Part two of three from Lessig, this second reading is the next chapter in his book Code. He expands on his ideas that he brought up in the last reading. Chapter four is entitled Architectures of Control. Lessig spends much of his time talking about identity in the future, this is the who does what where aspect of cyberspace. He talks about how at first people were like the invisible man, no one was able to keep track of what people where doing. It is now in a more regulated state in which people can be tracked by three familiar ideas – identity, authentication, and credential. Identity consists of attributes of a person. Authentication is the evaluation of your identity, while credential is the device for authenticating. Lessig says that identity and authentication in cyberspace is getting better due to TCP/IP addresses as well as ISPs and cookies.
This chapter was much longer and more technologically intensive. The writing and content dealt a lot more with the actual details of computers and cyberspace. The ability to have people know who is surfing what where on the Internet greatly benefits us. It allows for websites to be customize based on geographical features and allow for a webpage to have a more personal feel to each user.
Lessig also talks about how the unregulability was a product of design and that the failure of the network to identify who someone was, and what they were doing meant it would be difficult to enforce rules upon them. Now with the newer technology bridging these gaps many commercial interests have come about, such as online purchasing. Of course new problems arise such as viruses, ID theft, and spam, but this only shows the world that there is still a lot of unregulable behavior out there.
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