Phi Beta Iota: The below commentary is so spectacularly intelligent and concise we are cross-posting it from Quora, with a link to the original project and multiple questions as the end of the observations.
We forget before there was Facebook, there was Friendster, there was MySpace, there were chatrooms, email and AIM. There will always be the threat of a smart person creating something infinitely better.
Here are the things a “New Facebook” social network would win with:
If it's stats you want, this is an interesting insight. A wide variety of sources from around the Web were used to put this post together and Pingdom.com also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to chew on – this is as at January 12, 2011. It's a good kind of information overload!
Email
* 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
* 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
* 480 million – New email users since the year before.
* 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
* 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
* 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
* 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
By the end of the attack, Barr's iPad was reputedly erased, his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts were hijacked, the HBGary Federal website was defaced, proprietary HBGary source code was stolen and with over 71,000 private emails now published to the internet, HBGary was laid bare.
In this, was our first lesson: The asymmetry of cyber warfare.
The United States and the world are now a good two decades into the Internet revolution, or what was once called the information age. The past generation has seen a blizzard of mind-boggling developments in communication, ranging from the World Wide Web and broadband, to ubiquitous cell phones that are quickly becoming high-powered wireless computers in their own right. Firms such as Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and Facebook have become iconic. Immersion in the digital world is now or soon to be a requirement for successful participation in society. The subject for debate is no longer whether the Internet can be regarded as a technological development in the same class as television or the telephone. Increasingly, the debate is turning to whether this is a communication revolution closer to the advent of the printing press.
. . . . . . .
The Internet, or more broadly, the digital revolution is truly changing the world at multiple levels. But it has also failed to deliver on much of the promise that was once seen as implicit in its technology. If the Internet was expected to provide more competitive markets and accountable businesses, open government, an end to corruption, and decreasing inequality-or, to put it baldly, increased human happiness-it has been a disappointment. To put it another way, if the Internet actually improved the world over the past twenty years as much as its champions once predicted, we dread to think where the world would be if it had never existed.
Phi Beta Iota: What has become clear to our collective is that the Internet really does need to be free, and that includes the software, the spectrum, and the access to knowledge. The Autonomous Internet is a non-negotiable first step toward a prosperous world at peace.
If independent, democratic, governments are formed in the Middle East, they won't follow Washington's orders.
Lamis Andoni
09 Mar 2011 11:45 GMT
Al Jazeera
Barack Obama, the US president, has still not fully grasped the essence of the revolutions underway in the Arab world. He genuinely seems to believe that the people rallying for democracy in the region are making a pro-Western, if not pro-Israeli, statement.
In the fall of 2010, CACI of Arlington, a major player in the U.S. government's cyber security business, held a symposium entitled “Cyber Threats to National Security,” in partnership with the U.S. Naval Institute to discuss the issue of Cyber Security. CACI is chasing roughly $2 billion worth of cyber-related contracts over the next few years and company executives said they sponsored the symposium pro bono.
The symposium's conclusions: There are redundancies, little coordination and a lack of clarity among the various government agencies, organizations and military command posts that do cyber work. The symposium report notes, “agencies have overlapping and uncoordinated responsibilities for cyber security activities.”
The Obama administration's new Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), it says, “faces substantial challenges that cannot be overcome unless roles and responsibilities of all key CNCI participants are fully coordinated.” That includes several agencies: “Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security; the Intelligence Community and other executive branch entities,” all with “various overlapping and potentially competing responsibilities.”
Cybercom under General Alexander is not even going to come close to addressing these problems. Indeed the whole CNCI Program looks increasingly like yet another ploy to grow the U.S. National Security Establishment and spread the government largesse to a new party of contractors. There is no evidence that I have seen that any persons of consequence in the U.S. Government have actually examined the concept of U.S. cyberspace, much less explored methods and techniques that could be employed to provide it with minimum security.
The reason this suggests that the whole CNCI is a scam is that in point of fact that concepts such as ‘cyberspace’ and securing cyberspace have been extensively studied by computer and telecommunications experts in and out of government. No less a government authority than the U.S. National Defense University (a DOD institution) published a detailed and accurate study of these topics in the book Cyberpower and National Security. So the ignorance and confusion over the development of a comprehensive cybersecurity plan on the part of the leaders of the CNCI Program, including General Alexander, is really inexcusable.
That is not to say that the people leading the CNCI are not intelligent, but it is to say they are not serious. They are detached from the real world of cyber threats and information operations and live in a world where all problems are solved by what Robert Steele accurately refers to as contactor vapor ware.
John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney
