Information Technology Reference
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was a calm and quiet place with birdsong. It was a very fine place until suddenly one day
someone started running inside where I was working and jumping on the tables. Can you
imagine, I was there for three months and everyday it was calm and quiet, but one day
someone starts jumps on tables, reaches the ceiling, pulls out a yellow cable from the
ceiling and claims that now we are all safe. The guy was crazy. What does a cable from
the ceiling have to do with my safety? It was a security problem fifteen years ago. He
said he was aware that there was something called “a worm”, which is some kind of a
virus and it was the first Internet worm ever produced, in 1987. Why were they afraid? It
was a research institute and all the knowledge of projects was inside the computers,
inside the servers. And the worm was spreading throughout the servers and just spreading
and spreading. And nobody knew what the worm did. There were backups but many
people were afraid to simply see this information disappear from the servers. Now the
worm did not get to us, which is why he claimed we were safe. It is a simple matter; we
communicate, we cut communications, we are safe. Why am I telling this story? There
are many ways to deal with security and there are many things to consider.
Confidentiality, non-repudiation, availability. And you also have to consider there are
several worlds that exist. You have the physical world where you communicate and you
do other things. You have mobile phones, phones where you can communicate and you
have data networks. You can also communicate data on the Internet. And we cannot
consider all these worlds separately. Perhaps I am now safe because the cable is not on
the ceiling, but the terrorist can have a bomb outside and he obtained that information by
mobile phone. I believe that we have to first really understand the world we are living in.
For the Internet, I have to really understand what cyberwar means. Not because I have to
disconnect the cable, meaning I have to prepare myself for these attacks, but I also have
to understand the connections between this new world and the other.
By the way, I still write letters by hand, sometimes, at Christmas! And I still talk to
people. I propose that e-mail no longer be called e-mail. It is in fact a postcard. It is not
a e-letter, it is on a public network. If I do not encrypt it, it is an e-postcard. This is
different. When I send a postcard, the mailman can read that postcard. When I send a
letter, normally the mailman cannot open the letter. I still send postcards. Sometimes I
send letters. If I am afraid that the letter could be opened, I do not send it. I do something
else. And I have to understand the value of information and use security measures
accordingly. Now do I want a Big Brother who can search everyone's communications in
order to pinpoint terrorists, etc.? Obviously it is not possible and too expensive, and I do
not know if we even want it because of our freedom. So, the only way is to really
understand each of these worlds, the crossovers within them and fight back in each of
these worlds with the same resources. There is a distributed network of hackers. I can
use this term or something better. In any case we have to cooperate.
Why? Because it is not possible to acquire knowledge without cooperation. We both
know something, but together we know much more than one plus one. Together we can
learn, we can share and learn from each other, and multiply what we already know. So if
you want to be strong for this new world, which is very difficult for us because of
terrorism, I believe that the only way is to leverage knowledge, because if we know the
threat, we can have effective preventive security measures. And one thing I know from
knowledge is that it can only happen through cooperation. Even in university, students
learn more if they cooperate. If they study on an individual basis, it is really not
interesting for them. They learn what is in the topic, but I want to help them in learning
to learn. They have to do it together. So, that answers your question: there is no way we
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