Last week got pretty heated between mankind and its longtime
bedfellow, technology.
It all reminded me of this scene in “The Matrix
Reloaded” where Neo has a heart-to-heart with an old
bureaucrat in the underground city of Zion. The two philosophize
about technology while gazing over the engineering room.
Bureaucrat: “When I look at these machines, I can’t
help thinking that, in a way, we are plugged into them.”
Neo: “But we control these machines. They don’t
control us.”
Bureaucrat: “Just what is control?”
Indeed. With all the new problems technology poses, it’s
hard to tell who’s controlling what.
The machines may not have enslaved us yet, but it was a loss for
mankind when over 385,000 PCs across the world were infected with
the LoveSan worm this past week.
The worm surfaced early Aug. 11 and spread like virtual
wild-fire. By the morning of Aug. 12 it had hit my computer,
sending it into a continuous spiral of rebooting. I felt helpless
knowing my computer could be hacked so easily. Thankfully, patches
for the worm were available through numerous Web sites and damage
was minimal.
The implications of the attack, however, are still serious.
Future attacks could easily improve on the worm, resulting in much
greater damage to many more users and businesses. That’s kind
of frightening, considering it can infect virtually anybody
connected to the internet.
But the worm wasn’t the only problem with machines this
past week. A few days later, the east coast suffered its biggest
blackout in U.S. history, apparently due to a technical failure in
the aging power grid. New York City was incapacitated for 24 hours.
Security alarms were disabled across the giant city, with cops
working double time. It’s a relief panic did not reign free
and the community ties remained strong.
Still, what’s even scarier than LoveSan or the power
failure is the idea of a single, large-scale, hack-attack on the
power grid. As ABC News reports, “Over the past two years,
there have been numerous instances of what law enforcement
officials called “˜credible intrusion events’ into the
electric grid system,” which means this past week’s
attack was probably just a sampling of the shenanigans hackers or
terrorists may pull in the near future.
We’ve been so busy worrying about our physical reality,
with terrorism and the war on Iraq, that we’ve neglected the
virtual reality that is so is vital to our way of life. Welcome to
the 21st century. We may not have flying cars yet, but we’ve
got iPods and Tablet PCs, and we do have to worry about protecting
the invisible network that is the heart of our economy.
I look back with nostalgia on a simpler time, when everyone
could surf freely without the fear of having their computers hacked
into or the fear of being sued by Dr Dre. But alas, that was the
’90s. Cyberspace is becoming even more complex, with
Legislators scrambling to come up with proper rules and regulations
for everything from file-sharing to spam-mailing.
The future is here and as we step further into it, I see the
days of the free, unfettered internet becoming numbered.
Prepare to see governments becoming a lot more involved in the
Net.
Right now the Internet is like the Old West. It’s
dangerous and people pretty much do whatever they want.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but as it grows,
it’s bound to adopt more laws, structure and security.
In other words, we’ve forged our own matrix, and
it’s becoming larger and more complex. Nobody lives their
life in it, yet it’s what makes everyday life possible.
So who controls what? It’s hard to tell anymore. But I
won’t complain as long as I have power and e-mail.