Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy. Over the past two years there has been a steady drumbeat of alarmist rhetoric coming out of Washington about potential catastrophic cyber threats. For example, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last year, Chairman Carl Levin said that “cyberweapons and cyberattacks potentially can be devastating, approaching weapons of mass destruction in their effects.” Proposed responses include increased federal spending on cybersecurity and the regulation of private network security practices. The rhetoric of “cyber doom” employed by proponents of increased federal intervention, however, lacks clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public. As a result, the United States may be witnessing a bout of threat inflation similar to that seen in the run-up to the Iraq War. Additionally, a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War.
Follow Jerry on Google+ Soap is crusting up sewers, but it's not the clean kind. By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY Updated 4/27/2011 9:38 PM | Nationwide, about 22% of sanitary sewer overflows are caused by accumulations of a hard, gucky, adhesive substance called FOG, short for "fats, oils and grease. " But until now, no one knew exactly what it was or how it formed. A team of environmental engineers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh have been working since 2004 to unravel the mystery. What they've found comes as a surprise: The grayish-white, gritty formations that look like stalagmites along the walls of big sewer pipes are actually soap. "But this isn't Ivory," says Joel Ducoste, a professor of environmental science at the university. To chemists, all soaps are fatty acid salts. Household soaps are made from either sodium or potassium mixed with fat.
"It's fairly dense and hard, and it takes either high pressure water or cutting heads to cut through it," says Donald Smith, utility pretreatment manager for the town of Cary, N.C. A Declaration of Cyber-War. The secret of Stuxnet’s existence may have been blown, but clearly someone—someone whose timing was either spectacularly lucky or remarkably well informed—was sparing no effort to fight back.
Omens of Doomsday The volcanoes of Kamchatka were calling to Eugene Kaspersky. In the first week of July, the 45-year-old C.E.O. and co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, the world’s fourth-largest computer-security company, had been in his Moscow office, counting the minutes until his Siberian vacation would start, when one of his engineers, who had just received a call about Stuxnet from Microsoft, came rushing in, barely coherent: “Eugene, you don’t believe, something very frightening, frightening, frightening bad.”
After VirusBlokAda found Stuxnet, and Microsoft announced its existence, Kaspersky Lab began researching the virus. To help lead his Stuxnet team, Kaspersky chose Roel Schouwenberg, a bright-eyed, ponytailed Dutch anti-virus researcher who, at 26, has known Kaspersky for almost a decade. Japan, Oil and the Fragility of Globalization. 'Energy and Equity' starts today -- Andrew Nikiforuk's new weekly Tyee column about oil, energy and civilization. Explosion at Fukishima nuclear plant in March. Addiction to oil paved way for reliance on nuclear energy. [Editor's note: Andrew Nikiforuk's term as Tyee Writer in Residence is finished, but his incisive writing stays home right here, as today begins his new weekly column.
Read more about "Energy and Equity" in the sidebar that accompanies this story.] "No society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active. " -- Ivan Illich Sometimes it takes an earthquake followed by tsunami accompanied by a nuclear meltdown to catch people's attention.
Improbable events not only make the world go around but expose what is rotten. Or as the Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe wisely put it: "Japanese history has entered a new phase. " Japan's familiar energy path Japan, third biggest oil user A petro-fueled boom. Food and water as key ingredients of the coming civilisational eco-crisis. Excerpted from an important interview, please read it in full, by Lester Brown, interviewed by Scott Thill: “Scott Thill: The book and television program is called Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. So let’s start with how Plan A, what you call “business as usual”, bungled the job? Lester Brown: Plan A belongs to another age. There was a time when the market could set prices pretty well and guide the direction of economic development. ST: Plan B is arguing that we need to save not the planet, but ourselves. LB: Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come.
ST: Do you think that’s because losing civilization is beyond the comprehension of civilization itself? LB: That’s quite possible, when you look at the trends of earlier civilizations whose archaeology we study now. ST: This is not encouraging, given our current geopolitical and environmental nightmares. LB: That’s an interesting question. Answering the world's growing water problem.
The portion of the global population living in conditions of at least moderate stress involving water – everything from conflict over access to failing traditional sources and lack of access to clean water – will rise to two-thirds by 2025. Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition In other words, two of every three people on the planet will have some form of a water problem, experts say.
Yet as grave as that scenario sounds, specialists gathered at an international water summit in Washington Friday emphasized that even a world of reduced development-assistance budgets has the tools to vastly improve – if not solve – the coming global water challenge. IN PICTURES: World Water Day 2011 Among the keys to addressing the water challenge will be sustainability, conservation, technological innovation, and local solutions.
Coping with infrastructure backlog calls for overhaul of how costs are calculated. Public private partnerships took a king hit last week when the failed RiverCity Motorways was the object of a $700 million class action and the construction giant Leighton Holdings booked huge write-downs on its Victorian desalination scheme and its Brisbane Airport Link project. While the private sector was reeling, both sides of politics tried to get stalled infrastructure policy out of the wilderness in the face of worsening congestion, bottlenecks and electricity outages. After years of neglect from state and federal governments, the country's infrastructure backlog is building.
It ballooned to more than $35 billion last year, and more than $700 billion needs to be spent in the next 10 years to return to a quality that will sustain national prosperity. Advertisement While incentives to attract pension funds sound impressive, if they are aimed at attracting retirement savings into greenfields projects then they do not address the main problem and are fraught with risk. Japan's Disaster and the Manufacturing Meltdown. The effects of Japan’s March earthquake and tsunami are being felt far beyond the shattered region around Sendai and Fukushima.
As U.S. auto assembly lines grind to a halt for want of components that usually come from now-disabled factories in northeastern Japan, business strategists may be forced to rethink the way globalized companies do business. The result could well be a retreat from current manufacturing methods -- sourcing key components from a single supplier and running “lean” factories without stocks of supplies on hand -- whose main goal is to minimize costs. Now, management may also pay close attention to risks.
Such a change would represent a reversal of course for major international companies, potentially transforming the way that many of the world’s industrial giants have functioned for the past two decades. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register today for free. Register Register now to get three articles each month. Have an account? Fukushima and Derivatives Meltdowns by Mark Roe. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space CAMBRIDGE – Financial commentators have likened Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe to derivatives’ role in the 2008 financial meltdown.
The resemblance is clear enough: each activity yields big benefits and carries a tiny but explosive risk. But the similarity between the two types of crisis ends where preventing their recurrence begins. For the Fukushima nuclear-power plant, a 1,000-year flood and ordinarily innocuous design defects combined to deprive the reactors of circulating water coolant and cause serious radiation leaks. In financial markets, an unexpected collapse in real-estate securities and design defects in the derivatives and repo markets combined to damage core financial institutions’ ability make good on their payment obligations. We now understand the Fukushima risks and design defects well. Repos are financing transactions. Individual derivatives and repo transactions are hardly nefarious.
Seven Double Standards. Why don’t we judge other forms of energy generation by the standards we apply to nuclear power? By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 31st March 2011 The accusations have been so lurid that I had to read my article again to reassure myself that I hadn’t written the things that so many of my correspondents say I had. So, before I begin the counter-attack, here’s what I didn’t say about nuclear power. I did not claim that there is no alternative to atomic energy, or any such thing. Nor did I suggest that it should replace renewables, or produce any higher proportion of our electricity than it does already. But I did point out that most of the countries that might abandon nuclear power are likely to replace it not with renewables but with fossil fuel, and that this is a major change for the worse.
Replacing current nuclear generation when the power stations reach the end of their lives is a tough decision. A. B. OK, that’s the record-setting done. Double Standard 5: Costs.