Charles Stross has a funny take on it:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/05/rejection-letter.htmlOne is supposed to believe that evil genius hackers (unidentified) using code stolen from the most secretive of espionage organizations by some third party (also unidentified) and released for free on the internet, took someone else's poor quality malware (author unidentified) and turned it into a cyber first-strike weapon that causes carnage worldwide because millions of responsible computer operators fail to apply vital software security patches for months after they're released? This beggars plausibility.
It's a very curious situation. Government agencies with knowledge of vulnerabilities refuse to use their knowledge to help protect their own nation's infrastructure against attacks. There's a disregard there, but more deeply, a possessiveness, even fear. At some point the powers-that-be have figured out that technology in the hands of the people is fundamentally hostile to the exercise of government power, that it poses a kind of existential threat to government itself. The internet transcends national boundaries, treats censorship as damage and routes around it, enables communication between people in radically different regimes, and encryption denies visibility on all this to even top-level intelligence agencies. Without visibility, how can a government exercise its function of control? The consequence is that the struggle becomes not between nations and attackers, but between governments and the governed. The situation is worsened by the lack of technology competence in governments themselves. The majority of tech know-how is concentrated in intelligence agencies, to the point where they are dictating tech policy to mainstream government who are legislating it verbatim (certainly in the UK, not sure about the US). Intelligence agencies already have shadowy mandates, and are certainly not going to advocate for anything that opposes their function. As technology continues to develop and become an ever-more encompassing component of our lives, mainstream government will be increasingly out-of-their-depth and the real seat of power will continue to shift to these agencies - they are the only organs of government actively provisioning for this future.
everything wrote:Chromebooks
Chromebooks, and other devices like it, have interesting implications in this context. An unforeseen consequence of high-availability high-bandwidth internet connections is the emergence of these "thin clients" which rely on the "cloud" for storage and increasingly CPU. They are, of course, convenient and easy-to-use. The danger is that the cloud is basically just a rack of servers in a datacentre somewhere, where everyone's data and internet activity is centralised. This makes the data easy to monitor: by government agencies, for terrorist material, illegal porn, copyright violations, embarrassing intel etc.; and by companies, to build up a psychological profile for targeted advertising. It is so convenient and useful, and developing so quickly, that there is likely to come a time fairly soon where hard drives/local storage is quietly phased out, and then unavailable to purchase altogether, except perhaps for some large companies that really need it. Thin clients will always require some local store but users will not be able to access it, except to decide what apps to download. And even if apps claim to offer encryption, it will already have been back-doored by every intelligence agency in the country it was developed in. The majority of people will not know or care about this.