Are we romans?

For a long time, Europe lived under the rules of the Roman republic and later, the Roman empire.

Throughout this time, roads were built and civilization was brought to places where the people previously had habits not too distant from those on the ice age.

Roman civilization meant education, health and wealth to those who embraced roman culture as a way of exchanging goods and traveling in security to other provinces.

However, the West Roman empire where France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy exist today was progressively torn apart across the centuries by successive invasions of barbarians from the Northern parts of Europe until the roman empire in the west ceased to exist, marking the start of the medieval ages as we know them.


This remark in history is a true contrasense. If at one hand we had such an advanced culture in terms of technology, culture and organization - what went wrong to let the barbarians took over?

The explanation is plain brute force from the barbarians and faulty roman policies in terms of administration.

We see the roman history filled with heroes that shaped the republic and empire to success and falls across the ages, yet, even the barbarians admired the roman culture and attempted to replicate the same level of culture to no avail most times.


What can we learn as a lesson of history?

Civilized cultures are not prepared enough to survive against brute force threats from the outside or even weak management policies.

We see the same issues plaguing computer systems nowadays. Computer users attempt to secure their own machines from outside threats but are unable (or unwilling) to keep them tidy with effective security policies.

The barbarians are today's malware authors that use conquered computers as slaves to power monstrously sized botnets that serve as weapons to attack companies and organizations across the globe.

This is the reality today. We have barbarians and we have civilized citizens trying to work. But we still have little means to fight back the threats and propose truly efficient methods to fight them back, instead, we rely in defense and few actions are taken to go after the wrong doers.

Looking to where we are headed, will we let history repeat itself with the fall of a civilized Internet?

I think we should learn from the lessons of the past that we cannot close our eyes to the enemies at the border and expect that our own organization will be able of solving these menaces some day.

So, I would like to propose a roman-like concept of cooperative defense for the internet world.

Back in the old days we would see farmers picking up anything at their hand to defend their lands. This reality is not far from today where computer users install antivirus at their machines to keep them protected.

However, would it sound reasonable for you that a farmer is truly capable of defending himself against an aggressive tribe of barbarians that are professional hackers?

Something is truly wrong in this picture. Over the next months I will dedicate my effort to prove that we can indeed be romans. Prove that civilized people can fight back the attacks from barbarians and level the weights on each side of fence.

Let's begin.