by Alec Muffett
“#LondonCyber: our very own Star Trek conference”
#LondonCyber: our very own Star Trek conference
Billions and billions… shields to maximum until it’s all over
So the FCO’s London Conference on Cyberspace is here – and on Twitter – and you cannot have missed yesterday’s press trailers:
…read more, or comment at Unscrewing Security
I’ve been watching the live feed from the conference on the FCO site (would have considered attending, but didn’t know in advance what my other commitments this week would be). Seems there’s a lot of whistling in the dark; pretty much all issues raised thus far (with the honourable exception of accessibility for the disabled) are issues around people and their behaviour, and, reductio ad absurdum, “technology as culture and ideology clash enabler”.
The presentations in the last session had much in common with eachother (particularly about increasing and enabling worldwide connectivity and its perceived benefit for improving human rights), however there were a few points which stood out for me: Jimmy Wales being playfully subversive about Wikipedia’s self-governance model and recent nose-thumbing in the face of elements of national legislation which were considered unreasonable, Carl Bildt being very erudite and balanced on how opportunities and threats both employ the same tools, and William Hague delivering a very good introductory speech which nonetheless had an interesting piece of doublethink in it. Specifically, Hague’s mention of “freedom from censorship” and “protection of children” in almost-adjacent breaths points to the deeper truth that even in liberal societies, children do not enjoy the full set of human rights, by design – and this blind spot makes me think of the kind of self-inconsistencies which can exist in the manual, human world which are exposed and require considerable discussion and rework at a fundamental level when you get computers involved (unsurprisingly, I’m remembering examples from identity management projects, here)…
Good reviews, Dave. I can’t even get the streaming to work…
Ta, will continue putting them up, then :-). I’ve had the odd streaming glitch, but nothing more than a few seconds; I’m on OS X 10.7.2, Firefox 7.0.1, Flash 10.3.183.10, so nothing out of the ordinary (and a couple of things even need updating); streaming is flash-based.
I’m taking a little time to comment on the last few presentations; unfortunately the audio mix between the mics of the current Russian presenter and his interpreter is “the wrong way up” for someone who doesn’t speak Russian :-(.
William Hague wheeled David Cameron in for a brief address; he mentioned some surprising stats (which were a little too quick for me to note) which attempt to map broadband speed increase to GDP increase. The oft-quoted “1 trillion dollar cost of cybercrime” figure was quoted, again, along with a brief discussion to the effect that $1 can buy details of a stolen credit card, and there are online stores where such wares are available.
It was also mentioned that Britain is shortly to set out a programme for better online security and awareness, and (as has been mentioned by several other speakers), “Government must not use cybersecurity as an excuse for censorship”
VP Joe Biden presented via video link; he said the Internet is set to grow to 5bn users in the next 20 years from 2bn now. He seems to buy into the “cyberspace” metaphor pretty much wholeheartedly; “international law applies ‘there’”, “it’s a new ‘space’”, “one nation can’t assess the force posture of another, ‘there’”, and “”human rights applies to cyberspace just as surely as to every corner of every nation on earth”.
He also made some entirely open swipes at the Internet censorship attempts of various nations, clearly taking aim at one in particular, which he did not name.
Of particular interest was the revelation that the CERTs and nuclear risk reduction centres of the US and Russia are about to be be linked, for purposes of collaboration and threat management…
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