Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Nuclear weapons wreak the same destruction wherever they are dropped. But cyberweapons are very different, writes David Sanger in his book on cyber warfare titled Perfect Weapon . From the last blog , you’d remember: “The US went for what the Iranians valued most – their nuclear program – and Iran went for what America valued most: its financial m arkets.”   China was using cyberweapons in a different way. Since everything is manufactured in China, it was possible (and suspected) that they’d be installing spyware on electronic devices shipped world-over. This is incidentally the reason why the US is so paranoid about Chinese companies like Lenovo and Huawei. The Chinese consider this hypocrisy: don’t Google, Facebook and Apple turn over data to the US government? America claims that’s only done when backed via a court order (in other words, there are rules and checks), but the Chinese don’t trust any such measures.   Until about a decade back, there was another key d...

You must have heard of Moore’s law. Technically, it was an observation/ prediction made by Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, way back in 1965 that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years (even as the cost of computers halved in the same period). But it’s held up for so long (except the 2 years period changed to 18 months), that it’s been called a “law”. The benefits are very visible: smaller, more powerful devices, affordable to all.   With all those benefits, a parallel thing emerged: there’s a piece of software for everything under the sun. Which brings its own set of risks, warns Marc Goodman in Future Crimes .   He cites many examples, but I’ll just list a few. In older times, if a burglar wanted to target a particular home, he’d look for “a pile of newspapers in front of the house or a porch light that remained off at night”. In Burglary 2.0, criminals search your postings on Facebook and Twitter to identify when you plan to be on vaca...