters. We've managed to create situations where Elms were over-planted in our cities, and Whooping Cranes had no place left to go but some tiny little coastal marsh in Texas. With the help of "industry standards," we've also managed to create mono-cultures and dangerous concentrations of technology in the digital world. Maybe it's time we realized that diversity in our computing environment is a good thing too. So the next time someone tells you to buy something because it follows industry standards, or because everyone else is using it, ask them about Dutch Elm Disease.
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