Sec. Clinton is off in Estonia for a High Muckamuck level confab to talk about what NATO should be doing with itself. I think the biggest military alliance the world has ever seen has been managing to keep busy just fine, but every few years they seem to have these angsty existential crises. NATO’s core […]
The Fog of War is particularly foggy in cyberspace. Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, NSA director and the new nominee to head up Cyber Command, produced 32 pages of answers to Senators’ questions leading up to his nomination hearings. AP wrote a piece on one aspect: the Pentagon’s plan to counter any Internet-delivered attacks “swiftly and strongly.” […]
Hold on to your hats. In my last post I mentioned that the US and Russia were in complete agreement over one of the core problems of the Internet. From the same Times story: During a panel discussion on computer crime, Col. Gen. Boris N. Miroshnikov, an official with the Russian Interior Ministry, and Stewart […]
Governmental cyber officials from around the world met up in Germany this week to discuss international Internet security. The US hasn’t played a significant role in this hootenanny in the past. There are some huge differences between the US and Russia on the role of the Internet. We’re concerned about online crime, espionage and hacker […]
The Internet sure is good at misinformation. The saints at Snopes fix it one debunking at a time. Cyberwar Bingo! An awesome tongue-in-cheek look at CyberAlarmism. Michelle Bachmann (R-NUT) thinks the United States should keep the option of nuking nations who hit us with a cyber attack. The Guys with the Cool Robes in the […]
Looks like Bakiev’s government is out in Kyrgyzstan. Opposition Claims Control in Kyrgyzstan – NYTimes.com. This is wild and unexpected – your humble blogger spent a summer over there working with Internews, an independent free media advocate. It’s 5 years since they overthrew their last autocrat, but turned out to be a bummer of a […]
A bill by Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and co-sponsored by Olympia Snowe (R-ME) called the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (yes, I know, but remember the Senate is, well, a bit slow) just dropped out of committee and may see floor action soon.* It’s an interesting piece of work, and only 50 pages, so I’m actually going […]
The US isn’t the only target of Chinese hackers that-of-course-aren’t-government-sponsored-though-the-PLA-does-fund-hacking-research-in-their-school groups. That other rising Asian great power – the one that fought a couple of wars with China and is harboring their archnemisis – got pwned in a bad way. The NY Times has a story on it that makes for interesting reading. At the […]
Social networking makes for really, really targeted marketing possibilities. A bunch of advocacy groups dealing with Sudan are putting up Facebook ads aimed at people who work in Congress. Your employer is part of your Facebook profile. So if it happens to be Congress, bing! (erm, not that Bing™) there you go. They can also key […]
The Marines are onboard with this whole Social Networking thing, following along with guidelines from On High. From Wired’s Danger Room It’s a remarkable about-face. A Marine Corps order last summer described such sites as “a proven haven for malicious actors and content.” And it warned that adversaries were using SNS [social network sites] as an “attack […]
Bloomberg (home to belovedly hard-to-use finance info terminals, as well as actual news) notes that the Taliban systematically destroys the mobile phone infrastructure of the (shrinking?) chunks of Afghanistan they control. Why? Afghanistan, with 29 million people, had as many as 12 million cellular-service subscribers in December, according to the Afghan government. Fifty-two percent of the population […]
GoDaddy, home of lousy Internet hosting and scandalous Super Bowl ads, has inexplicably been a success with their cut-rate domain registration and hosting. Meanwhile, in the Middle Kingdom the Chinese government continues grasp as many levers of control over Internet users as possible. To register your own web name in the Chinese domain name space (eg, […]
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