Last Tuesday–not coincidentally, on some accounts, September 11–US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens was killed following an attack on the US Embassy to Libya in Benghazi. The attack, followed by others and by widespread protests against US and other Western diplomatic missions in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, is purported to have been […]
We were first alerted to the existence of the Stuxnet worm in 2010, due to some interesting security breaches and reporting in the New York Times making it clear that a nation-state–by direct implication and what may have been deliberate misdirection at that time, Israel–must have been behind the worm. Soon after we were alerted […]
In the latest skirmish in the Google-China information war–but is really more like a US-China war, it seems to me, in which we have been drafted by a private corporation with what I can’t see as consent–Google has shut off its mainland china servers and redirected traffic to google.hk. It’s another remarkable example of the […]
One of the central and most symptomatic of computational slogans is “information wants to be free.” Like most computational ideologies, it’s willfully techno-determinist, almost vitalist, with regard to “what information does,” even if many who recite the slogan may find ways to construe it otherwise. Like many pieces of “wisdom” that circulate in the digital […]
First published on Harvard University Press blog, Jun 24 2009. Few words have been heard more often lately than revolution. The word occurs in two ways, but the connection between them is at best fuzzy. First, commentators wonder if Iran is going through a political revolution. Second, they speculate about an “internet revolution”—not merely a […]
Original reportage by Michael Holden of Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2658640020071106 Experts Say West Can’t Stop Web Radicalization Tues, Nov 6, 2007 By Michael Holden 19 minutes ago LONDON (Reuters) – From behind a computer keyboard at his London home, student Younes Tsouli used the Internet to spread al Qaeda propaganda, recruit suicide bombers and promote Web sites […]