NPR: All Things Considered Uncloaking Terrorist Networks

"Homeland security warriors at the Pentagon and the CIA say the next terrorist attack may be prevented by investing in data-mining -- the science of finding patterns in colossal amounts of information. Companies are lining up to supply the government with the equipment to process the raw data. NPR's Larry Abramson reports."

The New York Times Many Tools of Big Brother Are Up and Running
[requires 'free' registration]

"In the Pentagon research effort to detect terrorism by electronically monitoring the civilian population, the most remarkable detail may be this: Most of the pieces of the system are already in place.

Because of the inroads the Internet and other digital network technologies have made into everyday life over the last decade, it is increasingly possible to amass Big Brother-like surveillance powers through Little Brother means. The basic components include everyday digital technologies like e-mail, online shopping and travel booking, A.T.M. systems, cellphone networks, electronic toll-collection systems and credit-card payment terminals."

redux [04.02.02]
First Monday Uncloaking Terrorist Networks

"To draw an accurate picture of a covert network, we need to identify task and trust ties between the conspirators. The same four relationships we often map in many business organizations would tell us much about illegal organizations. This data is occasionally difficult to unearth with cooperating clients. With covert criminals, the task is enormous, and may be impossible to complete."

Business 2.0 Six Degrees of Mohamed Atta

"It's also clear that this network would have been hard to dismantle. A hub-and-spoke network, where there is no contact between nodes except through a central figure, is an easy target: If just the central node is destroyed, the network disintegrates. Network analysts say a highly centralized network typically can be taken down by eliminating about 5 percent of the nodes. But the diffuseness of the hijacker network means that it won't suffer significant damage until the six nodes with the most numerous and important connections -- 21 percent of the group -- are removed."

"To draw an accurate picture of a covert network, we need to identify task and trust ties between the conspirators. The same four relationships we often map in many business organizations would tell us much about illegal organizations. This data is occasionally difficult to unearth with cooperating clients. With covert criminals, the task is enormous, and may be impossible to complete."

redux [11.10.01]
Business 2.0 America's Secret Weapon

""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."

NPR: Morning Edition Terror Networks

"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS "watch list" -- and being hunted by the FBI -- when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar's suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn't already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built -- it's called Golden Shield, and it's been designed by the Chinese Communist Party's police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield's tactics."

redux [09.27.01]
Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [09.14.01]
Red Rock Eater Imagining the Next War: Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy

"War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy would resume once their conditions had been reestablished. Civil liberties and the institutions of democratic government are not entirely eliminated during wartime; rather, they are reduced in their scope while retaining their same overall form. Even in conditions of total war mobilization, clear boundaries between the military and civilian sides of society are maintained. But war, we are told, no longer works that way. No such boundaries are possible. It follows, therefore, that "war" in the new sense -- war with no beginning or end, no front and rear, and no distinction between military and civilian -- is incompatible with democracy, and not just in practice, not just temporarily, but permanently and conceptually. If we conceptualize war the way the defense intellectuals suggest, then to declare war is to destroy the conditions of democracy. War, in this new sense, can never be justified."

"The danger of "total war" against the spectre named Osama bin Laden, then, is that it will reinforce the worst tendencies in our society, and that far from preserving the conditions of democracy it will undermine the cultural and institutional foundations upon which democracy rests. It will be war without end, without boundaries, without even a coherent conception of itself save as the expression of an impulse to vengeance."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

News.Com Hot links, cool trends on the Web

"Schatz said search terms also are reflecting the increased Web activity of teenage girls. Anything related to the prom or a young, male actor is on the rise, he said. "It's really amazing how many searches those heart-throbby actors get," said Schatz, who lists "Hulk" star Eric Bana and high-school basketball star LeBron James as hot commodities for the coming year."

"One interesting year-end finding came from AltaVista, which unlike most other search sites does not filter out generic terms. According to the site, the word "sex"--always a top search term on the Web--posted the biggest decline among surfers during the holiday season."

Ananova Internet searchers 'stuck in the nineties'

"The UK's internet users are stuck in the nineties, according to a new survey."

"One interesting year-end finding came from AltaVista, which unlike most other search sites does not filter out generic terms. According to the site, the word "sex"--always a top search term on the Web--posted the biggest decline among surfers during the holiday season."

redux [12.08.02]
The New York Times Postcards From Planet Google
[requires 'free' registration]

"Google is taking snapshots of its users' minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story."

"Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things. Country to country, region to region, day to day and even minute to minute, the same topic areas bubble to the top: celebrities, current events, products and computer downloads."

The New York Times Magazine Approximating Life
[requires 'free' registration]

"Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple."

Star Tribune Record labels grapple with CD protection

"For three straight holiday seasons, record executives say, Internet piracy has been the Grinch of the music business, undercutting album sales and labels' year-end profits."

"Music and technology executives vow that this will be the last holiday season without widespread use of technology that prevents songs from being transferred from CDs to the Internet. Of course, they've made that prediction before."

redux [11.18.02]
Wired News Fox Exec Wants Help Ending Piracy

"More importantly, Chernin will propose that effective antipiracy technologies will pull the tech sector out of its economic slump, by encouraging more and different kinds of digital content. He will cite stats showing the potential upside in sales of broadband connections, home networking gear, digital-rights management software and backend media servers.

"In the long run, the piracy of content may hurt the technology business more than it affects the media business," he said. "If we can work together to solve piracy, I think it could be a driving force for the growth of the technology business.""

redux [04.08.02]
SFGate Copyright's Next Chapter

"Nearly a century ago, the music industry argued that its future was threatened by a new method of creating and distributing multiple copies of a performed song.

The new technology? The player piano roll."

"Throughout history, new technologies -- from the Gutenberg printing press to Napster -- have posed a threat to the owners and creators of music, movies, books and other artistic works. Those publishers, writers, artists and other owners of copyrighted work have always responded with lawsuits and calls for stronger laws."

redux [10.15.01]
MIT Technology Review Owning the Future: Content Discontent

""Content": in the modern lexicon, the term denotes everything from the information delivered daily to our doors on newsprint to the multimedia clips streamed over the Internet; from the music carried on the airwaves to the interactive software on CD-ROMs. This so-called content is produced by an increasingly broad and diverse segment of the economy, including not just writers and artists, but also software programmers and other high-tech researchers who create new intellectual property.

And here's the most interesting part. Time and again, the distributors - such as publishers, broadcasters and record labels - recoil in the face of technological advances that could diminish their role."

redux [10.09.01]
Dan Bricklin Copy Protection Robs The Future

"Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so."

redux [08.03.01]
Ars Technica Intellectual Property and the Good Society

"Many of the voices in online debates around IP fall into one of two camps. I won't take the time to do more than very briefly summarize these two positions, because we're all familiar with them by now. The first is the "information wants to be free" camp, which advocates the free and communal sharing of information and rejects any notion that products of the intellect can or should be understood, legally or philosophically, as property. At the other extreme is a camp that is comfortable drawing direct, strong analogies between concepts of ownership of physical property and concepts of ownership of intellectual property. Furthermore, this camp is intent on letting the "free" market determine a value for information, much as it determines a value for more traditional types of property. This second camp usually feels that the anti-IP rhetoric coming from the first camp is merely a rationale for piracy, while the first camp feels that members of the second are mindless shills for the corporate machine.

Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a large majority who find both extremes attractive for different reasons, but who can't in good conscience commit to one stance or the other."

redux [06.08.01]
ZDNet Technology and the corruption of copyright

"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."

"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection

"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness

"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

Rocky Mountain News IMing - the 21st century telephone

"Instant messaging (or IMing for short) is becoming to the dawn of the 21st century what the telephone was to the beginning of the 20th - a normal way of communicating in real time across previously uncrossable distances, making faster, if not better, typists of us all.

How different it is, and how little we realize it. Could human beings really have once existed in a world where we had to communicate by paper, where ink-smeared messages took weeks, even months to cross oceans and inform recipients that someone far away loved them? Today, that old absence that once made the heart grow fonder is assuaged by the new-message notification. Souls that once ached across impassable divides wondering and waiting can now connect in seconds - via satellite."

redux [12.07.01]
CIO.Com Patterns of Progress

"Despite all the fanfare about interactive applications and e-commerce, the killer app for the Internet is the same today as it was two decades ago—person-to-person communication. Although Web traffic is 20 times the volume of e-mail traffic, it is e-mail that delivers the highest value to consumers and businesses. And in the wireless data business, short-messaging service—used to send messages of up to 160 characters to mobile phone customers—is the unheralded killer app, not the fancy mobile commerce, news and entertainment applications that service providers love to talk about. The lesson is that value hides in the strangest of places, and killer apps sneak up on you from directions you least expect."

redux [10.16.01]
The Economist Looking for the pot of gold

"What can operators do to boost traffic and maximise transport revenues?

The answer seems obvious: person-to-person communication. The success of text messaging relative to WAP shows that people like to use their phones to communicate with each other, rather than to download information from content providers. In the words of Andrew Odlyzko, a former AT&T researcher who is now at the University of Minnesota, "Content is not king - connectivity is more important." Indeed, he argues that the killer app for 3G phones might turn out to be increased voice traffic."

redux [03.19.01]
Slashdot Clay Shirky Explains Internet Evolution

"Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability."

"In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.

Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 gajillion Zlotys to own the customer now look like a giant shell game, because the users don't want to get headline news. They want to talk to one another, and they will switch carriers until they are allowed to. Email is the thin end of the interoperability wedge, and this will be true of interactive TV as well."

redux [06.21.01]
Newsbytes 'Instant-Messaging Generation' Emerges

"The Internet is used by almost three-quarters of U.S. teen-agers, a new report says. And nearly all of them are using instant-messaging technology in ways that may be transforming the manner in which kids deal with one another.

"It's kind of like having lots of telephones," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which conducted surveys late last year that were used in the 46-page report. "Because it's synchronous conversation, it's the quick-hit kind of stuff that a phone conversation would have, except you're having it in many cases with many, many people.""

redux [05.09.01]
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Conversational Technologies

"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day."

"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."

"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."

redux [02.18.01]
First Monday Content is Not King

"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."

The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.

For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king

"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."

Wired News Terrorists on the Net? Who Cares?

"To all those Chicken Littles clucking frantically about the imminent threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. computer networks, a new report says: Knock it off."

""The idea that hackers are going to bring the nation to its knees is too far-fetched a scenario to be taken seriously," said Jim Lewis, a 16-year veteran of the State and Commerce Departments."

""Nations are more robust than the early analysts of cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare give them credit for," Lewis wrote in the report. "Infrastructure systems (are) more flexible and responsive in restoring service than the early analysts realized, in part because they have to deal with failure on a routine basis.""

redux [12.13.02]
Newsfactor Research Firm Predicts Cyberterror in 2003

"Cyberterrorists will launch a major attack in 2003, according to research firm IDC, which has released a laundry list of predictions for the coming year. The offensive will involve a network intrusion or a distributed denial-of-service attack -- or perhaps even an attack on the Internet's physical infrastructure.

This act of cyberterror will completely halt online traffic for a full day or longer and will seriously affect the economy, IDC forecast. "We've already seen some evidence of this," IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky noted."

redux [10.29.02]
MSNBC Worries of a cyber war

"Politically motivated hack attacks are rising "sharply," London-based computer security firm mi2g said Tuesday, citing in particular the rise of what it called "Islamic interest hacking groups." And while political hacks account for just a fraction of all hacking activity, security experts worry that may soon change."

"October, mi2g said, has already qualified as the worst month for overt digital attacks since its records began in 1995, with an estimated 16,559 attacks carried out on systems and Web sites."

redux [09.18.02]
News.Com Government unveils cybersecurity plan

"CSIS analyst Arnaud de Borchgrave, a former editor-in-chief of the Washington Times and United Press International, warned that a "cyberattack" was just around the corner.

"It is later than we think. The next generation of transnational terrorists understands that a hand on a mouse can be more lethal than a finger on the trigger," said de Borchgrave, who co-authored a report that concluded: "Cyberattacks now arise whenever disputes occur anywhere in the world...Can cyberterrorism and cyberwar be far behind?""

redux [08.14.02]
ZDNet Is the U.S. headed for a cyberwar? I doubt it

"THE FIRST THOUGHT that comes to my mind when people mention cyberwar is: What kind of attack are they really talking about? We've seen Web page defacements traded between Palestinian and Israeli cyberactivists. The Yaha worm, thought to have originated in India, recently caused a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Pakistani government's main Web site. In the grand scheme of things, however these are relatively minor inconveniences compared with a major military ground or air attack."

"No one has ever made it clear to me exactly what a cyberwar would entail--and I'm betting I'm not the only one who's confused here. "

The Register Mock cyberwar fails to end mock civilization

"A mock cyberwar enacted by faculty of the US Naval War College and analysts from Gartner does not appear to have fulfilled the Clancyesque predictions of mass devastation envisioned by the leading security paranoiacs of the Clinton and Bush Administrations.

The exercise, named "Digital Pearl Harbor," apparently in tribute to US CyberSecurity Czar and Chief Alarmist Richard Clarke, brought together a team of experts in several areas related to critical infrastructure for a three-day hackfest."

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

The New York Times Securing the Lines of a Wired Nation
[requires 'free' registration]

""People aren't going to be killing us with computers," Mr. Hunker said, "but our life may be hell because of computer attacks."

The likeliest use of the technology, he said, would be to complicate matters further after a real-world attack, a tactic he describes with the military phrase "force multiplier." That could involve planting false information on the Web to create a panic or taking down crucial computers in the financial or communications sectors."

redux [08.19.01]
AsianWeek Get Ready for Cyberwars

""Taiwan has one of the world's largest computer software and hardware manufacturing bases," said D.K. Matai, managing director of the British-based Mi2. "The computer software programmers in Taiwan are world class. Our view is that getting involved in any kind of conflict with Taiwan, given the kind of intellectual capacity the country has, may prove detrimental."

The Chinese government has been quite open about its future strategic military objective. In paper appearing in the spring issue of China Military Science journal, a member of the Chinese Committee of Science, Technology and Industry of the System Engineering Institute, wrote: "We are in the midst of a new technology in which electronic information technology is the central technology. The technology provides unprecedented applications for the development of new weaponry...Military battles during the 21st century will unfold around the use of information for military and political goals.""

redux [09.06.00]
Rand Corporation In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age

"The thesis of this think piece is that the information revolution will cause shifts both in how societies may come into conflict, and how their armed forces may wage war. We offer a distinction between what we call "netwar" -- societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication -- and "cyberwar" at the military level. These terms are admittedly novel, and better ones may yet be devised. But for now they illuminate a useful distinction and identify the breadth of ways in which the information revolution may alter the nature of conflict short of war, as well as the context and the conduct of warfare.

While both netwar and cyberwar revolve around information and communications matters, at a deeper level they are forms of war about "knowledge" -- about who knows what, when, where, and why, and about how secure a society or military is regarding its knowledge of itself and its adversaries."

redux [01.04.01]
MSNBC Bytes without the blood in Mideast

"Scenes of street violence are played out day after day in Palestinian towns across Gaza and the West Bank. But another modern-day arena for battle between the Palestinians and the Israelis is growing ever more heated, so much so that the Internet war waged by computer-savvy political activists is being dubbed an "e-Jihad.""

redux [03.22.00]
CNN Kashmir conflict continues to escalate -- online

"A group of Pakistani hackers has used the conflict in Kashmir as a reason to deface almost 600 Web sites in India and take control of several Indian government and private computer systems, according to the group."

"Unlike the majority of Web vandals, the MOS members say they secretly take control of a server, then deface the site only when they "have no more use" for the data or the server itself.

"The servers we control range from harmless mail and Web services to 'heavy duty' government servers," says the MOS representative. "The data is only being categorically archived for later use if deemed necessary."

The Christian Science Monitor Wars of the future... today

"Take the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade several weeks ago. Rage spread across China and hackers from the mainland attacked the Web sites of the US Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the National Park Service. A subsequent attack brought down the White House Web site for three days. The attacks generated headlines across the country.

What the news media didn't report was that the US government had known for a long time that someone had been in its computer systems - they just didn't know who. Then, in a fit of anger, the Chinese hackers caused some real damage - and gave away the hidden "location" of several "backdoors" they had built in US government networks."

"The US Government Accounting Office estimates 120 groups or countries have or are developing information-warfare systems. According to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 nations have cyber-targeted the US."

Talahassee Democrat Survey predicts tech salary slip

"Tech workers may want to cut another notch in their belts because they'll most likely have to tighten them next year."

""I think that what you're seeing there is the old supply and demand," said John Reed, metro market manager in Dallas for parent company Robert Half International Inc. "Obviously, with more candidates available in the marketplace, companies have got a little more negotiating power.""

redux [11.27.02]
BBC News Hi-tech workplace no better than factories

"Staff in technology jobs work in the white collar equivalent of a 19th century factory. suffering from isolation, job insecurity and long hours, research has found."

"He looked at the characteristics of hi-tech workplaces, which are seen as a potential model for the future of work."

SiliconValley.Com Job migration is draining Silicon Valley

"The export of IT jobs from America to English-speaking Third World countries is a worrying new trend. First predicted more than a decade ago in Ed Yourdon's book ``The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,'', Yourdon went on to suggest that American programmers could avoid unemployment by becoming more productive with the help of software tools. His identification of the trend was correct, but his solution was wrong."

"The export of IT jobs has a permanent vicious cycle effect. As the jobs migrate, there are more and more unemployed people chasing fewer opportunities here."

Wired Magazine Google vs. Evil

"Most major companies refer to a detailed code of corporate conduct when considering such policy decisions. General Electric devotes 15 pages on its Web site to an integrity policy. Nortel's site has 34 pages of guidelines. Google's code of conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words: Don't be evil.

Very Star Wars . But what does it mean?

" Evil, " says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil.""

redux [11.22.02]
HBS Working Knowledge Where Morals and Profits Meet: The Corporate Value Shift

"Overall, though, my experience has been that probably half, and maybe even two-thirds, categorize ethics mainly as a risk management issue. These managers tend to see corporate values as a tool for preventing misconduct with its incident legal, financial, and reputational risks. Ethics gets their attention because they want to avoid the high-profile missteps and billion-dollar losses experienced by a Salomon Brothers, Bridgestone/Firestone, or Enron.

In recent years, however, I have seen more attention being paid to the positive side of ethics. More managers are waking up to the ways in which positive values contribute to a company's effective day-to-day functioning, as well as its reputation and long-term sustainability."

redux [09.20.02]
Fast Company The Secret Life of the CEO: Do they even know right from wrong?

"Perhaps we understand now. Or we're starting to. The corporate CEO is not the epic hero we once imagined. Now we know: He was never as smart or as right or as, well, together as we had hoped. His teeth aren't perfect either. But let's not go overboard: He's also not an epic sociopath. CEOs are only as culpable for all that has gone wrong with business in the past year as they were responsible for all that went right in the previous years. Which is to say that whatever they have done or failed to do doesn't explain everything. It doesn't even explain most things.

The truth behind the current episode of corporate comi-tragedy has plenty to do with the men ( and they are mostly men ) who are running the show -- but not in the way that we've always thought. All of our post-Enron hand-wringing about CEOs having values and "walking the talk" isn't wrong, exactly. It's just that it's not exactly right either. The truth is more shaded than that."

redux [08.06.02]
SiliconValley.Com As valley boomed, pressure blurred ethical boundaries

"Now it's Sunday morning across the nation, and CEOs are being hauled one after the other to the confessional. But the focus on rogue CEOs leaves out a wider picture: Many executives such as Rodek, who consider themselves honest, say they worked in the middle of tremendous pressure to stretch, if not break, the rules.

In an environment where some buffed the numbers, the price of doing the right thing was high and the payoff small. Companies that kept to the straight and narrow risked seeing their all-important share price doomed to mediocrity, making it harder to keep employees, raise money, compete with upstarts or even survive.

``It's not all greed,'' said Rodek, whose Sunnyvale company makes business software. ``Part of it is just competition. Business is a battle you either win or lose. There is no middle.''"

redux [07.09.02]
The Washington Post Sleaze and the Slump

"The WorldCom scandal is the latest building block in a new economic mythology. By the old mythology, the Internet and the "new economy" promised a rising stock market and anxiety-free prosperity. The new mythology holds that we've been mugged by corporate greed, which depresses stock prices and devastates "trust." In some ways, this is reassuring. It allows us to believe that purging dishonest executives and enacting the proper reforms will make things right. Unfortunately, it's also false."

"Morality tales are seductive. They express legitimate outrage. They're simple and understandable. It's right vs. wrong. Get rid of the bad guys, and the good guys can win."

"But the very simplicity of morality tales can be misleading."

redux [06.16.02]
SatireWire Remaining U.S. CEOs Make a Break For It

"Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.

"They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues," said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. "Right in front of my daughters.""

The Register Elcomsoft not guilty - DoJ retreats from Moscow

"The Russian software company which has found itself on trial in an American court was acquitted on all counts of circumventing the DMCA today."

"Today's jury verdict sends a strong message to federal prosecutors who believe that tool makers should be thrown in jail just because a copyright owner doesn't like the tools they build," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann."

redux [12.06.02]
The Economist Overkill

"WHEN Dmitry Sklyarov, a young Russian computer scientist, got up to deliver a technical paper at a conference in Las Vegas last year, he little suspected that he was about to become something of a global celebrity. But soon after delivering the paper he was arrested by the FBI for breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 American law that bans any efforts to bypass software that protects copyrighted digital files. The arrest sparked a rash of protests in both America and Europe. The Internet hummed with indignation. Charges against Mr Sklyarov have since been dropped, in exchange for a promise to testify. But the case against his employer, Moscow-based ElcomSoft, went ahead this week in San Jose, California.

The closely-watched trial is the first criminal prosecution brought under the DMCA, a law loathed by Internet enthusiasts. The trial will mark a crucial stage in the growing struggle between industries supplying content and those arguing that overly strict enforcement of copyright may crush the creativity of cyberspace."

redux [10.17.02]
Salon U.S. Embassy to Dmitry Sklyarov: Access denied

"The federal government's case against the Russian software firm ElcomSoft -- the first criminal trial under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- seems to be in legal limbo after two key witnesses were refused entry into the United States in mid-October."

"It's anything but certain that the visa decision will be reversed. According to immigration lawyers, a consular office's decision cannot be appealed; reversing a visa denial is more a business of perseverance and persuasion than it is about going through a well-defined process."

redux [01.01.02]
News.Com Freed programmer returns to Russia

"A Russian software programmer, freed in November after escaping prosecution under controversial U.S. copyright laws, returned home Monday and praised the support he received from campaigners while in detention.

Dmitry Sklyarov, 27, told NTV television after arriving at a Moscow airport that his release had defied the long odds of trying to defeat the U.S. authorities in legal proceedings."

redux [08.13.01]
The New York Times Software Double Bind
[requires 'free' registration]

"Call it the digital copyright equivalent of having your cake but not being able to eat it. The case of Dmitri Sklyarov, a Russian computer programmer arrested last month in Las Vegas, is drawing attention to a double bind in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that some legal experts say extends rights to consumers even as it effectively prevents them from exercising those rights.

The law of which Mr. Sklyarov ran afoul makes it illegal to manufacture or distribute a device designed to bypass technology that protects copyright material."

"The law also makes it illegal for individuals to use such a program - even to make a back-up copy of a book or movie or song for themselves, the type of copies traditionally allowed under copyright law. That is where the double bind comes in. Actually making such copies for personal use is not illegal. But it is against the law to break through the copy-protection measure to make the legal copies."

redux [07.30.01]
The New York Times Opinion Page Jail Time in the Digital Age
[requires 'free' registration]

"Dmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who, until recently, lived and worked in Moscow. He wrote a program that was legal in Russia, and in most of the world, a program his employer, ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation bought a copy and complained to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the program violated American law and that, by the way, Mr. Sklyarov was about to give a lecture in Las Vegas describing the weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software. Two weeks ago, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in a Las Vegas jail."

Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection

"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness

"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

The New York Times Web Calling Roils the Telecom World
[requires 'free' registration]

"After all, telecommunications and technology companies lost $7.6 billion in global market value from March 2000 to September 2002, as the industry was gripped by stunning collapses, financial scandals and an effort to absorb excess capacity on globe-spanning communications systems.

But alongside the industry's search for its direction after such turmoil are trends that threaten to destabilize global telecommunications further in 2003. These trends could be described as the start of a cannibalization of established services by disruptive new technologies."

redux [08.07.02]
Bob Frankston The Economist, the Internet, Telecom and the Dow

"Of course The Economist is not alone in this fundamental error but "Crash" story is a useful foil for addressing this misunderstanding.

It is a tragic misunderstanding since the woes of the Telecom industry are seen as representing the state of the economy rather than the collapsing of a facade of a Potemkin industry. In 1900's there was a real telecommunications industry just like in the 1800's when there was a thriving business in transporting ice from frozen lakes to warmer climes. Just as refrigeration put an end to the need for buying ice, the Internet has put an end to the need to buy telecommunications services from others. We just need commodity connectivity."

redux [07.22.02]
The Economist The great telecoms crash

"The telecoms bust is some ten times bigger than the better-known dotcom crash: the rise and fall of telecoms may indeed qualify as the largest bubble in history. Telecoms firms have run up total debts of around $1 trillion. And as if this were not enough, the industry has also disgraced itself by using fraudulent accounting tricks in an attempt to conceal the scale of the disaster."

"The danger is that the traumatic scale of the telecoms crisis will cause the pendulum to swing back too far in favour of the former monopolies. In the short term, they are likely to attract investment, to pick up the assets of bankrupt rivals, and to lead the way in consolidating the industry."

redux [06.18.02]
The New York Times Telecom Outlook: First the Bad News, Then the Bad News
[requires 'free' registration]

"The turmoil continues in telecommunications, making the long-awaited turnaround increasingly difficult to call. Indeed, in light of a wave of bad news last week and through the weekend, some analysts say the industry's problems could actually become worse before they become better."

" "I foresee a near total collapse as the endgame," said Susan Kalla, a senior telecommunications analyst at Friedman, Billings & Ramsey. "I've become more reactionary in the last month as it becomes clear that almost nothing is working in the industry's favor.""

redux [03.15.02]
MSNBC A telecom hangover ...that won't go away

"After nearly $2 trillion of investment, the build-out of the information superhighway has run out of gas. The mountain of money invested by wannabe global telecom providers continues to go up in smoke. Though the smaller upstarts were first to pull the plug, major carriers like Global Crossing are now hitting bankruptcy court. And analysts say it could be years before the industry shakes off its debt hangover, absorbs a glut of capacity and begins to grow again."

redux [02.08.02]
BusinessWeek The Tidal Wave Bearing Down on Telecom

""Some of the more highly leveraged companies are really struggling. They don't have the cash flow to make their payments," says James Glen, a telecom economist with Economy.com."

Worse, Baby Bells such as Verizon (VZ ) and SBC (SBC ) continue to eat away at consumer long-distance monopoly of AT&T, Sprint, and WorldCom. That's on top of the woes the big three already face in operating backbone undersea and land-based networks, which they resell to other operators in some places. While Sprint, WorldCom, and AT&T don't face the type of imminent cash crunch as Global Crossing does, a consolidation among even the major long-distance providers is now a possibility."

SMART Letter The Enronization of Telecom

"The fundamental health of the [telecom] sector is likely to get worse before it gets better . . . The combination of: the sector's anemic growth outlook, the cannibalizing competitive mega-trends of wireless substitution, voice to data migration, Bell entry into long distance combined with local competition, and the bubble-induced excesses in debt and over-capacity, all create a powerful wealth destroying dynamic. Telecom's 'debt spiral' has gotten so bad that even the relatively strongest players who are still able to raise significant capital (VZ, SBC, and BLS) don't want to assume any more liabilities or business risk. Consequently, Precursor is reversing its long held view that consolidation can help improve the sector from excess capacity and debt any time soon."

David Isenberg and David Weinberger The Paradox of the Best Network

"Despite the darkened outlook, new communications capabilities are within reach that will make the current Internet look like tin cans and string. The technical know-how exists. Radically simplified technologies can blast bits a million times faster than the current network at a millionth of the cost. These are sitting in laboratories undeveloped, in warehouses undeployed, and in the field underutilized.

It's not even that the communications revolution has been derailed by inept or self-aggrandizing behavior by incumbent telephone companies and their government regulators. Something more fundamental is at work."

News.Com Will "Sims Online" alter gaming world?

""The Sims" succeeded, Wright said, by appealing to people who weren't interested in conventional games that pursue a fixed set of goals.

"The Sims was just an empty cup players pour their fantasies into," Wright said. "People will still do that with 'The Sims Online,' but now it's not just your fantasies...This feels more like a zoo, with a bunch of different fantasies running around."

"The Sims Online" will expand potential social interactions to thousands of other characters, all controlled by real people. Add a complex, free-market economic system, tools for creating in-game items and multiple chat vehicles, and you've got a game that emphasizes creativity and socializing over the swords-and-sorcery dynamics of the fantasy role-playing games that currently dominate online gaming."

redux [11.23.02]
The New York Times Magazine Oversimulated Suburbia
[requires 'free' registration]

"Unlike the fictional worlds that flow from the precious prose academies, the Sims world has the feel of real suburban life. It has the same emphasis on money making, shopping, coupling and party throwing. The Sims characters have real-estate fantasies, just as real people do. They have consumer longings. And most of all, they have this desperate need to carve out a place for themselves amid the sprawl.

Unlike people, say, in a traditional Italian village, Sims characters have weak bonds -- if any -- to extended family or past generations, and they feel this intense need to tie themselves to others, to create some local community in which they can be happy. And all the shopping and decorating and party giving and bonding is part of that quest -- the need to create your own roots in a mobile and individualistic world. That doesn't sound so strange for anybody living in modern America. Indeed, it's kind of inspiring. The creative process isn't just for art students and design professionals. It's alive out there amid the subdivisions."

Wired Magazine The Sims Online

"Since online gamers spend a good deal of time text-messaging anyway, Wright's real competition isn't a niche product like EverQuest. It's America Online chat rooms. Like AOL, TSO will take great pains to ease its users into online life: The setting is suburban, the socializing typically takes place at home, and the neighbors can easily stop by on foot.

Internet cafes have sprung up all over Baghdad in recent months, and even in smaller cities such as Karbala, a religiously conservative city 75 miles southwest of the capital. Just last month, the government took another major step, permitting some citizens to have Internet connections at home

Ironically, the game could replace the neighborly interaction it so deliberately emulates. Indeed, The Sims Online promises a particularly unthreatening version of the virtual world Neal Stephenson imagined in Snow Crash, a place people do the socializing they can't or won't in real life. The Metaverse has finally arrived -- and it looks a lot like Main Street, USA."

Taipei Times Gamers likely to shun `the Sims'

"Online gaming trends between Taiwanese and Americans vary greatly, with locals preferring to band together and fight off attackers as opposed to their counterparts across the Pacific who prefer to create a virtual life for themselves."

""Taiwanese players like to play games where they can kill other characters using swords, or band together in a group fighting against others," he said. "First person games, where the player does not see himself and looks at the world as if throug