Fighting a war with no guns.

A government makes an unpopular move inciting popular unrest and some rioting. The real damage happens when the rioting moves to the ubiquitous network that everyone in the country depends on for virtually all activities. Rogue botnets infiltrate computers around the world which in turn become “zombies,” attacking the websites of newspapers, banks, and even leaving the country’s Parliament without email communication for days. Other countries move in to help identify and stop the attackers and 19-year old man is arrested as the mastermind behing the entire operation.

A new sci fi novel? No. Real events that happened in Estonia the last few weeks after the government removed a statue of a WW II soviet soldier. The NY Times has a great article on the events that took place between April 26th and May 19th in the small Baltic state.

As networked technologies, especially Internet-based ones, become both ubiquitous and central to every day life, our vulnerabilities increase as well. The Internet, as a physical network, is built to withstand all kinds of attacks and survive. It’s redundant and resilient in its design. But the information and services that use the Internet are much more vulnerable. Disrupting key applications such as email, banking, and web access, can cripple an organization as small as a tiny start-up and as large as the U.S. At the country level it could mean disruption of food and water supplies, electricity, and medical services. That could be enough to start physical (not virtual) unrest and violence among the population. In the end, a country can be destroyed from the inside out, without a single bullet being shot.

This may sound extreme and speculative, but with talk of countries like the U.S., Russia, and China developing information warfare programs, the prospect of wars fought at the information level becomes more real everyday.

Quantum computing is here…wait, it’s almost here…ok ok, it’s not even close.

This is bad science at its best (or worst). The NY Times reports on a company called D-Wave Systems that claims to have created the first “practical quantum computer.” They announced this with a demonstration of the contraption figuring out some relatively simple tasks, and doing so at a speed “100 times slower than a PC running the best algorithms,” according to Dr. Geordie Rose, the company’s founder and CTO. All while releasing only the minimun of details on how this quantum computer might work, definitely not enough details to confirm or dispute the company’s claims.

I’m no physicist, but I’m no sucker either. Cold fusion anyone?

Quantum computing right now is more interesting as an exercise in speculative fiction. Every now and then, an invention comes along that changes everything. It’s disruptive in ways that few can predict. Usable electricity was one of them. So were automobiles, the telegraph, and the silicon chip.

Quantum computing would increase the computing power of computers so much that it’s almost impossible to predict how it would change our lives. Imagine full-immersion virtual reality, new unimaginable medications created purely in a virtual environment before put into production, or artificial intelligence beyond anything we can imagine. The stuff of science fiction. Not to mention that our current security technologies, like encryption, would be rendered, for the most part, useless.

When this will happen, noone knows. Quantum computing is still in an early experimental stage. But when it does, nothing will ever be the same again.