koyunbabaGeopolitics in the 21st Century - Killer Apps and Governments
August 9th 2009 22:01
Welcome to the new face of global politics. In the last two years, we've seen how effective use or denial of the internet's "Killer Apps" can literally change the world. Here are some examples:
1. For those of you in America at the time, you know what I mean when I say that nearly every social networking site was flooded with Obama ads and links to pro-Obama blogs during the 2008 election. This was not true of John McCain. While there were many factors that led to the election of Barack Obama as President, I firmly believe that effective use of those portions of the internet frequented by young voters (age 18-25) caused a huge boost in voter turnout. These cheap media allowed the campaign to ooze into the very pores of popular culture and demographics that historically did not vote or rarely voted turned out in record numbers.
2. In June, 2009 Iran held national presidential elections. When Ahmedinejad was declared the victor by an unusually large margin, the opposition began to suspect election fraud. Protests were held in large numbers. But in the online world, large denial of service attacks were made on Ahmedinejad's website. These attacks were coordinated by exchanging the various attack tools through Facebook and Twitter. Next, the Iranian government (headed by Ahmedinejad) shut down internet access nationwide for 45 minutes. When access returned, the bandwidth was significantly lowered and many websites that could be used for political purposes were blocked. This is where it really got interesting: the opposition was still able to access these blocked sites for a time by using proxy servers. Where the killer apps came into play was the exchanging of the lists of proxy IP addresses. This exchange happened on Facebook and Twitter. Since the outside news media had been kicked out or kept under wraps some time before, the only way the rest of the world could really see what was happening at the protests was through YouTube. This near revolution failed, but for the first time, the internet proved its ability to fuel an uprising.
3. Finally, we come to the DDoS (or Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on blogger Cyxymu, a vehemently anti-Russian Georgian national. These attacks began on Aug 6, 2009 and appear to have originated from Russians or Russian sympathizers. The idea was to overload all of Cyxymu's various blog outlets by overloading the servers housing his blogs and/or eating up massive amounts of bandwidth on blog pages. The sites targeted Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, and some google sites. Google being the giant it is, didn't suffer much in the way of slowdown (their server space and bandwidth is pretty massive), but LiveJournal and Facebook both suffered slowdowns, and Twitter's entire site was down for a few hours. Thus millions of users were unable to access their accounts.
The moral of these stories is this: we now live in a world where killer apps have an enormous impact. Would Obama have been elected without Facebook? Maybe. Would we have seen the violence at the Iranian protests without YouTube and Twitter? Probably not. And while the Twitter/Facebook/LiveJournal DDoS attacks were merely an annoyance to most, they constitute a denial of free speech. I'm beginning to wonder where this will all lead? In 50 years, will we have physical elections? Will we have the same sized brick and mortar governments of today? How much war will be cyberwar?
All I can say is that there should be no doubt in your mind anymore that the Industrial Age is over. And with each new age comes a period of intense popular unrest. Where will it end up? I don't know, but I'm excited...
...and scared as hell.
Koyunbaba
1. For those of you in America at the time, you know what I mean when I say that nearly every social networking site was flooded with Obama ads and links to pro-Obama blogs during the 2008 election. This was not true of John McCain. While there were many factors that led to the election of Barack Obama as President, I firmly believe that effective use of those portions of the internet frequented by young voters (age 18-25) caused a huge boost in voter turnout. These cheap media allowed the campaign to ooze into the very pores of popular culture and demographics that historically did not vote or rarely voted turned out in record numbers.
2. In June, 2009 Iran held national presidential elections. When Ahmedinejad was declared the victor by an unusually large margin, the opposition began to suspect election fraud. Protests were held in large numbers. But in the online world, large denial of service attacks were made on Ahmedinejad's website. These attacks were coordinated by exchanging the various attack tools through Facebook and Twitter. Next, the Iranian government (headed by Ahmedinejad) shut down internet access nationwide for 45 minutes. When access returned, the bandwidth was significantly lowered and many websites that could be used for political purposes were blocked. This is where it really got interesting: the opposition was still able to access these blocked sites for a time by using proxy servers. Where the killer apps came into play was the exchanging of the lists of proxy IP addresses. This exchange happened on Facebook and Twitter. Since the outside news media had been kicked out or kept under wraps some time before, the only way the rest of the world could really see what was happening at the protests was through YouTube. This near revolution failed, but for the first time, the internet proved its ability to fuel an uprising.
3. Finally, we come to the DDoS (or Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on blogger Cyxymu, a vehemently anti-Russian Georgian national. These attacks began on Aug 6, 2009 and appear to have originated from Russians or Russian sympathizers. The idea was to overload all of Cyxymu's various blog outlets by overloading the servers housing his blogs and/or eating up massive amounts of bandwidth on blog pages. The sites targeted Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, and some google sites. Google being the giant it is, didn't suffer much in the way of slowdown (their server space and bandwidth is pretty massive), but LiveJournal and Facebook both suffered slowdowns, and Twitter's entire site was down for a few hours. Thus millions of users were unable to access their accounts.
The moral of these stories is this: we now live in a world where killer apps have an enormous impact. Would Obama have been elected without Facebook? Maybe. Would we have seen the violence at the Iranian protests without YouTube and Twitter? Probably not. And while the Twitter/Facebook/LiveJournal DDoS attacks were merely an annoyance to most, they constitute a denial of free speech. I'm beginning to wonder where this will all lead? In 50 years, will we have physical elections? Will we have the same sized brick and mortar governments of today? How much war will be cyberwar?
All I can say is that there should be no doubt in your mind anymore that the Industrial Age is over. And with each new age comes a period of intense popular unrest. Where will it end up? I don't know, but I'm excited...
...and scared as hell.
Koyunbaba
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