Bits and Bytes

China Worried By New US Cyber Strategy.  "China's Defence Ministry expressed concern on Thursday at the Pentagon's updated cyber strategy that stresses the U.S. military's ability to retaliate with cyber weapons, saying this would only worsen tension over Internet security."  Maybe this is a good thing .... Controlling Internet Infrastructure.  Still not sure exactly how the internet naming system works?  "This paper is the first in a series on the IANA transition. The initial paper explains the nature of the challenges and the opportunities presented by the transition. Subsequent papers will address in greater detail the substance of specific transition proposals now under development, and provide recommendations concerning the key components of a successful transition process." Lost in the Clouds.  "Our lives are digital now. Everything we do online leaves a trail that leads directly to us; something privacy advocates are fighting to eliminate. However, we're our own worst enemy when it comes to privacy, and personal cloud adoption has done nothing to help the situation. Each day millions of people across the globe create backups of their files. These backups are supposed to offer a measure of assurance that their files are safe and easily recovered if needed. But that's not entirely true.  In fact, depending on how you've configured the device, your backups are freely available online to anyone who knows what they're looking for." Artificial Intelligence and Spying. "China has constructed the largest and most automated system for surveillance of its citizens ever seen in human history. As argued in my book, Cyber Policy in China, when it comes to choosing between e-democracy and i-dictatorship, the Chinese government has opted for the latter. China is already using highly automated systems for taking down internet traffic that it deems offensive. It has constructed a national database of all of its citizens, and it is building key grid-by-grid locality surveillance maps, including residency data, for sensitive parts of the country (such as Beijing and Lhasa). While the surveillance task China has set itself is for now beyond its technological means, a rapid development and application of AI to political censorship and surveillance by China could shift the current balance of power between Chinese netizens and their government heavily in favor of the latter."