netdefences

Script for turning messy texts into well-structured, -outlined and -formatted Word documents

Some interesting pieces of software have been developed in recent years that aim at replacing the venerable Word as an authoring tool for large and complex writing projects. On the Mac side, two humbly named applications, Ulysses and Scrivener, have most notably emerged as popular writing tools. While everything is nice and fine as long [...]

The security risk of bad security-provisioning design

I’ve pointed out earlier some of the research questions for social scientific internet governance research. The main issues I described there are: There is a lack of empirical analysis undertaken by social scientists, who are not affiliated with biased agencies engaged in turf-wars or the fear-mongering security industry, about the scale, quality and impact of internet [...]

The emergence of internet security governance as a research field in social sciences

It’s finally happening. After an abysmally long time of politicians, military, and the security industry coming up with streams of innovative policy tangle in the name of internet security or cybersecurity, a critical mass of social scientists and research interested practitioners has teamed up to start deepening our knowledge of internet security and its governance. [...]

Internet and statehood – the battle over informational asymmetries

“Everything that can be thought is thought at some time or another. Now or in the future.” “Those things which were thought can never be unthought.” Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Physicists Ralf Bendrath and I gave a presentation on “statehood and internet” at this year’s re:publica conference in Berlin. Re:publica is an annual conference for internet aficionados, bloggers, internet [...]

Nagging questions in cybersecurity research

The Center for Media and Communication Studies at the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary), in partnership with the Centre for Global Communications Studies at the Annenberg School of Communications (Philadelphia, USA) will convene 30 selected experts next week at CEU in Budapest for a Strategic Workshop sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF). ... The argument of non-enforceability is based on a) the lack of reach of national law enforcement agencies beyond their jurisdiction and territorial borders, b) the lack of cooperation of foreign national LEA, c) the agility of perpetrators to change their locus of action, technologies and tactics, d) slowness of legal international cooperation, e) unlawfulness of direct cooperation between national LEA and foreign non-states actors such as ISPs , f) non-cooperative stance of rogue countries.

Information production support systems: DEVONthink

The vanguard of the more interesting category of individual thinking supporting software probably was asksam, created in the mid-late eighties, a DOS-based full-text database, with which you could easily create a digital version of Niklas Luhmann’s famous Zettelkasten – youtube has a nice video , in German though – or any other kind of text-based databases. ... For writers – whether novelists, business report creators, or academics – many tasks in text production are similar: collecting and gathering raw material (digital text, articles, pdfs, movies, links; photocopied artefacts, graphics etc.) related to general interests or to a specific project or task; annotating, categorizing and highlighting the raw material; taking notes, writing down ideas, mindmaps, sketches; write drafts, digest third party comments, create new versions, add bibliographic data (researchers only); and all jumping back and forth, chaotically, not sequentially.

26C3: internet politics 2010, defence of the digital habitat, internet utopia, decentralized technologies and implementing Cryptonomicon

“It seems like the Crypt is their worst nightmare.” (Neil Stephenson, Cryptonomicon) China spearheads the anything-goes movement of technology-based societal control, authoritarian countries worldwide follow suit, and we yet don’t know whether western democracies will manage to at least remain in their currently mediocre shape if one of the many ongoing global developments and crisis should ever [...]

A follow-up on the German botnet-center

I’ve written a quick analysis of the recent anti-botnet politics in Germany. Kind crew behind netzpolitik.org has published it on this blockbuster blog. It’s written in German, though, but you could alternatively give Google Translator a moment of embarrassment.

Shadowserver Foundation publishes Conficker botnet stats

This is going to be an interesting experiment in internet security governance. Scientists have argued for years that internet security problems are as much caused by a misalignment of incentives as they are by technological flaws in software and hardware. One obvious recipe to call ISPs for action against botnets is one that has helped [...]

Germany will get a private-public botnet center

Yersterday, press reports about an alleged joint venture of national ISPs and the national IT security agency to build a national botnet center stirred some scepticism and perplexety in Germany. After heise online brougth the news, the hacker association CCC informed that this rather is a hoax. However, the German national ICT security agency (Bundesamt für [...]

Justice by Slavery? The meanings of crowdsourcing

There are several concepts, partly overlapping, partly different, that are used to describe phenomena that seem to be somewhat similar if not the same: social production, peer production, crowdsourcing, or collaboration. As so often with buzzwords, theses concepts are, if at all, vaguely defined. Take crowdsourcing. Columnists and researchers use it it such different ways, [...]

Crowdsourcing of political investigation? The problem of web-based ad-hoc collaboration

A couple of days ago, I mentioned Wikileaks‘ scoop of leaking the apparently horrid contracts between the Federal Republic of Germany and Toll Collect, a joint-venture of Daimler-Chrysler, Deutsche Telekom and Cofiroute. When Germany’s leading webpolitics site netzpolitik.org brought the message (“Toll Collect wird offen”), its leading brain Markus Beckedahl asked his broad and usually helpful audience [...]

Links on states’ recent activities in internet security

UK UK cybersecurity centre starting operations in March – ZDNet.co.uk Administered by Cabinet Office; staff partly to be recruited from GCHQ, should have hacker mentality; “primarily … a defensive role “, cyberattack as “last resort”.UK also has an Office of Cyber Security (OCS), set up last summer. UK launches dedicated cybersecurity agency – ZDNet.co.uk Gordon Brown: “we [...]

Public knowledge brokering services vs. plutocratic demoracy

An interesting development is currently happening in German politics. It’s still in its infancy, but it could well become an important social experiment. Hopes have been high that the Internet and social media will not only revolutionize business models and business processes but also boost individual influence on decisions that are more or less out [...]

blog, research, interests

Security of the internet isn’t provided by a hierarchical, secretive and central organisation. There is no global internet police, and there is no internet defence corps. Internet security is the result of the collaboration of diverse types of actors such as internet service providers, technical experts, police and law enforcement, governments and academics. These actors [...]