[codezero]

I was going to say the opposite. It's awesome that we can spin up boxes and host our own servers, and on top of that, learn from our mistakes. I doubt there's a person here who's never been host to malware, spam or some other malady as a result of some of the experimentation they've done as they learned more about computer systems.

[bognition]

This is exactly my point. One of the major reasons that malware and malicious actors have been able to do as much as they have is because of the large number of misconfigured devices on the internet.

The internet has evolved beyond a network cobbled together by a bunch of academics and engineers -- its a critical piece of infrastructure.

[rlpb]

The Internet is kept running by a bunch of people who experimented in this way. If they didn't do it any more, in a couple of generations we wouldn't have any competent Internet engineers any more.

[codezero]

Thanks, this puts what I was trying to say in a much more concise and clear context :)

[codezero]

Seems like the problem is vulnerable by default options in software, not experimenting with it. More people have hosted malware by just running Windows than anyone has by experimenting with Apache, then fixing it and learning something useful that can now help other newbies.