Bytes versus atom is the future of war

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Mon, 12/05/2005 3:46 PM  |  Life

Kelik Tunomo, Contributor, kelik_tunomo@yahoo.com

The byte is more powerful than the atom. The atom, the smallest differentiable unit of material, put an end to World War II by destroying two big cities in 1945.

When an atom is put into a chain reaction, it creates nuclear power. A byte is also the smallest differentiable unit of programming language.

Nicholas Negroponte of Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes that the byte has more potential than the atom in human life. The disadvantage of an atom compared to a byte, as Negroponte illustrated, is the atom's physical nature. An atom disintegrates in a chain reaction while a byte is duplicated.

Negroponte's byte-versus-atom concept explains the following case.

The death of Dr. Azahari and his apprentice in Batu, Malang will not stop what he knew about bombmaking from getting out. He could have put his knowledge into bytes -- instead of atoms and distributed it through the internet. His digital jihad has made him more valuable than the thousands of mujahiddeens who waged jihad in the past.

Dr. Azahari's followers taped their jihad testimonies. The tape is the shiar -- the ""lesson learned"" of the jihad. It makes the jihad count before God.

In the past, a mujahiddeen would have died in vain if the government made atoms of his testimony. Making the testimony inaccessible would erase the shiar aspect from jihad.

Eventually suicide bombers will go to hell because taking your own life is prohibited in Islam. These videos can be digitized into bytes and the government loses the game. As stated above, a byte can have a stronger impact than the most powerful conventional war weapons.

Nuclear bombs destroy everything. Chemical weapons harm living beings with minimum destruction to possessions. The byte brings the enemy down while the winner can still keep everything.

In the year 2000, six big companies, including Yahoo! and eBay, were brought to their knees for six hours because of the Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS attack).

The attack was considered sophisticated since the attacker used other people's computers to launch it. The attacker designed a program that sent a request to the servers of the target companies.

The program was able to multiply so that the requests were sent by millions of computers around the world within minutes.

Yahoo! and eBay had to close down for six hours to fix the problem and suffered millions of dollars in the cost of lost opportunity.

A few years later, the same situation happened to Ericsson in 2000. There was no programmer nor sophisticated program involved this time. There was a hoax e-mail telling the e-mail recipient to forward the junk e-mail and carbon copy it to someone@ericcson.com -- an unregistered address.

Ericsson's mail server crashed for several days. It was forced to send an explanation e-mail to those who were hoaxed. For a stupid reason, another similar hoax e-mail was distributed a few weeks afterward and Nokia was the target.

Those two examples provide an illustration of how technology evolves and influences human lives.

First of all, Neil Postman of the New York University mentioned that we have surrendered our culture to technology. This means that one disturbance in today's technology can bring discomfort to our lives.

The biggest technological hoax of all time was the Y2K or millennium bug. We were forced to waste billions of dollars for something that was exaggerated. Though some of us were not fully prepared, like a nuclear facility in Japan, nothing happened.

Second of all, technology is becoming cheaper and easier to access. At one time it took millions of dollar to tape a video. Now it takes only a very small fraction of the cost. It took a witty programmer to screw six big companies, now it takes only a small e-mail.

This phenomenon is also shown in the evolution of computer viruses, worms and Trojans. These computer threats are more socially than technically engineered.

The creator thinks about how the recipient will behave upon receiving the e-mail, and how that behavior could affect the greater community.

Computer threat creators know that many e-mail users nowadays will not open suspicious e-mails and will report them back to the sender. Computer threats now have bot -- automatic answering engine -- capability to convince the recipient by sending believable replies such as ""That's OK. It's from me.""

Computer threats are used to interrupt works, damage hardware and destroy software.

Today, they track behavior, steal data, and even put the computer into a ""zombie computer"". Zombies are for rent for malicious purposes, such as launching a DDoS attack, spreading hatred or erasing a hacker's traces.

Tracing a hacker is more complex today. Massachusetts Institute of Technology was once hacked by its students through its wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) network.

It was difficult for the network defender to trace the hacker's location since there was no physical port to connect to. Even when they were able to locate the crime scene, the hacker had long gone.

Consider this scenario. A terrorist, who is equipped with a Wi-Fi laptop, goes to any office building looking for open wireless connection. He connects while hiding in the toilet and starts hacking a military website. He puts so-called confidential material about a military conspiracy on the site.

Then he moves to find another open wireless network to start a malicious program that command zombies to access the file and distribute it using their address books. The e-mails sent are not using the zombie's identity; instead they are using names in the address book.

Within minutes, the terror-driven war will be spread and it looks very legit. By the way, the complexity of tracing can be more complex with the birth of Wi-Max that extends to 50 miles (around 80 kilometers) of reach.

May this writing be an eye-opener. The author has no intention of preventing any technological advances or promoting censorship in Indonesia.

In Feb 2005, the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) -- the advisory committee for the American President -- reported that there are non-technology issues that can compromise cyber security.

Technology does have advantages and, therefore, as Postman said, we must negotiate with technology.

The author is studying how technology changes lives.

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