The Hacker Cold War

We live, today, in a world of dying nations. Individual national sovereignty is slowly, but surely, dying out. But group conflict isn't dying out with it.

And make no mistake -- this dye-off is essentially now inevitable. As the "information age" progresses, we continue to find ourselves economically closer and closer to our not-so-near neighbors. Information continues to take a higher and higher role in the world; instantaneous money exchanges allows for you to buy something hand-made in Germany from the comfort of your own home -- and have it delivered in, say, a week -- directly from the producer. This is strongly reflected in the slow downward spiral in the strength of patriotism. To be called a "patriot" is almost an insult in some circles today; the term comes closer and closer to approaching hollowness.

The first and second World Wars were fought essentially between nations; they were the result, in many ways, of nationalist conflict. So, one would imagine, the global tensions of the world would be fading out as nationalism itself fades. And yet, tensions and strife continue to build up throughout the world, not just the continual conflict-cesspool, the Near Orient. (That's the Middle East for those of you not quite so familiar with the term.) So whom, then, will be the masters, and whom the soldiers, of the wars of tomorrow? Well, on one side at the least will be, of course, multi-national corporations. And the soldiers of both sides will be clear: "hackers." Information has reached supremacy in almost every other area of our world -- so it should come as no surprise to anyone that warfare and conflict should have the corrupting tinge of the techno-devil as well.

Microsoft, certainly, agrees with this. Consider the following, from a Microsoft employee, on a Microsoft-sponsored blog:

Microsoft employs some of the best hackers in the world and actively recruits them and develops them. They work on all kinds of projects, whether it be in development, research, testing, management and of course security.

[...]

We employ "white hat hackers" who spend their time pentesting and code reviewing applications and software looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities so that others don't once we've released that code into the wild.

Disturbingly, it is painfully evident that the world simply isn't ready for this. The measures necessary to ensure that such conflicts at the very least don't spill over into the common public's inconvenience aren't at all certain. Our governments seem to be completely inept on the subject. American Judges believe that RAM-memory can be archived. Germany's new Anti-hacker law is so ubiquitous that simply saying your own password aloud where someone else can hear it is criminal. A significant portion of the corporate workforce of the world is so unfamiliar with computers that they can't understand how to select printers from a dropdown -- as this author can personally relay, having witnessed exactly this for himself only yesterday.

Meanwhile, it would seem that the governments of the world are still playing their information warfare games -- with even China, denying it all the way, stepping into the mix:

German weekly Der Spiegel reported espionage programs had been detected in computer systems at Ms Merkel's office, the Foreign Ministry and other government agencies in Berlin.

Investigations showed the programs could be traced back to People's Liberation Army hackers, it said.

"Hacking is an international issue and China itself is often attacked," [Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu] said.

And as all of this progresses, the "fallow" hackers -- the 'wild' ones out in the field -- continue to have a field-day stripping DRM technology from anything they can -- from the iPhone (as previously reported on this blog) -- to NetFlix:

A hacker has posted instructions for how to save streamed movies from the Netflix Inc. service, undermining Microsoft Corp.'s copy protection technology designed to prevent people from saving the content.

The hack is the latest in an escalating technical war by hackers against DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies, which limit how music and movies can be used in order to prevent piracy.

[...]

Microsoft has updated its DRM technology twice before to block the effectiveness of FairUse4WM. Last month, hackers on the Doom9.org forum declared another victory, saying it had defeated Microsoft's DRM again, and the company said it was investigating.

Now, many of you regular readers might be asking; what has this got to do with the avowed purpose of this blog -- journalism of the libertarian/transhumanist sort? To be clear; the 'fallow' sort of hacker -- that is hacker, not cracker -- is amongst the forefront of the technophilic freedom-lover that we libertarian transhumanists must draw our spiritual and philosophical sustenance from. (Yes, because both libertarians and transhumanists are really evil blood-sucking vampires. Didn't you know? Rifkin and Fukuyama are really prescient clerics of the coming dawn!) And keeping track of what happens in this conflict -- the 'fallow' hackers -- not black-hats, but 'wild bunch', who seek to maximize the utility of information for the end-users whom they believe they champion (rightly or wrongly), and the corporations which seek to restrict the use of products to how they see fit -- essentially, using their economic and political wealth to ensure positions of dominance over the common man.

Consider this a "state-of-the-conflict" report, then: as demonstrated above, we're in a bit of a "Hacker Cold-War" today; though you wouldn't know it to look up those terms specifically -- and the prognosis is... "Iffy, with a moderate chance of 'Oh, S&*!.'"