Stories, News, Books, and Videos on Science, Technology, Computers, Environment and the Realites of Life, for the general, smart public
Archive for August, 2010
Book Review – Inside Cyber Warfare written by Jeffrey Carr – Mapping the Cyber Underworld
Aug 26th
Internet connections have long ago ceased to represent only the blood vessels of our modern society. The complexity of what a few decades ago was a DARPA military research program has become akin to that of a global brain in which its neurons, the computers, are much more numerous than those found in the cerebral cortex of a cat.
Every aspect of our social, financial, and personal life is dependent on the hundreds of millions of Internet connections that cobble together all of our talents, ideas, visions and bake these into all the technological wonders and “freedom of expression” liberties which we now gladly, but blithely, enjoy these days. If these connections cease to exist so would your modern life. For that matter even mild and average disruptions of the wired system belonging to this boundless and dense Internet environment can be easily translated into millions of dollars of loses and even human casualties.
“Opportunity only knocks once” could have been easily quoted by anyone before the advent the Internet and modern networking. But now, having the possibility to connect with anyone from anywhere, anytime we choose to do so, opportunity has stopped to be a gift of life with which only the lucky ones will meet. With all this honey an undesirable effect will emerge; because an unseen law of nature makes every convenience come with its price, we will hardly enjoy the fruits ripen by the Internet’s human-ideas-cohesion knack without party-poppers, whose intentions hardly coincide with those of the group comprised of us more civilized individuals, that will try to exploit every vulnerability of this global informational network. Every aspect of your life, your ideas, your social connections, your family, your “secrets”, even your daily schedule become less personal once you plug all of these into the globally wired Internet. Cyberwarfare has begun!
Inside Cyber Warfare – Check Reviews on Amazon.com
Inside Cyber Warfare – Check Reviews on Amazon.co.uk
If you think Cyberwarfare is only about petty Internet crimes like credit card forgery and fraud, Website defacements done by immature individuals in desperate need to prove something, and malware coded with the intent of causing normal people like you and me to mentally brake down and throw our Windows based PCs through the window, then you are badly mistaken. The evidence brought about by this book and the fact that it’s target audience are Information Warfare policy makers will convince you that Cyberwarfare can be as serious as the armed warfare between countries and even terrorism.
The 2010 Stuxnet worm first discovered in June by a security firm based in Belarus (VirusBlokAda) specifically infected Iranian computers using Windows OS as their operating system platform in order to pave their way towards the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems used in Iran; the virus was supposedly coded by professionals to target Iranian nuclear power plants, industry sectors, and important infrastructure networks that used SIEMENS control systems as their automation technology; this is the first computer virus specially designed by a team of computer programming professionals, industry specialists, and specialized hackers; the time, the money, and the complexity of the malware gives us pretty good evidence on the possible implication of US intelligence agencies in aiding these kind of groups both financially, logistically, and even in creating themselves these special divisions of informational warriors.
Informational Warfare of all types, complexity, and level of damage inflicted on enemies has been going on for a long time. Non-state hackers driven by political and religious beliefs, state sponsored youth group organizations, cyber mafias thieving unwary online navigators of tens of millions of dollars, major corporations, companies and internet providers led by the urges of high profit, they all are part of this cyber war, and in one way or another, willingly or not, they pave the way and help build the “informational infrastructure” that will make computer viruses and specialized malware the future bullets that are going to be used by nations in order to wage war one upon another.
Jeffrey Carr’s Inside Cyber Warfare provides ample evidence for the information war stories that wandered in the mainstream media and alternative media at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. The story about People’s Republic of China (PRC) hackers’ war waging upon U.S. government websites , the cyberwar between Israeli and Palestinian hackers due to the Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Palestine, the Russian cyberwar between Chechnya, Georgia, and Estonia, where clear evidence for state sponsored hacking divisions is provided by the author, the 2009 Iranian presidential elections, and much more are analyzed in this very readable text which paints with unchallengeable arguments the not so rosy picture of Internet Dynamics.
Even Hacking techniques are given a non-shallow attempt at explaining in order to make their picture clearer. The book provides examples of attacks done by hackers using DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) techniques, SQL Injection (SQLi), Buffer Overflow vulnerabilities, Backdoor malware, social engineering techniques applied using social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, and the list can go on. Even though all these methods are also used by cyber criminals for extorsion, industrial sabotage, theft, revenge, economical espionage, they can also be ferocious, anonymous (sometimes untraceable) tools that can be easily used by terrorists, political activists and special state departments in order to wage war on enemy countries.
More to this, a lot of the text in this book engages in an interesting debate and argumentation onto the possible policy measures which state departments, intelligence agencies, and international organizations have adopted and will need to adopt in order to fight cyber crimes, cyber terrorism, and ultimately cyber warfare. Overall, the book deserves a score of 8 out of 10. Highly recommended for programmers, IT specialists, and government and intelligence agency policy makers, even though it can be easily enjoyed by anyone interested in the subject.
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Book Review – Guns, Germs, and Steel written by Jared Diamond – The major reasons for today’s distribution of power and wealth around the world
Aug 11th
What would a roundabout superficial brainstorming session yield as answer to the question of why is the global arrangement of wealth and power distributed in the way we see it now-days? Why did the European colonialists manage to dominate and decimate the Maya, Inca, and Aztec empires or the nomadic hunter gatherer tribes of the Americas, Africa, and Australia, but not the other way around?
Can the shallow assumptions about the genetic inferiority, concerning either intellectual or brute physical fitness, that the conquered societies purportedly were the phenotypic manifestations of, be the correct explanations for the observed happenings? Could the Conquistadors’ genes have made them more easily adaptable to whatever environmental pressures nature contrived in their path towards conquering the major societies of the Americas?
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel will offer an au courant, astute explanation about the systemic distribution of wealth all around the world, and will flat-out deny one of the premises that started this article, the one concerning the supposedly intellectual inferiority of the hunter gatherer tribes. The genes responsible for the mental abilities of the less wealthy, less powerful, less literate, less industrialized societies that roamed all continents, and that still roam certain places on this planet are certainly, Jared argues, not to be considered as having any significant importance into the developments of the last 10000 years. Hunter gatherer tribes are not more primitive, but are the result of the environmental hold backs, be it the scarce resources, geography, or the improper climate that bedeviled these tribes in one form or another during the lapse of time.
So if this purported difference in intelligence between Eurasians and their conquered societies is not a reason worth taking into account if we want to answer the above questions, what are the real causes for the observed differences in wealth and power? Why wasn’t Africa, with its more than 5 million years of human evolutionary history, the launch pad of colonizations, technology, and industrialization? What are the ins and outs of the causes that made it almost sure that Eurasia will satisfy the adequate conditions in which industrialized societies based on literacy, steel, and technology could easily evolve and conquer the rest of the world?
The answers to the above questions are rather counter-intuitive, and some are certainly cynical. First of all to put an end to all theories that struggle with human genetics as a cause for the observed facts let me state this: There would be little time for much significant differential evolution of intelligence in the different tribes that roamed the various continents of our planet; the few hundreds of ancestors of all living humans today took an exit out of Africa some 100.000 yrs ago, too early for significant genetic mutations to have happened. More to that, look at industrialized societies today! Besides the assault of useful information of course, today’s children grow with a shallow view of life, being bombarded all day long with stupid useless hogwash memes generated by their TV programs or their Facebook account.
Contrary to them, the children of the remaining hunter gatherer tribes that live in our times (Papua New Guinea) stretch out their mental muscles early in their lives, having to cope with wild life, scarce resources, spatial memory and navigation, territory memorizing, and other types of issues that take their survival skills to the edge. So, maybe society and culture, not genetics, should be considered a significant factor in the overall intelligence of today’s humans. Therefore, you can hardly say people of hunter gatherer tribes are intellectually inferior to us. So for the sake of argument, Jared argues, let’s consider them equal.
In 11000 B.C. all things were dull, similar, and un-experimented. All tribes looked almost the same, and behaved almost the same as if nothing significant had happened since the time our ancestors escaped Africa 100.000 yrs ago. But a strange force accelerated the evolution of the tribes from the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization from Western Asia, which included the once fertile regions of Mesopotamia and the Levant, delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south and the Anatolian highlands to the north. In this region plant and animal domestication began to appear.
