technology: December 2007 Archives

ForeignPolicy.com has a list of the top 10 foreign policy stories you may have missed (if you're not a foreign policy nut like some of us.)

Number 1? The beginning of the cyberwars:

The year 2007 will be remembered as the beginning of the cyberwars. In late April, Western experts were caught off guard when a barrage of cyberattacks emanating from Russia crippled the banking, police, and government offices of Estonia. Many called it the world's first full-scale cyberinvasion. Then in June, Pentagon officials accused the Chinese military of hacking into a computer network used by top aides to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Near the end of the year, Britain's MI5 intelligence service sent a confidential letter to the CEOs of major multinationals warning them that the Chinese army was probing the cyberdefenses of their companies.

This emerging threat may explain why in September the U.S. Air Force quietly decided to form a Cyberspace Command. The new Cyberspace Command, due to become fully operational by October 2009, will be charged with helping to guard against such threats.

Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for the US Military to form a command centre to take care of cyber-threats. So far, such defense had lain in the hands of intelligence gathering agencies like the NSA or CIA, that, while they have expertise in security issues, don't have the resources needed for full on network and computer infrastructure maintenance and defence. They're intelligence gathering services, after all, not defence agencies.

The questions that comes up is: will the Air Force seek to recruit some of the best qualified people to work as these cyberwarriors? I ask this because some of the best people are former black-hat hackers (black-hat refers to malicious hackers) that have turned their knowledge of systems penetration tactics into a skill set in the securities consulting business. Somehow, I think the Air Force would find that pill a little hard to swallow with their attitude tests and psychological profiling.

Update: I forgot the link to the ForeignPolicy.com article. It's now been added. Way to forget the basic premise, Ed.

I apologise for the lack of updates recently. I was unable to log into the administration area of the blog for a couple of days, and I spent a good amount of time trying to resolve that issue myself.

I found out today that it was caused by my web hosts upgrading their server software. Since Movable Type isn't completely portable to all OS's, this broke the administration scripts.

Luckily, my web hosting company, Total Choice Hosting, has a great tech support department, so they got my blog back up and running with a few code modifications within a couple of hours after I told them of the issue.

In case any of you out there run into the same issue with your hosts, I'm told the solution is to add the following code into /lib/MT/Bootstrap.pm:

$ENV{'MT_HOME'} = '/home/username/path-to/cgi-bin/mt';

I had tried a similar solution, but apparently in the wrong cgi files. Thanks, Total Choice. I've gotten nothing but good service from them, and they have active MT users among the administration, so it helps a great deal that they know how to help us MT users.

I should be back to my regular posting schedule by tomorrow.

AOL News has come up with a really funny commercial that shows us YouTube celebrities as they would appear in the real world:

Nice job, AOL.

The 2007 Merriam-Webster "Word of the Year" is (drum roll please):

w00t.

That's right folks, a l337 speak word has made it into the Word of the Year list. For those that are technology or l337 deficient, I'll let CBS explain:

"W00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness.

I never thought "w00t" could sound so sterile.

Guilty admission: I've been known to exclaim "w00t!" out loud in real life when happy. Yes, I know I'm a dork, thank you very much.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007 [Merriam-Webster]