cybernetics and cyber war

My favorite cyber crime story is still from 1994: “The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc.“. Mostly because of this:

The traffickers have the advantages of unlimited funds and no scruples, and they’ve invested billions of dollars to create a technological infrastructure that would be the envy of any Fortune 500 company — and of the law enforcement officials charged with going after the drug barons. “I spent this morning working on the budget,” the head of DEA intelligence, Steve Casteel, said recently. “Do you think they have to worry about that? If they want it, they buy it.”

I’m going through a lot of the current literature on cyber war, cyber crime and how the cyberspace is the new dimension.Strategies and tactics are being published and there are even people who write about regulation of cyber weapons (go figure).

With all this noise generated on the subject from all kinds of people, maybe it is time to make the leap and start thinking about moving from cyber space to cybernetic space. War (and organized crime) is a lot about management (and many aspiring management suits recite “Art of War” seeking enlightenment and higher ground) so it seems natural to me that cybernetic management deserves a chance as a strategic tool.

Hmm…

The Law of Armed Conflict and the Economy – A question

While (according to my understanding) War theroticians have not concluded adequately when a cyber-attack can be answered with the use of kinetic force, especially in the case of non-state actors, a new question emerges:

– When a non-state actor (or even a state one) attacks my Economy, is the use of kinetic (or other) force a justified act of defense?

(χωρίς σχόλιο)

Hunters of Dune

How painfully boring! How totally disrespectful of the original series.

Oh how much I am not buying your excuses (from both of you).

Brian Herbert publish Frank Herbert‘s bare Dune 7 notes if you dare!

Foreseeing the RSA hack?

“Inside Cyberwarfare” which I am reading slowly but steadily, proves to be a prophetic book. Chapter 10 describes a methodology similar to the one that seems to have been used in the RSA hack.

This book continues to amaze me in so many levels.

It is Sysadmin Day today!

Happy SysAdminDay!

Aiming for failure

Thanks to @gtzi the following quote by Herbert Swope came to my attention:

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody

Just like your Postmaster, or your System Administrator, be him either junior or senior. Impossible tasks and system administration go hand-in-hand…

Gambit REPL

I try Gambit Scheme almost once a year, therefore I am a casual user at best. It may be because Racket comes with a fullfilling environment and a book. But now with Gambit REPL on the iPad, this is going to be more frequent. It reminded me the days of LispMe and the Palm IIIx years ago.

Update: A few days later I wondered whether there exists a good calculator for the iPad. And then it struck me: I already had a Polish Notation one: The Gambit REPL.

Bluefire Reader

Thanks to Bluefire Reader I can now read ePubs and PDFs with Adobe DRM (like the ones I’ve bought from ebooks.com) using the iPad.

Foreseeing stuxnet?

I copy from “Inside Cyber Warfare“:

“For instance, a cyber attack might shut down a system, rendering it inoperable for some time, or a cyber attack might cause an explosion at a chemical plant by tampering with the computers that control the feed mixture rates. The results of those attacks mirror the results of conventional armed attacks, previously only achievable through kinetic force, thus satisfying the instrument based approach.”

The book was published in 2009. This quote is taken verbatim from “Solving the Dilemma of State Responses to Cyberattacks” which is again dated April 2009.

Stuxnet was detected around July 2010. Sort of Life imitating Art…

Update: Shortly after I pressed [Publish] my twitter stream was filled with mentions of “How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History“.