baked: OK - but from a CIO's perspective, any security risk is too much both from the bad guys getting in and creating mischief, and proprietary data getting out (in my business, more the latter). Until innovations stabilize, I would think that every CIO will choose isolation. Unfortunately, once there it's hard to get them back out. How do you get the CIOs to either wait or to adopt temporary solutions?

Jonathan_Zittrain: Absolutely. Part of the problem is that everyone is being rational here! For CIOs I can understand the desire to bolt everything down. But I guess I'd say that bolting down too much can be like stripping a screw... employees will end up creating their own shadow IT if the official systems are too locked down. I'd ask CIOs to be willing to participate in some of the "digital nervous system" apps that we're developing (we're = Oxford/Harvard) to allow PCs to anonymously broadcast their basic vital signs (not the company documents), especially because then mainstream Internet users could ask the system things like, "How many expert/corporate machines have this software installed, vs. the AOL-types?" (apologies to AOL types)

dreamworld: You write glowingly of the open, collaborative process used to create Wikipedia. How can a process like that can be used to solve today's worst cybersecurity problems, which are criminal in nature?

Jonathan_Zittrain: I'm eager to see us develop the kinds of technical tools that Wikipedia has -- think quick revert -- so that harmful stuff isn't a catastrophe. And tools that let people collaborate to give early warning of bad or unfamiliar code. Right now surfing the Web is designed to be an autistic experience.

Moderator-Julie: Pre-submitted question: Do you use an iPhone, Blackberry or other PDA? How do you square that with your views of how tethered Internet appliances are hampering innovation on the Internet? 

Jonathan_Zittrain: I actually don't use any of those devices -- I find that email is fun when it comes in, but a burden once it's stale, which is in about five seconds. So I like to deal with email from a PC, when I'm devoted to truly processing it. But I'm not too doctrinaire about it -- I don't think the iPhone is evil, just that (1) it and platforms like it may well crowd out the PC and (2) if that happens, we'll lose much of the ability to innovate that we've enjoyed for the past thirty years. And we'll gain new vectors of government/regulatory surveillance and control. Facebook can be told to kill Scrabulous in a way that Bill Gates was never told to kill Grokster or Bittorrent.