The ever-excellent Roderick Jones at Counterterrorism Blog (who also blogs at MetaSecurity) posits a future in which virtual assassination could be deployed as an effective a tool as that of the 19th century anarchists:
… a cyberspace assassination would seek to achieve the following aims: prevent the candidate from actually being in cyberspace ( the equivalent of virtual-murder), instill fear amongst their supporters that the same may happen to them and as a side-effect force the political campaigns to spend money on their cyber security or force the Secret Service to protect cyber-personas (the protection of cyber-identities is clearly something that all protective security agencies are going to need to consider). The tools to do this arguably already exist - hackers or botnets for hire could be diverted to these ends. This of course is fast-forwarding to a future more virtualized point where society is more reliant on cyber-spaces but similar tools could be applied today.
As with all things virtual, the scenario can be flipped. The use of precision cyber-attacks (or virtual assassinations) against America’s enemies should be considered today as a tactic to disrupt cyber-terrorists.
New report from the Advanced Research and Assessment Group of the UK Defence Academy by Adam Goodman, Informal Networks and Insurgency in Iraq [.pdf]. Key points from the report:
Informal networks are present at all levels in Iraq and they also exert their influence internationally.
Stopping the activities of various militias would not put an end to the activity of informal networks in the country. Informal political and religious networks are deeply embedded within the fabric of Iraqi society.
Despite the influence of sectarianism on Iraqi politics, various informal networks have employed sectarianism as a means of furthering their political and policy interests. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that even drastic solutions such as partitioning the country will bring the insurgency to an end. Cross-sectarian political alliances and intra-sectarian conflicts indicate that politics takes precedence over ideology.
The influence of informal political and religious networks has prevented the nascent Iraqi state from defining a concept of national interest in a way that is acceptable to even the groups participating in the political process. At the same time, cross-sectarian alliances aimed at preserving a unitary state have failed to agree on anything other than maintaining the unity of the state.
The Iraqi insurgency symbolizes the beginning of the era of post-international politics which is characterized by global wars for creating political spaces rather than wars for territory and the national interest. The era of post-international politics will be turbulent because informal networks often try to create their own spheres of authority which transcend national boundaries.
The role of computer networks would appear to be fairly straightforward: to ferry data from one point to another. But a novel wireless-network protocol developed for the U.S. military breaks with this tradition by sending not the data itself but rather a description of the data. In simulations, a network using the protocol was five times more efficient than a traditional network. Within the next year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will test the protocol in field trials at Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia.
The protocol is part of a project to create a new generation of mobile ad-hoc networks - self-configuring networks of mobile wireless nodes - that will enable faster and more reliable tactical communications between military personnel and vehicles, says Greg Lauer, section head for advanced network systems at BAE Systems in Burlington, MA, which helped develop the protocol for DARPA.
But the project also demonstrates the potential of a new and exciting field called network coding, says Muriel Médard, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who collaborated on the project with BAE Systems.
I’ve long been sceptical of the One Laptop Per Child program. Not because they don’t have laudable aims to provide connectivity to developing countries but because they’ve been concentrating on the wrong technology. This article by Paul Lamb at ComputerWorld sums up the real issues:
The folks at One Laptop Per Child deserve a lot of credit for raising awareness around the global digital divide. Their stylish green laptop, along with the accompanying goal of putting 21st-century technology in the hands of children in developing countries, has captured the imaginations of people, companies and governments worldwide.
But the nearly half-million orders received from developing countries thus far for the so-called $100 laptop suggests that this effort to supply the developing world with affordable PCs may be too late.
That’s because the developing world has been swept up in the mobile voice revolution, which has far outpaced the spread of desktop and laptop computers. Global mobile phone users number nearly 3 billion, and 1.3 billion of those users are able to access the Internet using their handheld devices. That compares with roughly 1.1 billion desktop users with Web access worldwide.
And it is estimated that by 2010, half the world’s population will have mobile Internet access, while the growth in desktop and laptop computers is expected to remain fairly flat.
Not that the current generation of cell phones can do everything a desktop or laptop can do, but with the emergence of the iPhone and efforts to create an open application environment for handsets, we are moving rapidly in that direction. Add in increasing mobile storage capacity, voice-activated search and the ability to project images and keyboards anywhere on the fly, and it will only be a matter of time before anything we want to do on a desktop can be done just as easily on a handheld device.
And in the developing world, where the mobile phone market is growing phenomenally, and where nearly a third of the population is illiterate, cheap laptops may not be the best answer.
A cheap phone with Web access and locally relevant applications may be a better driver for bringing the developing world online. Phones are much simpler to use, allow people to leverage voice as a preferred means of communication and are certainly easier and safer to carry. Mobile banking, which allows the majority of people who are too poor to have a traditional bank account, to safely move and store money via cell phones, has caught on like wildfire in Africa, the Philippines and many other developing nations. In India, one-third of cell phone owners access the Internet only through their handheld devices.
It would only seem good sense to build on the current mobile explosion in developing regions, leapfrogging the PC. By offering enhanced cell phone devices — equipped with simple-to-use productivity and education tools — we may be able to reach many more people much faster than current PC digital inclusion efforts allow.
So as much as One Laptop Per Child is a good idea, it may be time to rethink our approach to helping the remaining 80% of the world come online and adopt 21st-century technologies. One BlackBerry Per Child may sound like a ludicrous notion, but so did a global distribution of cheap laptops just a few short years ago.
I would add that the energy savings would be immense too, although that’s a presumption on my part. I can charge my phone with an inexpensive solar charger, which isn’t great, but that’ll change too. Compare that to an always-on PC. Go somewhere horrendously deforested like Malawi and factor in the additional ecological damage needed to fuel the next generation of laptops, however resource-light they are.
I’ve seen a lot of great projects - by NGOs, academics and individuals - utilising cellphones in ways we would probably not have imagined five years ago. Certainly, the microcredit angle really surprised me when I first encountered it in Kenya and Uganda in 2005 (two years previously when I was there, the software credit-transfer mechanisms were not readily available). And the cellphone companies are facilitating it too - it’s good business for them, and it’s good business for their (usually pay-as-you-go) customers. You don’t need a flashy model either - people are hacking the hell out of even the most beat-up models.
I’ve stopped taking my laptop out of the house. Now it sits in the living room as a second, more mobile PC. When I go out, I take my phone instead. I mean Mobile PC, because that’s what it really is. It’s rubbish as a phone, but great as a browsing, downloading, emailing tool (although, hurry up Firefox Mobile). At a pinch I can even take notes on it. I’m too much of an eejit to be able to do half the things it could but I guarantee you that people in Kampala, Kurdistan and Kashmir are squeezing every sweet, connective, inventive drop out of theirs.
And from the folks at e2save is this rocking little history of the mobile phone, with a glimpse into the future too:
Content aggregation is the new thing now. But the problem we should be solving isn’t the many to many flow of information. It is the one to a few, or few to a few that needs to be tackled. I doubt I’ll ever need to know about all the content that is out there. It is just a small part of it that I’m interested in. Content aggregation, no matter what form is used only leads to more content leading to noise, filtering and search. Social networks allowing us to connect to the entire world leave us with too many connections and too much information. It leads to more than we can handle. It leads to so much information, tagged and targeted, that the information itself becomes less valuable.
And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers.
Online tools under the rubric Web 2.0 are changing how information flows, with social networks letting people communicate directly with one another. This is reversing the top-down, one-way approach to communications that began with Gutenberg, challenging everything from how bosses try to manage to how consumers make or break products with instant mass feedback.
The institution that has most resisted new ways of doing things is the biggest one of all: government. This is about to change, with public-sector bureaucracies the new target for Web innovators…
So we need to stop thinking about classical liberalism within the conservative framework and start imagining and inventing a conceptual framework and ultimately a social-political-cultural movement to champion a 21st century individualist-classical liberal ruleset. If we don’t do this then the collectivists will and our children and grandchildren will find themselves living under their ruleset, again.
Marisa at Making Sense of Jihad joins the dots between knowledge management and CT/COIN, via this article by Dave Snowden:
Over the last decade as I have worked on homeland security, we have had the chance to run some experiments that show that raw field intelligence has more utility over longer periods of time than intelligence reports written at a specific time and place. In other experiments, we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking…
The big problem for the knowledge and information management functions in an organization is that their governance structures were developed in an earlier, more ordered time when we focused on transaction systems for accounting and process. The essence of such systems is to remove ambiguity; the evolutionary pressure of natural human knowledge exchange is to embrace ambiguity. Narrative, social computing, the open source movement are all comfortable with ambiguity, embrace it and use it. Organizations need to do the same, but the old patterns of control persist beyond their natural utility.
Marisa also points the way to a video of an International Data Corporation panel on Generation Y and the Emerging Power of User-Generated Content (UGC - another term I loathe btw). Four Asia-Pacific bloggers talk about social networks, monetisation, micro-blogging, etc.
A few titbits from the last week or so’s technology news:
AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010, U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.
25 Leading-Edge IT Research Projects, including terahertz electronic circuits, hybrid computers, internet mapping, datamining and security, dark web analysis and much more.
Firefox goes mobile, Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker says Firefox Mobile (codename: Fennec) to be released later this year. And not before time in my view - Windows Mobile 6 is driving me up the wall …
Wonder how long it takes for the ‘open source’ mindset to rub off on the US military in general. It would certainly make John Robb happy (via Strategy Page).
Linux Goes To War
One method of protecting your military networks from hackers is to use an operating system other than the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows (which controls over 85 percent of the market). Linux has been a popular choice for the military. The U.S. Navy uses Linux to run critical systems on its warships. The U.S. Army is using Linux for its networked FCS (Future Combat System) vehicles (which are still in development). The army is also converting many of its Microsoft Windows applications to run under Linux.
It’s not just the better security Linux provides, but the fact that there are many versions of Linux to choose from, and the operating system is easier to modify (being an “open source” system, unlike the proprietary Windows.) Currently, the U.S. Department of Defense has over 200 Linux based software projects in development.
China has also gone down this route, and is trying to get all Chinese computer users to switch to Linux. This has proved difficult, because so many Chinese use stolen Windows software to run their businesses. Often, there is no Linux alternative for key Windows applications. The military, however, uses custom made software for its most critical applications, and it’s easier to create this stuff using Linux.
