21st Century Wire says…
We all know about websites crashing, or institutional infrastructure crashing, but can the Internet crash? The answer is ‘yes’.
As we’ve pointed out before to 21WIRE readers, roughly 99% of TED Talks are pretty useless musings, book promotions, liberal utopian dreamscaping and corporate promotional seminars – but once in a while, a truly independent speaker will share some important information.
Dr. Danny Hillis (photo, above) has been on the Internet since the early 1980’s – a time when you could list every existing email address in one small booklet (see video). Hillis explains what the Internet is, and how it is vulernable, as well as some key points regarding our ever increasing flawed dependency on its basic infrastructure.
Note also that Hillis alludes to the Stuxnet cyber attack by the US and Israel against Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities, although Hillis does not specifically admit who did it and how (standard TED self-censoring, because “it’s too political”).
21WIRE believes that the Stuxnet virus was not delivered via a smuggled USB drive, but rather the virus was delivered in Iran via automatic Microsoft OS updates.
Regardless of the immense volume of tertiary arguments naturally attached to this conversation, the fundamental issues raised by Hillis are real and will need to be addressed by governments who are currently too obsessed with spying on their own citizens and public officials.
With all these great brains on the case, you have to wonder: why haven’t redundancies already been developed? Which leads us to the biggest relevant question in all : is Internet 1.0 being built to fail in order to usher in top-down controlled Internet 2.0? The classic Helegian dialectic rules in this scenario – problem-reaction-solution.
The future has already arrived…
The fact is the world runs on software and software and is subject to attack. The Internet, which we’ve come to depend on, is full of vulnerabilities. One of the big risks is that we know the parts, but we don’t really know how the whole thing works as an “emergent system.”
What’s an “emergent system”: think the weather. This is not a crank. He got his PhD from MIT and holds over 150 U.S. patents.
Danny pioneered the idea of parallel computers that is now the foundation for super computing, and RAID disk array technology that all large databases depend on.
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READ MORE STUXNET NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire STUXNET Files
