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?