The Net's gettin' messy
Among the open-source community there's a commonly used acronym, "POGE." It stands for the "principle of good enough," and it's meant to emphasize the open-source tenet that you don't begin a project by over-engineering the end result.
Instead, you do what is "good enough" and then let things improve over time.
The Net started this way. In the beginning, it was "good enough." Good enough for some forms of communication. Good enough for posting documents that linked to other documents. Good enough for putting dirty pictures online. But lately, the Net is no longer good enough: identity fraud, viruses, worms, phishing, snarfing, child porn--oh, and endless piles of spam. All of these problems exist because the Net's core infrastructure--its architectural essence is no longer "good enough."
The bottom line is this: the sundry schemes, scams, and shams that now dominate the Net are quickly dragging us toward a future where the Net as we know it is basically unusable. Put plainly: the Net's getting messy.
