I’ve recently been writing and researching a bit about ‘dwelling’ and ‘cyberspace’, and the interface between physicality and virtuality. It was therefore surprising to overhear a conversation on BBC Radio 4’s horrendously parochial soap opera The Archers (running continuously since 1950) which addressed this issue. From the Tuesday 14 July 2009 episode:

Lynda Snell (cut-glass busybody), to Elizabeth Pargetter: Elizabeth, Elizabeth, we all live in cyberspace.

This reminded me very much of Lawrence Lessig’s words, ‘Cyberspace is a place. People live there.’ Odd to hear this on The Archers, renowned for its olde worlde attitudes and rural emphasis – it’s set in a fictional English county, Borsetshire, replete with cod-yokel accents and farming terminology. I guess it shows how ubiquitous information technologies have become, even in the minds of the scriptwriters and their rustic characters.

Air Force’s ‘Universal Translator’ Has Everybody Talking – David Axe, Danger Room

Duffy: How Not to Experiment in Virtual Worlds – Edward Castronova, Terra Nova

Why Cops Should Trust the Wisdom of the Crowds – Michael Bond, New Scientist

Korea DDoS Surge Mired in Hype and Confusion – Virus Bulletin

Is This Cyber War? Response Possibilities Limited — And Nobody’s Talking About Bombs – Pauline Jelinek, AP

China Blocks US From Cyber Warfare – Bill Gertz, Washington Times

Was Moore’s Law Inevitable? – Kevin Kelly, The Technium

Ubiquitous Sensing and Liberty – Dale Amon, Samizdata

Social Relevancy May Turn the Web Into a Next Edition of the Lonely Planet – Alexander van Elsas

Israel’s Enemies Are a Strong Match in Cyber Realm – Mohammed J. Herzallah, Newsweek

What is A Cyberwar? – Ariel Silverstone

Kicking and screaming … Well, not quite, but I have been resistant thus far to entering the world of Twitter, fearing information overload and subsequent brain implosion. Today, as a result of encouragement from Drew Conway, I’ve taken the plunge and can now be found at, where else?:

@ubiwar

I believe that’s how you do it. It’s going to take me a while to get used to this new (for me) application but, as Drew rightly pointed out, the only way to find out if it’s useful is to check it out. So, I’m going to trial it for a while. I’m adding a Twitter widget to the sidebar – if I can figure it out – and let’s see how it goes. Without meaning to sound too Big Brother, I’ll be following you, so follow me too.

Short Note on the Virulent Growth of WWW + Internet, 1988-1997 – Johnny Ryan, Assorted Materials

Katharine Berry Creates IRC-to-Second Life Chat Bridge – Wagner James Au, New World Notes

China’s Cybersecurity Fears Sound Very Familiar – Steve Kelman, Federal Computer Week (written before July 4th)

Internet Heroes and Villains Named by ISPs – John Ozimek, The Register

Shock of the New Media – Brian Whitaker, The Guardian [on Fatah banning al-Jazeera]

Investigation Into Cyberattacks Stretches Around the Globe – Jeremy Kirk, PC World [via DJ Technocrat]

Canada Echoes EU: Facebook Breaking Privacy Law – Ian Brown, Blogzilla

Web’s Anonymity Makes Cyberattack Hard to Trace – John Markoff, New York Times

Cyber Warfare and Attribution – Steven Fox, CSO Online

France Plans Development of Database for Threatening Personalities – J. Thurman, DETECTER

Oz Cops Turn to Wardriving to Fight Wi-Fi ‘Jackers – Tony Smith, The Register

Evgeny Morozov has a critical op-ed in the NYT, The 0s and 1s of Computer Warfare. At the heart of his anti-panic piece is this: ‘it may pay to ask whether excessive secrecy is what has made our cyberspace insecure in the first place’:

If the last two decades, marked by the steep rise of open-source software developed and tested by large and open communities, have taught us anything about security, it is that excessive secrecy is usually not the best way to secure one’s networks.

There is a reason why open-source operating systems based on Linux are less likely to be infected by a virus than proprietary systems like Microsoft’s Windows: As computer security experts like to say, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

The problem with the current approach to cybersecurity is that by miring it in unnecessary secrecy, we are shrinking, rather than growing, the number of eyeballs that can find and fix those bugs.

Jeff Carr wrote a lengthy piece on the eyeball thesis last year, which bears revisiting:

When Eric S. Raymond wrote his now-famous essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“, he created a maxim that he called Linus’s Law: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Open Source advocates have long proposed that security can more readily be assured when many people can examine the code versus close source code, which leaves detecting code vulnerabilities in the hands of a few. Not only has the development paradigm been shifting towards open standards, it is gaining ground in the Intelligence Community.

The DNI Open Source Center has come a long way since its inception on November 1, 2005 , yet open source intelligence (OSINT) still does not receive the same recognition and respect as other intelligence disciplines. Some argue that OSINT is not a discipline at all, it’s simply “going out and grabbing what’s already out there” (Bean 2007). With all due respect to intelligence professionals of this persuasion, twenty-something hackers operating with nothing more than a laptop and some free malware are sitting in an Internet café in St. Petersburg making fools of you.

As events of the last two weeks demonstrate all too clearly.

At The Wild Surmise, Sue Thomas asks a question that’s been rolling around my brain for the past couple of hours:

Which Space Is More Significant: Outer Space or Cyberspace?

This month we’re celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing. Few people connect this celebration with the fact that by some spooky serendipity 1969 was the year that humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July) and then ‘in’ cyberspace (the first two nodes of the internet were connected in September).

Today the mountains of the Moon remain largely neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat with a complex geography shaped by those who inhabit it. It could be said that the entering of cyberspace has proved to be a far more profound experience than the entering of outer space.

It would be easy to dismiss this as an attempt to compare two realms, as it were, that are simply not comparable. That’s not my view though. I’d be the first to say that a lot of the security-speak around cyberspace is predicated on the incorrect assumption that cyberspace is merely the same as land, sea, air or space, i.e. a physical domain over which to exert, well, dominion.

Without giving away too much of what I’m currently thinking with regard to this very issue, I’d be fascinated to hear any thoughts you guys might have about this. As I’m sure Sue would too.

Trinity: 16 July 1945, 11:29:45 UTC, 05:29:45 Mountain War Time:

In 1967, Marshall McLuhan observed in a CBC head-to-head with an arrogant and obfuscating Norman Mailer that ‘wherever a new environment goes around an old one there is always new terror’. This goes some way towards explaining why all new technologies create a sense of what Adam Thierer at The Technology Liberation Front calls ‘techno-panic‘:

What is perhaps most ironic about these techno-panics is how quickly yesterday’s boogeyman becomes tomorrow’s accepted medium, even as the new villains replace old ones.  For example, the children of the 1950s and 60s were told that Elvis’s hip shakes and the rock-and-roll revolution would make them all the tools of the devil. They grew up fine and became parents themselves, but then promptly began demonizing rap music and video games in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  And now those aging Pac Man-era parents are worried sick about their kids being abducted by predators lurking on MySpace and Facebook. We shouldn’t be surprised if, a decade or two from now, today’s Internet generation will be decrying the dangers of virtual reality.

In a new report for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics’, Thierer mainly addresses this phenomenon from the perspective of child online protection. The general drift of his argument though is relevant to those who would cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of censorship and ubiquitous surveillance.

This may have passed many readers by but Cheryl Rofer, ex of Whirled View, has joined one of my favourite blogs, Phronesisaical.  Back when I started this blogging lark in January 2007 (jeez, I used to do film reviews), Phronesisaical – its co-authors being Helmut and Barba de Chiva (pseudonyms both) – was one of the first blogs I read regularly and had contact with. Subtitled ‘Politics, Philosophy and Fruit’, I’ve always found it an engaging and intelligent source of comment and analysis of current affairs. Cheryl Rofer will fit right in.

Offline in the Afterlife: An Essay – Extropia DaSilva, Gwyneth Llewelyn

Costs of War: Chasing Cyberghosts – Shaun Waterman, ISN Security Watch [h/t Raff]

NSA’s Cyber Overkill – Jesselyn Radack, Los Angeles Times

Social Networking: A Risk to Information Security? – Cath Everett, InfoSecurity

Cyber Attacks Traced to the U.S., Britain – Kim Zetter, Threat Level

Iranian Consumers Boycott Nokia for ‘Collaboration’ – Saeed Kamali Dehghan, The Guardian

Tehran Acknowledges the Power of Twitter and Public Diplomacy? – Matt Armstrong, MountainRunner

So-called Cyberattack was Overblown – Bruce Schneier, MPRnewsQ

Why Is the Government Vulnerable to a Simple Cyber Attack? – Stephen Wildstrom, Business Week

The Cyber Security Debate Continues – Steven Bucci, Security Debrief

Meme-Tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle – via Docuticker