Tech Brief
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On Tech Brief today: Hackers, hackers, everywhere. Indian code ambitions and the fossils of the web.
• Avoid high phone bills, route all your calls via the net. It seems easy advice to follow and it is, says :
"Australian network companies have told of clients receiving phone bills including $100,000 worth of unauthorised calls placed over compromised VoIP servers. Smaller attacks have netted criminals tens of thousands of dollars worth of calls."
• How wily are those hackers? Exactly? :
"We should assume that the power grid, ATM and financial systems, and civilian aviation networks of most advanced nations have already been penetrated. Most of these know incursions have been made by the military or clandestine services of other nation states."
Thankfully, Mr Glocer has some suggestions on how to fix the problem:
"I can imagine a layered internet in which the nuclear arsenal is controlled by the highest and most secure level, the power grid, air traffic control and ATM networks are secured by a sufficiently robust next layer, but an open cyber frontier -- a wild west -- remains for individuals to roam free of government control and authentication, but also open to attack and abuse."
• You can't fault the ambition of India's Defence Research & Development Organization. to build its own operating system:
"Having its own operating system will help India prevent hacking of its systems, VK Saraswat, scientific adviser to the Defence Minister, and DRDO Director-General said on Saturday, according to media reports. Two software engineering centers are being set up for this purpose in Bangalore and New Delhi, he added."
• Finally, a jog through the history of the web by likening the way it has changed to Darwinian evolution. :
"If we examine any aspect of web design, we can see that trends and technologies being discarded, improved on, or superseded by something better is common. Evolve or die, pick one of the two options. And if we delve deeper, we can see three core elements that dictate this natural selection and evolution."
Though net history moves fast, Mr Dawson spots where the history is written:
"Looking back at the Internet's past, I find it interesting that we can 'carbon date' our sites based on the techniques and technologies they use, and even scarier is that much of the web today remains fossilized within the bedrock of our servers."
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