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Earlier this morning, while listening to a story about the use of social media in Iran, a thought occurred to me: would governments have a need for their own botnets?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that governments have any such networks nor are actively creating them.  I am not suggesting, either, some massive international conspiracy.  Rather, I am curious if this technique would be useful for states.

Cyberspace will be, by all accounts, the next major battlefront in international warfare.  Given that there are few, if any, casualties on the battlefield, cyber-attacks will likely be more commonplace.  States who are merely hostile towards one another and not engaged in active combat may utilize cyber-attacks against one another, such as the recent war between Georgia and Russia.

In their current incarnation, botnets provide malicious individuals or organizations the means to tap into a supermassive computer network.  Malware infects the personal computers of unsuspecting individuals, allowing for   The most common use of a botnet is to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, but other uses are possible.

Governments of sufficient size, such as the United States, would likely not need a botnet.  These governments have more that sufficient resources and talent to conduct more sophisticated forms of attack. Furthermore, the political and social risks of being caught operating such a network would be too great.

On the other hand, smaller governments, especially governments that are much more restrictive or even totalitarian, would have every incentive to create such networks.  These governments have limited resources at their disposal, insufficient resources to dedicate to cyber-warfare, and a growing need to counteract the internet as a tool of political and social change.

In the end, botnets may not prove to be an effective tool.  States wishing to stifle true dissent may simply choose to disable access to the internet entirely.  A botnet may only prove useful as a tool of war between states, or between states and non-state actors (e.g., terrorist groups).  Still, it is worth considering the possibility of the botnet as a tool of warfare, if only to protect against it.

The Federal Trade Commission today entered a consent order today finding that Sears Holdings Management Corporation (Sears and Kmart) by which Sears settled FTC charges of failing to disclose the scope of collection and usage of customer data and web activity.  This, according to a statement by the FTC, constituted a deceptive practice.

Affected customers were members of the “My SHC Community”, who would pay $10 to participate.  These customers would then be asked to download research software.  A description of the nature of the software was buried in a “lengthy user license agreement.”

Under the settlement, Sears will not only destroy the information collected by the “research software” but also make a separate disclosure as to the nature and purpose of any future web tracking software, including any possible sale of the data to third parties.

The proposed settlement is open for public comment until July 6, 2009.  Those interested can visit the FTC website for further information.

Newspapers are in trouble, so report the newspapers. So does network television, also facing new challenges from both cable television and the internet. This week, NPR’s On the Media posed the question on how to save newspapers. They played excerpts from a recent Senate commerce committee hearing on the future of journalism. After pointing fingers at one another, with Google News and the Huffington Post on one side and greedy media conglomerations on the other, the consensus seemed to be that the newspapers in particular and “old media” in general needs special help to survive.

Of course, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the media debating the virtues of the media. Journalism is a profession and a business, with its own history, customs and practices. Like all businesses, it has little interest in seeing reform or change come to its time-honored traditions. Unfortunately for the Fourth Estate, the barbarians of new media are at the gate and reform is coming to the industry, whether or not it is welcome.

The media like to use “bloggers” as a straw man to attack when discussing the woes of the current state of journalism. These ambiguous, amorphous figures sit behind laptops and anonymity, publishing the first rumor and hearsay to reach their inbox. Bloggers, according to the media, have no respect for journalistic practices and do not know how to write a story. One key question seems to go unanswered in this discussion — what is the difference between a journalist and a blogger?

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Recently, my hosting company, Laughing Squid, established a new cloud hosting service dubbed “Ultra Squid“.  Today, for essentially the same cost I’ve been paying, I now get over three times the storage, two and half times the bandwidth, more databases, and tons of email storage space.

I’ve been using LS for years and found it to be the most reliable hosting company I’ve ever used.  Hopefully that trend will continue with this new service.  Now I just have to figure out what to do with it all.

Time to scheme…

This is part one of a multi-part commentary on the next generation of internet communications. In this article, I will be exploring the problem of the “walled garden” and closed communications systems.

Twitter. Facebook. MySpace. What do all these systems have in common? They all use isolated, closed servers.

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I love that flickr is so friendly.

According to a number of news sources, the FTC stated today that it will not oppose the proposed acquisition of DoubleClick by Google. The proposed deal, at US$ 3.1 billion deal would make Google the largest internet advertising company in the world.

However, the European Commission has not yet ruled on whether or not Google’s proposed purchase of DoubleClick violates Article 139/2004 [rules on merger control]. A ruling on this is due by April 2008.

One of the more interesting aspects of having an RSS reader is that, assuming you catch the original post, you can see when someone publishes an update to their original post. Take for example this set of postings from Slate magazine, shown in order of most recent publication:

I am not sure why they chose to change the word “jihad” to “war”, especially considering that the article title still uses “jihad” in the title. Either way, I’m curious whether or not major (and minor, for that matter) media publications should disclose when they make changes of any sort, no matter how innocent, after publication. I can see how the argument can go both ways. On the one hand, some weblogs, such as Boing Boing, use the strikeout font to indicate when they’ve made changes after publication, usually to correct for factual errors. As you can imagine, this is perhaps the stupidest way an awkward to achieve such disclosure. On the other hand, the corrections page tends to get buried in the back of a publication, leaving the more attractive space free for errors. Even with the corrections model, though, it is becoming easier to have a permanent space for corrections (the message being “we are always going to make mistakes”).

This particular instance is probably more benign than in other instances, where substantive content is radically changed. I also receive alerts from Reuters, and those articles always contain a summary of the changes that were made as a caption at the beginning, although the specific details are not disclosed. This may be the most reasonable balance on the internet, since the corrections pages will not necessarily be stumbled upon as it would be in a print publication.

My question is this: is it better to have a full disclosure policy (à la Boing Boing), a limited disclosure policy (the Reuters model), or to simply make changes and hope no one notices (the Slate way)?

UPDATE: Ironic, I know, but the entry was edited so the pop-up image would display correctly.

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