Today’s Big Nothing 6
The headline writers today are clutching their pearls at this:
These people suffer a severe shortage of clues. They have no idea how the internet or networks work.
Email addresses and most emails travel across the net in the clear.
When an application for tracking and mapping your bicycle rides* wants access to the contact list on your phone, persons willingly run through Facebook in their digital birthday suits, phishing@hooklineandsinker.ru has been emailing everybody for years, and persons (like me) make email addresses public on blogs and websites, I just cannot get worked up over this. It is much ado about not much of anything.
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*Map My Ride (no link–find it yourself). And that’s why I didn’t install it. I use Move! Bike Computer.
October 15, 2013 at 1:08 pm
I do get a kick of seeing Keith Alexander getting hauled in front of Congress to explain the latest every two weeks. His career is toast until he retires to run the cyberwar-sales arms of Lockheed, Northrop or Boeing and it’s made a hash of all the silly scripts about cyber-Pearl Harbor and Chinese cyber-stealing.
We could write a story like this: “Imagine, if you will, heightening of tension with China over arms sales to Taiwan. A decision is made in Beijing to fire a warning shot in cyberspace. The orders are sent to its most elite secret team, Unit 451, also called The Pummeling Fist in hushed tones, to launch a cyberattack on the US government, one the present administration and public will not be able to brush off. Within 24 hours, the Pummeling Fist’s cyberwar plan has paralyzed the US government, employees are unable to get anything done, the digital finance that is the life’s blood of the American government and democracy is frozen and inaccessible …”
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
October 15, 2013 at 3:35 pm
That’s an element missing from stories like this and the one of robotic death raining from the sky–what if the tables were turned?
I think what’s keeping that out of consideration, at least here in the U. S., is firm grip of the myth of American “we-can-do-no-wrong” Exceptionalism. Anyone who knows history knows that, even though that perhaps America’s founding ideals were exceptional, in day-to-day life and certainly in foreign policy from the Spanish-American War to Chili and Allende to Nicaragua to Hawaii to Dole Pineapple to installing the Shah in Iran to many many more, it just ain’t so.
That’s one reason I keep an eye on Asia Times, Der Spiegel, and the like. Perspective.
Afterthought: I do believe that one reason the NSA and others are collecting so much stuff in such a scattershot manner is simply because they can, because collecting stuff is what they do, not because they any idea how to put it to any practical use. Never underestimate the power of inertia in organizations.
October 15, 2013 at 8:53 pm
Nearly twenty years ago I made the argument that there was no practical way to digitally know everything about enemies, and vice versa, that it would be possible to do what the fearmongers on cyberwar said was possible. This was in “Electronic Pearl Harbor, Not Likely”. And I was right then and I’m still right now. That’s two decades. Seen it, been there, had enough of it, over and over. Keith Alexander needs to go away to the private sector. Enough of DefCon and Blackhat and hackers are great memes. Time to stop reading Wired, in the magazine and on the web, and all the wanna-bes exactly like that. The national security megaplex has had two decades to build its huge but petty cyberwar engine and history has passed us by. Reality happened. The national enemy wasn’t external and digital and all about software and hardware and networked computers. Ten years ago it was al Qaeda and its websites. Six months ago before national politics and Snowden wiped them off the front page, it was China. No more hackers, please, good, bad or indifferent. No more digital lock-pickers, operating system tinkerers and vulnerability mavens. Hate ’em. Don’t wanna hear about it. Marginal fringe issues in the big social picture.
October 15, 2013 at 10:16 pm
It’s a simple equation.
People don’t understand subnetting (and I”m no guru–it only took one website for me to understand subnetting).
They see computers as magic mysterious, magickal, frightening boxes.
Hence, they are ripe for the picking by scams and frauds.
But, underneath, it’s all ones and zeroes.
October 15, 2013 at 10:55 pm
I’m serious. Keith Alexander needs to go away. Hackers and cybersecurity experts need to leave the news discourse. It’s not new anymore. They won’t but they’re not ever going to change the world for the better or seize freedom from tyranny. That canard was old 15 years ago. They just get hired to do the digital plumbing necessary to keep the global networks running, and if they want to work for the US military, they can learn how to do bad stuff the corporate national security way. Your IQ improves by 20 – 30 points when you stop reading cybersecurity tech news. Guaranteed. Hang the guy who wrote “WarGames” in effigy. The guy who published my book on virus writing culture and whose publishing catalog was built on volumes that were the first to sell viruses to “hackers,” government and security workers who wanted to learn dirty tricks died of cancer in central America and no one noticed. It would take another book or two to explain all the crap I saw pass by. Many make careers out of total bull—. That’s where we are, there’s no fixing it any more than there’s a fix for the much larger issues controlling the national trajectory. You know my contempt for it. The eyes should roll up in the head when you read about cybersecurity. I discarded the idea that it was proper to spend any time memorizing the weekly issue of network vulnerabilities years ago. It’s hard to think of anything more morally and intellectually worthless.
October 16, 2013 at 8:36 am
I’m serious, too, from a different perspective.
If the general populace knew more about how this stuff worked, the cybercharlatans would not have such easy pickings. As long as people think it’s magic, the witch-doctors will have followers.