| I'm reading this as I am giving a class on Stuxnet this morning. We're doing worms and multi-stage malware. But inevitably the
conversation turns to national boundaries, cyberwar, collateral damage
(to individuals, hospitals, power plants, companies..). My students
want to understand the relations between companies like Microsoft and
the NSA, what happened to Siemens from the economic fallout, why the
Iranians would be running Windows? Who paid to clean up the tens of
millions of infected machines out there? I keep getting questions that
begin "Bit surely....?" We've been through an unprecedented period of human history in which
the internet brought us together. That time is over. The fact that a Russian company could trade freely in the world such
that American companies, only within a decade of the Cold War, would
use Kaspersky (which I believe is an a good product) is absolutely
remarkable. It's what Richard Buckland called "A miracle of interoperability" that
allowed a movie made in Hollywood to be recorded on a DVD manufactured
in China to run on a player assembled in India, according to standards
designed in Nederlands and Japan, playing in a home in Australia. That level of trust and cooperation has to run both ways. It's at
least as remarkable as Russians, Chinese and Iranians running
Microsoft Windows. The internet delivered on much of its promise to
unite the world. But what I've seen in the past 5-10 years is so much
effort by everyone to _undo_ that trust. Greed and surveillance
capitalism has played as much a part as gobernment intelligence
over-reach and economic warmongering. All parties have abused trust
and now we are withdrawing into silos again. From a business perspective, maybe we'll need to reckon with a future
more centred around domestic sales and use. Perhaps the "splinternet"
is just the beginning of a global divergence at the protocol level. How can we (proponents of a true INTER-net) avoid this? |
Well, it can be played in Australia only if its DVD region code is 4, and it cannot be played in any other countries you mentioned, which are all in different regions (USA: 1; China: 6; India: 5; the Netherlands and Japan: 2). So there's that. "A miracle of interoperability."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code