The Internet has been in a lot of headlines the past few weeks. Here is a roundup of net-related news I found interesting:

The Past

Preserving digital information for posterity is a serious problem. Getty Images has poured a lot of cash into researching ways to allow our great-great grandchildren to access the old, worn JPEGs from our modern day digital cameras. The World Wide Web History Center was recently in Canada calling for awareness.

Censorship

The OpenNet Initiative, based out of the University of Toronto, has a great interactive map detailing the pervasiveness of internet filtering on a country to country basis. A similar map was in The Atlantic Monthly this time last year.

The Wild West

On April 27th a wave of DOS attacks began flooding government, banking and media websites in Estonia. The attacks originated in Russia and were said to be in retaliation of the Soviet war memorial removed from Tallinn. This weeks Economist has a good article detailing the Estonia attacks and describing the state of flux that the field of net security is in. It cites NATO and the International Telecommunication Union as two IGOs getting ready to wade into regulating aggressive activity on the Web. The Economist also covers a number of historical state related internet-based attacks, many of which you probably never heard of.

MAD 2.0

John Robb also covered the Estonia attacks, and sees a new tool of statecraft: Mutually Assured Disruption.

In a globally competitive marketplace, ongoing disruption of a single country’s economic system can result in rapid declines in relative performance. Computer assaults can accomplish this result with a high level of deniability.

The first line of defence against this kind of attack is the market. Businesses that depend on the global communications capability of the net will be taking precautions to defend their interests, and in turn defend the economy as a whole. But there may be a role for the government to play, and John’s idea of a new MAD might be it. The disruptions John mentions should like economic warfare. But is it that simple? Last month’s attack on Estonia rendered its emergency services call number dark for more than an hour. Lives, in addition to cash, hang in the balance. This is much bigger than the market. Check it out: DHS has a division under the Office of Policy development dedicated to cybersecurity.

Words

The FT has just launched a handy new glossary of IT terms for business.

“Information warfare” is an extremely cumbersome term that doesn’t exactly describe the attacks on Estonia. DR has a list of terms used in the media recently, including one they coined themselves: Cybarmageddon!

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