Crimson Reason: October 2010

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Pumpkin Art

Artist Ray Villafane began carving pumpkins on a lark for his art students in a small rural school district in Michigan. These are images of pumpkin carvings Villafane created over the past five years.

Friday, October 29, 2010

Geopolitics of Stuxnet

With the introduction of the personal computer (PC) by IBM and DOS by Microsoft in the United Sates in 1980, the world, for the first time, was given a common and consistent computer hardware platform for which to develop software. What followed, like the invention of the movable types in printing press, was a slow-moving revolution that altered the world and affected billions of people positively over the next 30 years.

Many of the benefits of this revolution fell on the United States: her developers and engineers created wealth by supplying innovative and useful software and hardware products that human beings bought all over the world. [ In India, for example, the UNICODE capabilities of MS Windows has enabled tens of millions of people to use computers in their daily lives – all is needed is to purchase a PC running a language specific version of MS Windows and the corresponding keyboard.] Computer software and hardware exports are one of the areas of economic activity in which US has still a dominant presence.

The Stuxnet worm (see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/stuxnet.html and http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/w32_stuxnet_dossier.pdf for more information), allegedly against Iran, has the potential to severely damage this bright spot in US economy.

The reason is that no foreign purchaser of proprietary software or hardware products could any longer trust the security & integrity of such products. The hypothetical question: “Has the XYZ government introduced or added harmful features into this system to use at their discretion in some future time?” has been answered in the affirmative. "Would my manufacturing line go down because the XYZ government has political differences with my government?" Or, "Will my network cease to function by a foreign power through the dormant, but harmful, agents in them?"

Every responsible government in the world is going to demand assurance that the systems that they are purchasing are free from such harmful artifacts. Certainly a new industry will spring-up to ensure that.

But this new industry will not compensate the potential damage done to Microsoft, SIEMENS, Oracle, Intel, IBM, HP and other purveyors of proprietary software and hardware solutions (in US mostly) – especially in the embedded systems development arena.

The Stuxnet worm incident could give an impetus to open-source software since the code could then be scrutinized before being deployed. Furthermore, the Stuxnet worm will almost certainly lead to the development of alternative software and hardware platforms by China, Brazil, Russia and others that so far have relied on the Wintel Platform as well as other proprietary (embedded) systems produced in US or by her allies.

The perpetrators of Stuxnet worm have greatly damaged the United States, in my opinion.