“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought the fragmentation of the world-wide web—which I described in my 2016 book Splinternet—back to public consideration, from South Africa to global media (here and here). It’s oddly fitting, because If I had to pick one moment when the splinternet began, it would be when current-Russian-resident Edward Snowden’s stolen information began to reach the public in June 2013. In a general sense, Snowden’s revelations were not surprising, in that one had known that Silicon Valley and U.S. security agencies had always had close if discreet relations.”
Read the full interview here.
The Real Fight for the Future of 5G
With 5G it is possible to do enormous amounts of computing at very high speeds and without having to connect the input device—a cell phone, say, or a self-driving car—to a wire of any kind. But those high speeds are possible only if the rest of the system (signal towers, base stations, distributed servers, and the megascale centers that house the data and do a great deal of computing themselves) is physically near enough to these input devices. Having your phone, car, or pacemaker in constant contact with vast computational power in the so-called cloud sounds amazingly untethered and extraterritorial. Yet in its physicality and focus on location, the emerging system is more grounded than the Internet ever was.
Read the full piece here.
“This past weekend, there was an effort to give birth to what might be called a Nationalist International. In Koblenz, Germany, leaders of the main nationalist parties of Holland, Germany, France and Italy, among others, joined together in public for the first time, celebrating the victories of Brexit and President Donald Trump and vowing to build on them.
“2016 was the year the Anglo-Saxon world woke up,” said Marine Le Pen, head of France’s right-wing National Front party and a leading candidate for the French presidency this coming spring. “2017, I am certain of it, will be the year of the awakening of the peoples of continental Europe. It’s no longer a question of if, but when.” Geert Wilders, who is likely to become Holland’s next prime minister after March elections, put it this way: “Yesterday a new America, today Koblenz, tomorrow a new Europe. We are at the dawn of a Patriotic Spring.”
Nationalism is something more and more countries have in common. The day before Le Pen and Wilders’s remarks in Koblenz, Trump said in his inaugural speech, “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.” He urged each American to “open your heart to patriotism.” Later this week, Trump will have his first meeting as president with a fellow head of state: Theresa May, prime minister of Britain, who is herself at the head of a movement based on the assertion of national sovereignty, in her case against the European Union.
It’s not immediately obvious how nationalist movements — motivated by slogans like Trump’s “America First” — might unite in solidarity. The Koblenz meeting was the first of its kind precisely because Europe’s nationalist parties and groups have not found it easy to get along. Many in Germany’s far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland, which was the host and convener in Koblenz, opposed the meeting and, in particular, the large role for Le Pen, whose party they see as overly socialist. Le Pen strove to square this circle, emphasizing the claim that the European Union and the euro “deny diversity.” “I love France because it is France,” she said. “I love Germany because it is Germany.” This drew great applause from the audience.”
Get the full story here.
Nationalism is something more and more countries have in common. The day before Le Pen and Wilders’s remarks in Koblenz, Trump said in his inaugural speech, “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.” He urged each American to “open your heart to patriotism.” Later this week, Trump will have his first meeting as president with a fellow head of state: Theresa May, prime minister of Britain, who is herself at the head of a movement based on the assertion of national sovereignty, in her case against the European Union.
Get the full story here.
“Yet, ever creative, the counter-culture finds workarounds. Hackers and the privacy-minded “jailbreak” their devices, removing software restrictions imposed by manufacturers, or use VPNs (virtual private networks), which enable users to bypass official, commercial channels and share data more securely. For Irene S. Wu, a senior analyst at the US Federal Communications Commission, commerce has been an enabler, not a handicap, for the internet and the connective technologies that preceded it, at least as far back as the telegraph in the nineteenth century.”
Read the full article here.
Read the full article here.
“The programmes [Snowden] exposed showed that the US government was spying and it was using American companies whether they knew it or not and whether they liked it or not. For Silicon Valley, it is a disadvantage to be seen as a tool of the US government.”
To read more, visit Financial Times.
“Malcomson’s “Splinternet,” a cyber-realm disintegrating along geopolitical fault lines, isn’t a rupture of the World Wide Web, but rather a pointed reminder of the inescapability of this global condition.”
To read more, visit The Nation.
From 10,000 books in consideration, Scott Malcomson’s Splinternet, has made the shortlist for getAbstract’s International Book Award 2016, conferred in October at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
“getAbstract recommends his compelling overview and fascinating anecdotes to students, entrepreneurs, investors and policy makers who will benefit from this overlooked story’s rich information on where the Internet came from and cautionary notes about where it’s going.”
To read more, visit getAbstract
“Scott Malcolmson in conversation with Virginia Heffernan”
To hear more, visit Virginia Heffernan
At the Moscow meeting last week, Lu Wei, the head of the Chinese delegation and the Communist Party’s Internet security chief, said, “Now our countries are faced with an aggressive media propaganda. Therefore, we should pay serious attention to verification and filtering incoming information.”
To read more, visit The Huffington Post.
“Mr. Obama once famously declared that government, not entrepreneurs, had built the Internet. That wasn’t true, but his actions have proved a different point: If Washington continues to abandon its commitment to the open Internet, the dreams of digital innovators around the world will be crushed.”
To hear more, visit The Wall St Journal.
Scott Malcomson’s recent book Splinternet. How Geopolitics and Commerce are Fragmenting the World Wide Web is a great piece of contemporary history. Its aim is nothing less than to tell the story of the Internet – giving credit both to technology and politics, eccentric individuals and the anarchic cyberspace counter-culture of the 1980s.
To read the rest of the review, visit Netopia.
In some cases, internet sovereignty can mean a state protecting its citizens’ privacy against international corporate surveillance or infiltration by another state. In other cases, it can mean the state ensuring that it can invade the privacy of its citizens whenever and however it likes. The choices made depend on the state, but that of course is the point: it’s the state that decides. Was this inevitable? Perhaps.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Guardian.
The implicit premise of this valuable book is that “we study the past to understand the present; we understand the present to guide the future.” In that light, the book makes a valuable contribution by offering a sound and detailed historical survey of aspects of the Internet which are not well-known nor easily accessible outside the realms of dedicated internet research. However, as explained below, the author has not covered some important aspects of the past and thus the work is incomplete as a guide to the future. This should not be taken as criticism, but as a call for the author, or other scholars, to complete the work.
To read the rest of the review, visit boundary2.
As Scott Malcomson writes in “Splinternet”, an illuminating survey of the past and future of the internet, [the internet] was developed “by the US military to serve US military purposes”. In fact, nearly every technology that makes smartphones so delightful started life as a tool of war. The Washington naval treaty, signed soon after the first world war to limit the size of warships, was silent on the matter of weaponry; that provided the impetus to develop machines capable of the complex mathematical calculations required to aim and fire guns accurately. The attack on Pearl Harbour spurred what would become the first computer with an operating system. The computer screen came from the need for radar-tracking screens.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Economist.
To watch the interview, visit Inc..
One of the big secrets of Silicon Valley in the ’70s and ’80s was that it combined so much money, so much power, so much idealism, so much technical creativity, and a complete ignorance of its own will to power.
To watch the full interview, visit Bloomberg.
I think that as governments increase their dependence on the Internet and networked computers for the projections of force, then they will begin to seek or they are already seeking ways to attack each other’s computers.
[..]
My greatest worry is that as these very nervous militaries of major countries who depend on this technology for major military functions now—such as directing aircraft, directing fire—that their dependence will create a kind of insecurity that will reach a point where they want to strike others’ machines, thinking that they’re only hitting machines, but that this could then trigger a conflict that would involve human bodies as well.
To listen to the full interview, visit WNYC.
The Internet is edging closer to the Splinternet. The leading Republican candidate for U.S. president, Donald Trump, has referred to “closing” the Internet in areas where the U.S. has enemies, while China’s president, Xi Jinping, reasserted, at the second World Internet Conference (WIC) in China last week, that each state has a sovereign right to control what its citizens can and can’t do in cyberspace. The control by a state of “its” Internet has long been advocated by Russia’s government, while the European Union, following an October decision by the European Court of Justice, has released a General Data Protection Regulation that will determine how non-EU companies can market to or monitor EU individuals. That four such distinct political cultures could, for a mix of political, ethical, commercial and security reasons, all reach the same conclusion — that the map of the political world should become the map of cyberspace — suggests that the days of a universal Internet are numbered.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Huffington Post.