Monthly Archives: July 2009

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What are the rules of a cyberwar?

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Despite its age (and its semantic inaccuracy), the term “cyberwar” is cropping up a great deal in mainstream media of late, and promises to do so with increasing frequency as the world’s infrastructure becomes more tightly interwoven with the internet. The web is the ideal platform for modern guerrilla warfare – there are no distances to be travelled, no supply logistics to marshal, and one kid with a serious Red Bull habit can potentially muster as much digital muscle as a major nation-state or criminal syndicate (if there’s any real difference left between the two in political and economical terms).

All this leaves the military brass in an uncomfortable position. They know how to define the terms of a meatspace war – the sorts of things considered to be a deliberate act of agression by an opponent, and the proportional responses to be taken – but cyberwar is a different beast entirely, as Kim Zetter points out at Wired‘s Dual Perspectives blog:

In a battle where the militarized zone exists solely in the ether(net) and where anyone can wield the cyber-equivalent of a 10-ton bomb, how do we fight, let alone find, the enemy? What standard of proof will be used to determine the origin of an anonymous attack?

And how do we know if the anonymous cyberwarrior attacking us is a soldier from the Red Army or just a Jolt-guzzling teen in his mother’s basement. Or, perhaps, a Jolt-guzzling teen who’s also a covert mercenary for the Red Army. Should the U.S. take action against a band of student hackers in China suspected of working for their government if Chinese authorities deny responsibility for their aggression?

Furthermore, if computers running NASDAQ trades are brought to a halt in a cyber attack, is that a criminal offense for the FBI to investigate or a national security incident worthy of a counterstrike? And how will the U.S. respond to freelance cyber warriors who sell their services to any adversary who pays the highest bid?

All good questions… and all devoid of easy answers.

While the immediate issues arising are easy enough to understand – the fragility of certain pieces of national and international infrastructure, whether military or civilian – the long-view problem remains unspoken, for reasons just as obvious: nation-states are now vulnerable to small political players and rogue individuals in a way that has no precedent in recent history (if ever). And as that vulnerability becomes more apparent, the power and authority that comes from being the capstone of the old hierarchical pyramid will start to erode more quickly…

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Get up to speed on high-frequency trading

New York Stock Exchange buildingRemember that story we ran a few weeks back about the alleged theft of the Goldman-Sachs automated trading code?

Well, thanks to said case, Goldman-Sachs and the high-frequency automatic trading (HFT) practices that they dominate are increasingly sliding into the spotlight of Congressional scrutiny, so Ars Technica have knocked up a brief guide to what it’s all about. If you thought “the markets” were those guys in suits shouting at each other on the trading room floor, think again. [image by Coffee Maker]

If you look under the hood of the markets in 2009, you’ll find that the trading floor has been replaced by electronic networks; the frantic, hand-signaling traders have been replaced by computer systems; and all of moves in the trader’s dance—a thousand little tricks and techniques (some legal, some questionable, and some outright illegal) for taking regular advantage of speed, location, and information to generate profits—are executed hundreds of times per second, billions of times per day. And the whole enterprise is mainly powered by the same hardware from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, that Ars readers use for gaming.

[…]

Only about three percent of the trading volume on the NYSE is actually carried out by means of traditional “open outcry” trading, where flesh-and-blood humans gather to buy and sell securities. The other 97 percent of NYSE trades are executed via electronic communication networks (ECNs), which, over the past ten years, have rapidly replaced trading floors as the main global venue for buying and selling every asset, derivative, and contract. So the ECNs are the markets in 2009, and those pit traders who pose for the cameras are mainly there for the cameras.

In other words, Josephine Average Stock-Trader is going head to head with supercomputers every time she dips a toe into the game. The ECN algorithms specialise in making millions of tiny trades, each making fractions of pennies of profit – small beer when considered in isolation, but big profits when scaled up to the sheer volume of transactions that these systems can handle.

It’s like a vast virtual ecosystem of predatory code-critters; go find out more about it. Know thy enemy, and all that.

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Psychohistory in the real world

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crowdResearchers at Indiana University believe that it may be possible to create a real-life version of Isaac Asimov’s concept of psychohistory:

Much as meteorologists predict the path and intensity of hurricanes, Indiana University’s Alessandro Vespignani believes we will one day predict with unprecedented foresight, specificity and scale such things as the economic and social effects of billions of new Internet users in China and India, or the exact location and number of airline flights to cancel around the world in order to halt the spread of a pandemic.

Psychohistory as described by Isaac Asimov holds that “while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events.”

This certainly seems similar to the ideas of reality mining discussed here:

Vespignani writes that advances in complex networks theory and modeling, along with access to new data, will enable humans to achieve true predictive power in areas never before imagined. This capability will be realized as the one wild card in the mix — the social behavior of large aggregates of humans — becomes more definable through progress in data gathering, new informatics tools and increases in computational power.

It is an exciting direction, and offers the possibility of a black-swan style technological breakthrough. With improved data, through things like spimes and ubiquitous computing, combined with improved data processing techniques and communications there exists the possibility for a new and powerful way of studying, monitoring, and even controlling social and technological developments with precision.

[via Next Big Future][image from woodleywonderworks on flickr]

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Science and drugs and rock’n’roll: can we make science cool?

Much like science fiction, science isn’t considered to be cool (unless you’re a geek like us, of course). So what can be done about science’s image problem?

Over here in the UK, a chap called Richard Bowdler is trying to open the eyes of ordinary people to the cooler sides of science by doing a form of outreach. His Guerrilla Science organisation sets up tents at music festivals and hosts talks, lectures and participatory hijinks, with the aim of pressing people’s sensawunda buttons and banishing the notion of science as dull stuff for people with slide rules and labcoats.

Often the host asks how many of those present hail from a science background – and always, only few put their hands up. So does Bowdler hold with the widely held view that the British public are not interested in science?

“I don’t subscribe to that view, but I would say that science is seen in a very uncool light, which I personally believe to be a rather immature standpoint.”

Speaking on the evolution of music, science writer Zoe Cormier is at pains to press this point home. Explaining the reasons for setting up the project she says: “We’re here to show you science is NOT boring.” She could well be preaching to the choir. After every talk there are dozens of inquisitive minds throwing forth questions.

And as one speaker told me, these aren’t the same as the questions discussed in science labs. Instead, the audience tends to see the big picture, and often the scope of their enquiries takes the scientists by surprise. When there’s no more time for questions, small crowds descend upon the speaker as the Q&A continues by the candy-pink stretch limousine outside. All of those presenting their research are flattered by the interest, often returning to lectures on similar areas of research the next day to form impromptu roundtable sessions with the audience. There’s no end to people’s appetite for science here.

How much of that openness to new ideas is due to the, er, explorative frame of mind that prevails at music festivals is open to debate. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that science, when properly framed, can fascinate everyone – think of the popularity of Carl Sagan, for instance, or the inimitable lecture style of the late Richard Feynman.

But is there perhaps a risk of cheapening science by trying to make it more rock’n’roll? After all, for every exciting moment in the lab, there’s plenty of dull number-crunching and repetitive procedures to go through; hell, my first year of university eroded my interest in electronics almost completely. Should science be left to those most suited to it by temperament?