For ‘attack’ read ‘protect’

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Fascinating piece in the NYTimes about US reaction to a Chinese academic paper on cybersecurity.

It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.

Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

When reached by telephone, Mr. Wang said he and his professor had indeed published “Cascade-Based Attack Vulnerability on the U.S. Power Grid” in an international journal called Safety Science last spring. But Mr. Wang said he had simply been trying to find ways to enhance the stability of power grids by exploring potential vulnerabilities.

“We usually say ‘attack’ so you can see what would happen,” he said. “My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.” And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.

The difference between Mr. Wang’s explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction…

The Net didn’t kill US newspapers: they committed suicide

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Instructive little vignette from 247wallstreet:

Gannett (GCI) is part of the crumbling newspaper industry. It has not gotten its online properties to nearly match the revenue of its traditional print operations, so the firm is still shrinking and has no real answer to it troubles. Gannett’s stock is off 80% over the last five years, which is much greater that the shares of either The New York Times Company (NYT) or The Washington Post (WPO). Gannett’s revenue is likely to drop again in 2010.

But, Gannett CEO Craig Dubow made $4.7 million last year according to the Gannett proxy. That is up from $3.1 million in 2008. Senior executives at the paper company get the customary access to private cars and the firm’s jet.

Gannett has fired thousands of people over the last two years and asked others to take weeks without pay. The company has not come up with a single meaningful strategic plan to overcome the slide in its fortunes. Operations like Huffington Post , Politico, and The Daily Beast have flanked Gannett. It never had the intelligence to launch its own large internet-only products. Perhaps it feared that would cannibalize its print properties, but they are dying anyway.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for the link.

Only connect…

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This morning’s Observer column:

My mother used to say that television had killed the art of conversation. One wonders what she would have made of Chatroulette, the current sensation du jour. It’s the implementation of a stunningly simple idea: live online chats with randomly chosen, complete strangers.

After logging in two frames appear on the left-hand side of the screen. The lower one shows you (or what your webcam is pointing at). The other is labelled “Partner”. Click “New Game” and you’re off. An image of someone or something appears in the upper frame.

“Connected,” says the status bar, “Feel free to talk now.” If you don’t like what you see, click the “Next” button and you’re instantly connected to someone else. And so it goes.

To anyone unused to raw, unmediated Net culture, Chatroulette will come as a shock…

Genius, pure genius

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From the Guardian report:

Last night, Britain’s most prestigious design prize was awarded to a plug. At a ceremony at the Design Museum, the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year award was carried off by an unknown Korean who only graduated from the Royal College of Art last summer. Min-Kyu Choi was probably not the first person to notice the disparity between his Macbook Air laptop (thin enough to slide into a manila envelope) and the plug attached to it (so bulky you need a duffel bag). But he was certainly the first to sit down and redesign the plug so that it folds flat. This piece of electrical origami says all you need to know about the power of designers to transform our everyday world.

The company set up to produce the plug is here. As someone who also has a MacBook Air and is driven wild by the idiotic UK standard plug, I’d like to order one. Actually I’d like to order about ten. They would make terrific gifts for my geeky friends.

The gospel according to Orlowski

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From Spiked-Online.

Google has two business strategies. One strategy is to ensure that the internet’s pipelines, both wired and wireless, can’t make money. It has lobbied for a ‘neutral’ internet, and sought to write the first technical regulations ever imposed on the internet – the first rulebook for operators. Robbing the retail networks (in the jargon, ‘access networks’, or ISPs) of the ability to generate value allows Google to concentrate the value instead in its vast data centres. It’s a peculiarly inefficient way of distributing bits, and precludes all kind of clever network innovation – but it’s the one that Google prefers. It’s where it has placed its bets.

The other strategy, more noticeable, helps ensure the destruction of the value of copyright. This permits Google to become, by default, the world’s royalty collection society, the only aggregator of digital value. As with internet advertising today, Google would set the royalty rates, weakening the ability of creators to negotiate collectively for better rates, as they do today. Newspapers, publishers and other media companies have only belatedly begun to come to terms with Google’s take-no-prisoners approach. For example, it took EMI Publishing six months to realise that Google had digitised its valuable sheet music collection, as part of its Google Books settlement, without asking. There are entire industries that don’t realise they’re in Google’s crossfire, until they’ve been shot, and the body carried from the battlefield.