J. D. Fielder

Infographic: China's Answer to Social Networking

Image courtesy of G+ and Mashable.  I crops down a bit on this page, so here's another link for the infographic.

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China and Other Realities of Cybersecurity

Fantastic article by James Fallows at The Atlantic:

"In a report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission late last year, Northrop Grumman prepared a time line of electronic intrusions and disruptions coming from sites inside China since 1999. In most cases it was impossible to tell whether the activity was amateur or government-planned, the report said. But whatever their source,  the disruptions were a problem. And in some instances, the 'depth of resources' and the 'extremely focused targeting of defense engineering data, US military operational information, and China-related policy information' suggested an effort that would be 'difficult at best without some type of state-sponsorship.'"

Later in the article Fallows provides an interview excerpt which in short says the most consequential cyber threats aren't 15-year old kids looking for trouble, but rather mature, sophisticated and well-funded cadres.  I concur.  Large scale cybercrime or conflict requires time, expertise and coordination to pull off: just like conventional or even unconventional conflict (even terrorism isn't cheap).  Furthermore:

"...nearly everyone in the business believes that we are living in, yes, a pre-9/11 era when it comes to the security and resilience of electronic information systems. Something very big—bigger than the Google-China case—is likely to go wrong, they said, and once it does, everyone will ask how we could have been so complacent for so long. Electronic-commerce systems are already in a constant war against online fraud."

Indeed.  You see, the problem with intelligence analysis and early warning is no one knows when you're successful.  Alas, everyone knows when you fail.  I assure you there are many motivivated security professionals out there working day and night to stop the big one. 

Sometimes the bad guys win.

When they do, though, successful contingency plans separate the organizational wheat from the chaff.  The organization that quickly triages and adapts to circumstances survives: the organization that fails at damage control will be paralyzed at best, and fall apart at worst.  Furthermore:

"This led to another, more surprising theme: that the main damage done to date through cyberwar has involved not theft of military secrets nor acts of electronic sabotage but rather business-versus-business spying."

There's big money to be made in competitive intelligence (i.e. legal spying on companies based on mining open-source information), and that's simple data mining.  But there's  even bigger money to be made in cracking another company's electronic safe.  In my opinion, the best cyberdefense tricks don't' come from the military, but from the business sector.

Good reading--check out the rest of the article here.

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Virtual Currency Becomes Real In South Korea

From JoongAng Daily via Slashdot:

The [South Korean] Supreme Court acquitted two defendants in a case related to the legality of using cash to buy and sell cyber money for online games.  The court conditioned its ruling on the fact that the cyber money was earned through skill, not luck.

From Slashdot:

For those of you who might not be drawing the link, the core there is that selling in-game currency for real money is essentially just an exchange of currency and perfectly legal in South Korea.

Basically, by paying for a virtual object users are paying to save time, i.e. the user does not have to commit X number of hours to buy or find an in-game item.  Unggi Yoon at  Terra Nova provides a similar illustration:

"The appellate court overruled the decision and explained that Lineage is game of sweat, not a game of luck, considering that it takes lots of time and effort to get Aden by hunting & Aden can be earned not only thru hunting but also thru PVP combat and P2P market in lineage world."

I'm personally not ready to quit my day job to start an virtual goods arbitrage business, but this is still an eye-opening reminder on how virtual goods are quite real for players. 

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Google Removes Search Filters in China!

Word.

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China." CONTINUED

Laughing Squid is reporting uncensored images of the Tiananmen Square protests are now showing up in Google.cn searches.  More to follow, I hope...

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(Abstract) The Internet's Impact on Activism: The Case of Burma

My first abstract post.  As I conduct my own literature reviews I'll post links to pertinent research for your reading enjoyment.  I'll post links to free content when possible, but access to most full text articles requires a fee.  However, your local academic or public library may offer free access to online journals and journal aggregators (such as JSTOR). 

I will also maintain a list of abstracts on my Literature Review page.

This is an older article, but it's worth reading about the early influences of the Internet on political science.

Danitz T.; Strobel W. P. "The Internet's Impact on Activism: The Case of Burma." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 22, Number 3, 1 July 1999 , pp. 257-269(13)

Abstract: The case of Burma raises intriguing questions about the effect of modern computer communications on nonviolent grass-roots movements and on the balance of power between citizens and elected officials, and between local, national, and international power structures. Geographically dispersed, but knitted by the Internet, the pro-democracy movement concerned with Burma (a small, and to many, obscure Southeast Asian nation), was able to raise Constitutional and national policy questions in the United States, when state government passed foreign policy legislation without consulting Washington. This decision violated international trade agreements between the U.S. federal government and foreign entities. Then, in April 1997, President Clinton signed federal legislation banning any new investment by U.S. companies in Burma. . . . These legislative decisions were made due to a grass-roots campaign run to a considerable degree on the Internet, and despite the presence of only a negligible Burmese constituency in the United States. . . . This article shows how the Internet has aided the cause of activists of various cultures in ways that would not have been possible in the era before the Internet's networking capabilities became cheaply and globally available.   Full Text available at IngentaConnect

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