Cyberbollocks

Ranks up there with Tim Egan’s O’Mansions? I think I remember you expressing a mix of annoyance and amusement about it at the time.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/the-orphans-of-ireland/

I want to have your cyberbaby.

Cybertastic.

The establishment media have never got ‘cyber’ and it is too late to expect them to change.

Early on and against all our expectations the major newspapers suddenly decided it made business sense to put all their content online for free. That pretty much put paid to my efforts to develop a micropayments scheme at the W3C. It made no business sense to me, but I was not in business at the time, what did I know.

Twenty years later with every major newspaper in the US bleeding red ink, it turns I I knew more about their business than it appears they did.

The breathless ‘cyber’ headlines at best tell us what those of us in the field knew a decade ago. At worst they are just plain wrong. Cyberwarfare is not new at all, and it is not something you do instead of war, it is what militaries do to compliment their ‘kinetic’ warfare.

What is new is the possibility of a form of engagement that in some cases is not a form of warfare (e.g. espionage, propaganda) or has an indeterminate status (attacks on critical infrastructure by non governmental actors). The cool kids call this ‘information engagement’, or at least they did a few months ago, they may have another cool term by now.

Cyber is a force multiplier and tends to favor the side with more force to multiply. But there is also an element of opportunity. In the Israeli vs Palestinian hacker war the Israelis ran out of targets pretty quick and then decided it would be cooler to become high paid security consultants helping businesses protect themselves against the attacks they had personally provoked. But even so, the Israelis have vastly more opportunity to make use of IT than the Palestinians.

The real power of cyber that has emerged is not the ability to perform actual attacks or even to coordinate demonstrations. Turning off Twitter did not help Mubarak during the Arab Spring. In fact I think it harmed him since it forced the people sitting in their den following events on Twitter to come out onto the street to find out what is going on.

Twitter and Facebook were important in establishing the conditions in which a demonstration could be effective: A tightly knit group of several thousand young people who expressed mutual opposition to the regime. That was the basis for the people-powered revolutions of ’89 that brought down communism. It was the few hundred demonstrators who came out in Leipzig each week in the spring that led to the quarter million in the fall.

The Arab Spring and the Year of Miracles were both examples of highly asymmetric warfare – the people against the despots and their handful of supporters. The people had always had the power to throw of their government, all that the net did was to provide the means for them to realize that power.

The net is also the antidote to the likes of Bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. The net gives them access to information and helps them organize. But their political theories are of the fringe and rejected by the vast bulk of the population. They can perform atrocities but they are counter productive.

The devil made be do it: Enough of this silly-cyberin’!

*cy*

nope, it was meant to say

asterisk “cy” asterisk

(What the HTML tag for “this is not an HTML tag”?)

People, please. The Pentagon believes it. That’s enough make it real — or at least to kill thousands of innocent bystanders who’ve only just begun to wonder what all these official madmen suddenly sprung up out of the woodwork are on about.

Blake knew, but he was an innocent as well. The framing of fearful symmetries has always been the province of lunatics — General Leslie Grove being the archetype, at least in the U.S. It’s bipartisan, and it’s approved. Go back to bed.

@Strategist I just realized that I should’ve written “text” in order to display “text“.

For instance, “cyber” has a very specific internet tradition. Let me explain it in verse (with apologies to William Blake):

Cyber Cyber burning bright
In teh wee hours of night
What immoral acts we type
At least we’re not doin’ it on Skype.

In what distant deeps and skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
How old you are, I cannot tell,
Please IM your A/S/L.

And the pic in your gravatar
Teh tee that says nerds you ♥
Makes mine skip an irregular beat
Makes me question if I am 1337.

WTH! WTF!
OMG! Teh heat does suck.
What the anvil? what death grip
Off the desk one hand slips

When it’s done, I lower my spear
And water’d keyboard with my tears
I did smile, thinking you nude
Whilst in my base, killin my d00dz.

Cyber cyber burning bright
In teh wee hours of night
What immoral acts we type
To each other through teh Intarpipes.

Thanks muchly.

Cracking up, here.

Doesn’t matter how many times one reads that. It still bites.