(picture: Franklin D. Roosevelt at London Summit 1933)
The upcoming G20 meeting where 85% of the World’s GDP will be present will take place in London where a similar meeting took place in June 1933. The question remains if this G20 meeting will meet the same fate as the former London meeting or a step away from the brink of the sharp economic downturn.
In 1933 the meeting was organized by the League of Nations . The objectives of many Nations were to re-instate the currency link to the Gold Standard, which would secure that prices and wages would fall in parallel with a downturn, and the idea was that this would stillenable foreign trade. The objective of some of the leaders – Mussolini, Hitler – was to demonstrate that nationalism and increased spending of re-armament would prove to be a way out of the crisis, while the country that was accused to put a torpedo to the London summit was USA. The new president, Franklin Roosevelt, had put his New Deal on the table back home, and this – very much like the present situation – resulted in a weakening of the Dollar because of huge deficit – in other words: US Govt paid to get out of the crisis by inflating it’s currency. This would be effectively stopped if the Gold Standard was to be reinstated. But it shouldn’t have been a surprise that FDR would work against the scheme – already in his inauguration speech, Roosevelt said:
"I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment,"
This time around the agenda is almost the same -http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk/en/summit-aims/- but with the added objective to re-start the World on a path towards sustainable growth.
"The breakdown has created a political impasse. State rescues of entire banking systems are a necessary and inevitable response to the financial meltdown, but the consequence will be to try to limit banking to national units. Italian taxpayers will not want to see their money used to bail out remote eastern European debtors. The same political logic applies for fiscal stimulus packages, where voters will not want to see foreign producers in effect subsidized."
We may once more witness a situation where US will take the lead in what would this time become a new era of nationalism, disguised as regionalism. Already the rescue packages accepted by the US congress contains element of protectionism, ‘buy American’.
Others remain optimistic. See Recommendations – From Brookings - http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/0326_g20_summit.aspx or to quote from their list of recommendations also pointing to IMF as a potential key player:(See the full report from
“At least a tripling of resources for the IMF from currently $250 billion to $750 billion through a combination of a generalized quota increase, a sizeable SDR ($250 billion) allocation, a further authorization to borrow under the so-called “New Arrangements to Borrow” (NAB) or ad hoc borrowings from selected surplus countries— following the commitment already by Japan to $100 billion—and other measures to make the IMF a major actor in the global financial system”
The fears in US and UK are that there may not be lenders enough in the World to finance the galloping public deficits. Some UK critics have calculated that if you add the nationalized banks’ debt, this will all add up all debts ever accepted by UK Governments from 1691 to 2008!
“With the debts of the nationalised and part-nationalised banks now on the public sector balance sheet, the ratio of public sector debt to GDP in the UK exceeds that of Italy and Japan. And it is set to grow much higher. On the basis of the planned levels of borrowing, it could exceed 65 per cent of GDP in 2010-11. And at that scale of indebtedness, the Armageddon scenario most feared by the Treasury - that there will be insufficient lenders to match the planned level of borrowing - begins to look a distinct possibility.”
The UK recession clearly deepens as UK Public deficit hits all time record – but this time around so does the recession in almost all other countries. This is what gives us the hope that the G20 meeting – even if it may not solve all problems – at least will prove to be the first step on a long journey towards more global commitment and cooperation – including a greater role for the 3rd World countries. TheFinancial Ministers met 2 weeks ago and this statement was part of their end comminqué for the preparatory G20 meeting:
The DG INFSO organisation last week arranged a very interesting seminar focusing on the impact of web 2.0 in Government, in particular trying to bring the attendance to the top European politicians to the impact that the new 2.0 technologies could bring to the table.
The main organizers behind the event, led by David Osimo, clearly expressed that their objective is to use web 2.0 as a tool to formulate and expand Europe’s next ICT-strategy and in this way for the first time have the user community engaged in formulating the ‘post i2010’ strategy.
The formal kick off for the revision of the current i2010 strategy will take place in Malmö, Sweden in November, but David Osimo and his colleagues’ aims at setting up a web 2.0 Community already from mid May. The seminar held on March 16. was intended as a show case of what is already going on, best practices from NGO’s, private companies as well as some public cases.
The morning session contained a number of ‘grass root projects’ – typically NGO’s, private persons or small organizations that had developed web 2.0 sites and/or tools to solve specific societal issues: Jack Thurston demonstrated a transparency project on farm subsidies in Europe – Farmsubsidy - as the first results indicated an enormous skew in the sense that all the big land owners obtained the majority of all funds available. David Price, founder of Debategraph,showed an interesting graphical WiKi-tool useful in many public debates.
A very inspiring presentation was made by Emma Mulqueeny – Rewired State – showing a ‘hacker competition’ in UK:
“On Saturday March 7th 2009RewiredState held "National Hack The Government Day" at the new Guardian offices in Kings Cross. 80 developers created working projects from public sector information between 10am to 6pm, and presenting them to government officials and the media in the evening, before heading to the pub.”
The results was amazing, the top solutions awarded was a complete re-write of the public sectors’ job search solution (Job Centre Pro Plus ) and a site called Fix My Site, where users can suggest changes in public sector web sites to make them easier to use.
James Munro is a director of PatientOpinionby now a sort of icon in the public 2.0 area, originally received a lot of critical statements from the National health Services in UK when patients began rating their experience at the hospitals, but by now a very natural symbiosis between the public and the citizens.
OnRoadMedia is an extremely interesting project aiming at providing social media solutions to educate and train marginalized youngsters, street children, immigrants and homeless. This is a true demonstration on the real value of web 2.0.
Simon Hampton from Google Europe presented an interesting project linking public transportation time tables across Europe to provide a GoogleTransit solution using mash up techniques.
During the lunch break a new movie on the value of web 2.0 and crowd sourcing was shown.
“In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?
New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.
This website features all material being created during the making of the film.”
Afternoon session started with a block focusing on experiences with projects and programmes that could stimulate web 2.0 innovation.
Anna Maybank presented the Social Innovation Camp project – an NGO set up collecting all sorts of ideas and suggestions for web sites or web 2.0 solutions for social innovation. Last round was held in December, and after selecting the most promising ideas, the persons with the bright ideas were confronted with hard core developers and during a couple of days their ideas came to life.
Alberto Cottica from Italy presented the Kublai Project. The idea is to stimulate growth and creativity in the southern part of Italy by offering a collaborative design environment using meetings in second life and a sounding board community to discuss and possibly engage with the owners of the ideas. So in fact it is a combination of a number of web 2.0 techniques: crowd sourcing, second life, social networks, peer coaching.
Wim de Waele represents a Belgian organisation called IBBT - Institute for Broadband Technology and has worked with user driven innovation for some years. It seems to be a European ‘Media Lab’ (like MIT) – and seem to have launched a very substantial number of interesting projects marrying creative ideas with technology experts. Also arts and culture has been targeted, and recently also a project inviting open source programmers (Not only in Belgium but internationally) to participate in collaborative creative projects.
I presented the IBM experiencesusing the innovation jam-technology. Since 2001 IBM has improved and tested a large scale collaborative jam session technique involving potentially all IBMers on a World Wide scale. The technique has been used also for external projects like the UN Habitat Jam as a preparation for the UN global conference on Urban Dwelling in Vancouver in 2005. The most recent Jam was held in October 2008 engaging more than 90.000 individuals including representatives for more than 1.000 IBM customers. The focus areas were to identity new, innovative solutions, mobilisation of customers, new ways of dealing with the environmental and energy challenges and exploiting globalisation in product development and service delivery.
The final session dealt with Government representatives and their views and experiences using web 2.0. Richard Stirling from the UK Cabinet Office talked about the study he has recently finalized for the UK Government and the Power of Information Taskforce. He also gave a number of private/personal experiences and pointed out a number of areas where the exploitation of web 2.0 by government would be inevitable.
Davied Van Berlon from Netherlands discussed on the role of ‘Civil Servant 2.0’, the changes necessary not only in the technical World but much more the change of culture that is needed also in terms in attitude, ways of working. The Civil Servant 2.0 is a combination of blogs, wikis, social network between civil servants aimed at educating, discussion among peers and by including web 2.0 specialists empower the civil servants and inspiring them.
Jose Alonso is the chair of the eGov group in W3C/CTC. He described projects and ideas to open up the Governments huge collection of data to the general public. One example was the transparency project in Chile where data on all public procurement is on line. The underlying requirement for to open up public archives is of course is to use open document standards like XML, OpenOffice.
Yven Punis, Principal Scientist from JRC IPTS, the EU Research Centre studying web 2.0 finished the day off by a discussion on how the technology might be taken up during the next few years.
David Osimo summed up the day and by using the RSS feed from the conference site you should be able to participate in the formulation of EU’s next version of the ICT strategy when the call for crowd sourcing starts in May. Eventually all of the presentations will be available here as well.
(The conference managed to be on top of the twitter popularity roll for 3 hours when the presentations and discussions were being broadcasted in live video).
On February 24.th it was announced that IBM would join the so-called Edison-consortium. The EDISON consortium (Electric Vehicles in a Distributed and Integrated Market using Sustainable Energy and Open Networks) consists of IBM Denmark, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Denmark's largest (National-wide) energy company DONG Energy, the regional energy company of Oestkraft, Technical University of Denmark, Siemens, Eurisco (Plant Genetic Resources) and the Danish Energy Association. Due to the environmental benefits of the electric vehicle technologies, the research will be partly funded by the Danish government. At the Technical University north of Copenhagen a large scale computing system will be established based on websphere, SOA-technology and IBM Blades. The idea is to use this to build advanced simulation and calculation models to determine the optimum time to charge electric car batteries given the surplus from electrical windmill generators. Denmark is one of the foremost countries in the World when it comes to deployment, production and development of windmills. (See Vestas homepage)
This is perfectly in line with the Danish Government’s drive towards a consensus at the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen later this year, and it also matches perfectly with IBM’s declared strategy to support green technologies on a World Wide basis. The Green Agenda at IBM was in fact one of the most solid outcomes of a World-Wide so-called Jam, that IBm conducted with it’s 350.000 employees and more than 400 private and public business partners and customers in October 2008. The results are now being launched as recommendations, programs and new investment areas under the Smarter Planet initiative – including the Green agenda. Read about IBM Smart Planet drive
IBM currently is running more than 20 energy-related major innovative projects around the World, and the first one that was announced was the Island-state of Malta, home of the Templar Knights. Here IBM won a contract to supply the small country’s energy system with more than 250.000 intelligent meters with the intention to optimize usage of electricity, balance pricing with consumption and help consumers to time heavy use of energy.
Many more projects are bound to come up – also aiming at the consumption of energy within the IT business in itself. With a projection of energy consumption going up 10-30% pr. Year, even the current IT consumption at 2% of all the World’s energy resources will soon be very visible. The Green Datacenter is bound to be a focus item for any large organisation.
Already during his election campaign Barack Obama stressed the need to improve the protection of US against Cyber Warfare and to set up an organisation to improve protection level.
“As President, I'll make cyber security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century. I'll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset, and appoint a National Cyber Advisor who will report directly to me.
Once the election was over Obama and Biden declared at the transition website for the President electwhat would be the policy when they took office. The key areas of an increased effort against cyberwar would be (of course) to defeat terrorism Worldwide, to prevent Nuclear Terrorism, To strengthen American bio-security and to protect information networks.
At the same level the importance of improving Intelligence Capacity and at the same time protect civil liberties (a different recepei than George Bush!) plus the objective to protect American citizens from terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Protect American infrastructure and to Modernize the aging American infrastructure.
Particularly the policy to Protect Our Information Networks seems to be a new approach, as the New President is knowledgeable and capable of understanding what Cyber warfare could really do to a modern society, where most of the infrastructure - from communication networks, Media, to trains and airplanes to power stations, to sewers and drinking water - is controlled by IT systems that may be the target for cyber attacks.
As was stated also by the Frontpage in January 2009, this policy was further defined by these focus areas:
Strengthen Federal Leadership on Cyber Security:
Declare the cyber infrastructure a strategic asset and establish the position of national cyber advisor who will report directly to the president and will be responsible for coordinating federal agency efforts and development of national cyber policy.
Initiate a Safe Computing R&D Effort and Harden our Nation’s Cyber Infrastructure:
Support an initiative to develop next-generation secure computers and networking for national security applications. Work with industry and academia to develop and deploy a new generation of secure hardware and software for our critical cyber infrastructure.
Protect the IT Infrastructure That Keeps America’s Economy Safe:
Work with the private sector to establish tough new standards for cyber security and physical resilience.
Prevent Corporate Cyber-Espionage:
Work with industry to develop the systems necessary to protect our nation’s trade secrets and our research and development. Innovations in software, engineering, pharmaceuticals and other fields are being stolen online from U.S. businesses at an alarming rate.
Develop a Cyber Crime Strategy to Minimize the Opportunities for Criminal Profit:
Shut down the mechanisms used to transmit criminal profits by shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes. Initiate a grant and training program to provide federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies the tools they need to detect and prosecute cyber crime.
Mandate Standards for Securing Personal Data and Require Companies to Disclose Personal Information Data Breaches: Partner with industry and our citizens to secure personal data stored on government and private systems. Institute a common standard for securing such data across industries and protect the rights of individuals in the information age.
Where did Obama get these ideas from? Undoubtedly from having studied what took place in Estonia in 2007, where a Russian led protest against the movement of a Russian war-memorial from the centre of Tallin to some outskirts initiated a denial of service attack that blocked the better part of the Estonian Financial Sector as well as most of the central and local government web sites for weeks.This in turn led to NATO’s profound interest in extending the defence lines of the alliance to include cyber war, so according to Computerworld, May 2008, NATO is launching a centre to detect, prevent and protect member states against cyber attacks.
But President Obama’s very first task was to launch an in-depth analysis of the security threats against US, due in 2 months from now, according to The Register.:
“This 60-day interagency review will develop a strategic framework to ensure that U.S. Government cybersecurity initiatives are appropriately integrated, resourced and coordinated with Congress and the private sector.”
The importance of the coordination with the private sector is that the threat is not only being seen as directed towards the public net services, and the analysis will be a 360 degrees review. Also it is clearly stated that privacy laws and regulations and respect for personal integrity has to maintained in parallel with an increased level of security against cyber attacks.
Also the German Bundeswehr is building up capacities and a national center consisting of 76 highly skilled specialists to oversee, predict and prevent cyberwarfare. The article in Der Spiegel February 7, 2009, states that the reason for this is an increased number of cyber attacks against German ministries and public websites.
Other very recent examples of cyber warfare was the cyberattack on Israel as a result of the attack on Gaza, and even in the former Russian Republic of Kyrgystan the Government felt the anger of the hackers (presumably either from inside Russia or – worst case – maybe endorsed by Russia) to try to down the feeble Kyrgystani network before consenting anything to US’ wish to have an airbase in the country.As stated by Computerworld UK:
“Since 18 January, the two biggest Internet service providers (ISPs) in Kyrgyzstan have been under a "massive, sustained distributed denial-of-service attack," said Don Jackson , the director of threat intelligence for SecureWorks. “
The attack followed almost similar pattern as a cyberattack against Georgia during the conflict with Russia in 2008. Seems the hackers are getting their act together based on a lot of practice by now!
The Danish Super-blogger Dorte Toft noticed that as 8000 Danish net bank users were locked out of their net bank because they had been affected by the so-called ‘Donadup’ worm this clearly illustrated the vulnerability of the Danish IT Infrastructure. As the work had a clearly identifiable Russian origin, we may be looking into the same family of super hackers as the other recent cases.
In a later blog dated February 8 2009, Dorte Toft notes that Denmark clearly lacks a central organisation to supervise and protect us against massive cyber attacks, and that the way the Financial sector handled the case of 8000 infected PC’s is a clear sign of misunderstood restrictive communication to the general public.
In fact this is not the first time the attention has been brought to the need for a more coordinated defence against cyber attacks in Denmark. In May 2004 the Danish Technology Council published a report on a project called ‘How vulnerable is the Danish IT Infrastructure?’ . This report concluded that the threat is real, it is increasing and it has to be met by a ‘total defence’ view led by a coordinating organisation. A number of other practical suggestions were proposed, but only a few of them seem to have been followed. So it seems that Dorte Toft is absolutely right in her conclusion and it would be about time that the warnings from 2004 are being heard – and followed. It is not enough to rely on a NATO centre, we have to have a coordinating, practical body with sufficient level of expertise and with legal power to coordinate sector organisations like Finansrådet – The Danish Bankers’ Association - but also other sector organisations like the Telesector, the Energy sector, the transportations sector and of course Danish Industry including the IT industry.
It is not a moment too early that the Government and the heavy ministries – Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Justice – together with the Ministry of Technology - start to do something. They have got a clear advice not only from Teknologirådet /The Technology Council but also from the IT industry ITEK and the Danish Industry Security Committee. And from Dorte Toft as well.
During 2009 the New Danish Digital Signature will be rolled out; already before availability, critics have stated that it seems to be complicated to install and to use. Usage requires a one-time code to be entered, and there is no single recommended or secure external media to ensure mobility.
However, the major advantage of the new Digital Signature is that it is a cross-sector solution supported by the public and by the financial sector. But, as I have stated earlier, it’s usability in my eyes is limited because it does not give the citizens any new kind of Identity Card.
The requirements for an electronic identity is increasing, not least because of the explosion of the take-up of social networks – both by NGO’s, companies, media,private citizens and now also more and more by the public sector. These networks holds some part of the individual’s profile and rightfully need to be protected – but maybe not using the full power of a qualified digital certificate.
In some countries the public sector have ambitions to set up a ‘one stop shopping’ portal for access to all public services; in US the primary purpose is to ensure and control who is allowed inside, in a number of European countries the aim is to increase use of on line services with a minimum of user inconvenience by setting up a centrally managed authorization and control system – single sign on.
But why should everybody need to use a strong certification for accessing everyday type of information or standard services, where only the citizenship, maybe age, sometimes postal number, is of importance?
It was interesting to note that the German law on digital identities offered a user-centric way of controlling how much PII (Personally Identifiable Information), each citizen would like to reveal.
So my suggestion is that a web 2.0 enabled World will require user centric identity management, not a centralized monolithic control mechanism. Yes, access to personalized health information requires a real strong identification. But does participation in a chat room concerning the local city planning aspects? Hardly.
IBM’s Zurich Laboratory has been one of the driving forces in a consortium - consisting of 20 scientific institutions as well as private companies - called PRIME - PRIME - Privacy and Identity Management for Europe :
“PRIME aimed to develop a working prototype of a privacy-enhancing Identity Management System. To foster market adoption, novel solutions for managing identities had been demonstrated in challenging real-world scenarios, e.g., from Internet Communication, Airline Passenger Processes, Location-Based Services and Collaborative e-Learning.”
“The success of PRIME is evidenced by the number of offspring projects, including “PrimeLife”,PICOS and PrivacyOS—bringing privacy high up on the European research agenda. “PrimeLife”, also coordinated by IBM’s Zurich Research Lab, is the direct successor project of PRIME and aims at empowering users to manage and control their personal data and privacy throughout their entire lifetimes, whenever they participate in Web 2.0 technologies, such as social networks or virtual communities, which raise substantial new privacy challenges.”
IBM Zurich’s major contribution to the project is the solution called IDEMIX, somewhat misleading mentioned as ‘anonymous authentication’. Themain author of IdeMIX, Jan Camenisch from IBMResearchCenter, in his presentation describes that the idea is to have the user control how much PII to reveal by having one secret, private key but multiple public keys signifying different levels of PII. In fact, the term Pseudonymity would have been more appropriate.
User-centric identity systems (sometimes referred to as Identity 2.0) are an attempt to put the
control back into the user's hands. In this way a user gains consent as to what information
about them is disclosed to which sites and for what purpose. One of the other benefits of user-centric identity systems is that they can be loosely coupled relationships. The relying party does not necessarily need to have a pre-existing trust relationship with the identity provider (be it a managed identity provider or self-issued). This arrangement allows for a non-password-based account bootstrapping process, which is easier for both users and
relying parties.
Currently there are 3 standards available that supports this type of User Centric Identity Management (also supported by IBM’s Tivoli Federated Identity Manager):
If you look carefully at these 3 solutions, it seems that the Eclipse-based solution holds the best potential for an a multi-level open, future oriented standard. OpenID is a practical ID-solution, but does not offer the granularity and level of ID revealed that is characteristic for IdeMIX and the Eclipse solution.
One of the reasons for stating this is also that the eclipse solution has been used as a foundation to develop a new generation XML-based policy management solutions – XACML - eXtensiveAccess Control Markup Languagewhich is ideal for developing and implementing privacy and security policies in existing applications without change.
This is typically a problem when you have large, complex database transaction systems, like health service solutions. Patients’ data are protected (HIPAA or similar compliance regulations) and must not be revealed unless consent has been obtained. This can then be combined with a multi-level user centric identity management model, so that consent from a patient (with highest level of identification proof) stating that ‘any doctor’ could be allowed access, or even make access granular, so that basic health information could be revealed to any person employed by the health sector.
This example illustrate that the whole idea of User Centric ID management first and foremost is to help the citizen obtain control of her own data – and make this control a practical and easy tool.
In Europethe Commission has begun preparation to renew and re-design the Data Privacy and Protection Directive from 94, which many now considers outdated. It is highly likely that a revision will further strengthen the need for user centricity, ownership and control over personal data.
A couple of weeks ago one of our friends from Liseleje, Axel Hvidtfeldt, occurred on TV where he proposed the creation of a Bronze Age center in Northern Zealand. The background for this idea was the occurrence of a huge stone filled with Bronze Age drawing, Petroglyphs, close to Liseleje at Hyllingebjerg.
The Hyllingebjerg Stone is an 8.5 tons granite monolith, which was left atop Hyllingebjerg, by the receding icecap in Northern Europe about 10 000 years ago. Hyllingebjerg is a 28 meter high earth cliff at the coast of Northern Zealand in Denmark. The stone was in the Bronze Age, about 3000 years ago, decorated with rock carvings including ships, sun wheels and about 300 bowl shaped carvings.
The stone and its rock carvings were first discovered in May 1983 when it was lying on the beach at Hyllingebjerg, where it had tumbled from the cliff 28 meters above. The stone had lodged at the waters edge half buried in sand after storms had eroded the cliff. The DanishNationalMuseum was alerted, but was not at the time, interested in a conservation project because of lack of funds.
Following a period with some interest from one of the National Museum’s specialists, the stone was moved to a local museum in Frederiksværk, Gjethuset, but in August 1999an attempt was made to have the stone exhibited in a diamond shaped glass cage within a fully controlled atmosphere (Relative Humidity and Temperature) at the top of the Hyllingebjerg cliff, which 3000 years ago was a cultural and religious place. The project was not realised due to lack of funds, so the stone remained hidden away from the public in a dark corner of the “Gjethuset”.
At that time the rock carvings were not drawn up and barely visible. Sometimes during 2001thestone was then transported to Stone Conservator Leif Vognsen´s facility at Gram in Jutland, Denmark, a journey of 317 kilometres. There is no record of this transport. The stone spent the next 4 years at Leif Vognsen´s shop. Here the stone was cleaned, but it is not known precisely which methods and which agents were used in this process and this needs to be further investigated.
The hundreds of rock carvings on The Hyllingebjerg Stone were in August 2004identified by Scandinavia’s foremost authorities on rock carvings, Gerhardt Milstreu, and the DanishNationalMuseum’s Flemming Kaul on a grant from the EU. The carvings were touched up with white paint and the carvings were photographed 2-Dimensionally. The beautiful 3000 years old artwork was now after 11 years again clearly visible. The stone was to remain at Leif Vognsen´s conservation shop for another year.
InNovember 2004 “Hyllingebjergstenens Venner” – The Friends of the Hyllingebjerg Stone -had received a grant, which made it possible to have the rock carvings photographed using a new 3-Dimensional photographic technique. We also had a model of the Egtved Girl from the same Bronze Age pose next to stone so as to give an impression of the size of the stone. The result was posted on the Internet and can be viewed at www.frvhistorie.dk/Hyllingebjergstenen. Here the artwork can be admired from all sides through manipulating the computer mouse.
The again on the 19th of November 2005 then stone was transported to Hilleroed, where it was put in a cold store, as it was explained by the National Museum, to protect the stone from decaying if left out to the rain and sun. This was a little bit stiff to the local historic committee and to our friend Axel Hvitfeldt, so right now they have increased their lobby, not only to get – at least a copy – if not the stone itself back, but to create a Danish bronze Age Center in the area of the find.
Now the Bronze Age – which in Denmark and the Nordic countries is dated from 1800 BC to around 500 BC, was a period with a nice warm climate, in fact you could grow grapes in Denmark. The coast line was much higher – maybe what we will see in another hundred years as a result of the melting of the inland ice. The period was named after the most precious metal used for weaponry and ornaments, most particular some very characteristic women belt ornaments.
The so-called ‘girl from Egtved’ (Pictured beside the stone )represents this glorious period and the short skirt clearly illustrates the climate.
At the North Zealand peninsula Halsnaes around Hyllingebjerg we do in fact find a lot of Bronze Age Mounds, very characteristic burial sites as well as remainders from villages and fishing places .There is little doubt that the Nordic Bronze Age produced a high level of technically well equipped ships, which are among the most typical drawings on the petroglyphs. It is believed that the carvings represent pictures of the sun and that the ship actually illustrates the transport vessel of the sun across the sky.
These ships later developed into the Vikingships, but already in the Bronzeage they were obviously used as a means of transportation across the Baltic sea and deep into Europe on the rivers following the so-called amber-route, where the Nordic people exchanged fur and amber for precious metal and occasional weapon.
It is believed that the religion contained to Gods – a male and a female – which can be seen on contemporary petroglyphs in Sweden, and that these Gods later became absorbed in the Nordic mythology as Freya and Frey – or Freja and Frøj. Freya seems to have been the goddess Nerthus as described by Tacitus.
The 'sun wagon' from Trundholm Mose depicts the Sun God.
The beautiful North Zealand area would be perfect for a living Bronze Age museum, and as the Jelling Stone – one of the Unesco Heritage points in Denmark – is also in need for coverage against weather and sun the project for the Hyllingebjerg Stone developed by the Famous Danish artist Bjørn Nørgaard could easily be replicated and re-used.
I do hope that this project will attract interest also of some of the heavy weight foundations in Denmark. It would be a beauty along with the Neolithic center in Hjerl and the Iron Age Research Center at Lejre.
As is usual around the change of year a number of specialists in all disciplines try to make predictions of what is going to happen in the year to come. And also the ‘security specialists’ have been very active. Before we turn to the actual predictions it may be worthwhile to see what really happened in 2008 in terms of cyber attacks and cyber crimes.
His analysis for what happened during 2008, described as ‘the best of the worst in 2008’ pointed to the following major observations:
New Malware Variants and new Families of Threats – millions of distinct threats that mutate as they spread.
Fake Applications – ‘Scareware’ – fake secure sw applications that install together with a Trojan horse.
Web attacks galore – Symantecs figures point to the web as the prime area for attacks
Underground Economy – hard to estimate the real size of this, the investigators claim that in a year they noticed stolen goods traded on the Internet at the value of more than 276 million $, but this is probably only a very small fraction.
Data Breaches – this of course includes company specific data as well as public stored personal information. Particularly in UK and US some really extraordinary data losses of public data have been noticed.
SPAM – Still very active and annoying, but in fact because of more advanced spam-filters down to some 60-65% of what it was at it’s height
Phishing was also a major threat in 2008 – various techniques and baits used in different economies, Obama’s election was but one example.
Browser and plug in vulnerabilities – cyber attackers are carefully studying loopholes and vulnerabilities and even if Microsoft Explorer’s total domination may be going away, there are still room for improvement also in other browsers.
Explosion of Malware Variants – according to Symantec’s analysis, there is now more malware programs being released on the internet than legitimate programs! This calls for new types of detection programs needed.
Web Threats – It is expected that web services will be the next area for introduction of threats. This points toward the need for some certification scheme for web services.
The Economic Crisis will give rise to new types of fraud promising people to get rid of their loans or offerings , or maybe web sites promising new jobs. These types of fraud typically hits the weaker and poorer.
Social Networks – phishing for username and account info. Based on the rapidly growing success of social networks also as a part of normal enterprise web sites, it is inevitable that more threats will come in this area.
SPAWAR
Other highly competent sources of knowledge of security threats include SPAWAR – The US Space and Naval Warfare Command Centre in San Diego. Among their tasks they will provide: "…revolutionary information superiority and dispersed, networked force capabilities to deliver unprecedented offensive power, defensive assurance, and operational independence to Joint Force Commanders."
- General move towards ‘information centric security’ with data as the focal point as opposed to the traditional user/application rights management focus.
“What seems certain, concludes the Sophos report, “Security threat report: 2009,” is that the variety and number of attacks will continue to escalate, compromised PCs will remain the primary source of spam, and web insecurity and SQL injections will remain the primary distribution method of malware. “
Infected web pages are cropping up three times as fast this year as compared to last, while the number of infected web pages increased from one every 14 seconds in 2007 to one every 4.5 seconds in 2008, according to Cluley.
“There's a real challenge in how businesses big and small will manage this problem and ensure that their web sites are properly secured and hardened from SQL injection attacks,” he said.
In addition, malicious emails with a greater proportion of legitimate looking attachments, or web links aiming to infect unpatched users, are likely to be sent. Data leakage and identity theft resulting in decreased customer trust and loyalty will continue to pose problems for enterprises, Cluley said.
On the bright side – security software is getting better and more proactive.
For enterprises, Cluley recommended dealing with the security risks with a tiered defense against attacks, including up-to-date anti-virus software, firewalls, security patches and policy control and user education.
John Strand not surprisingly, points to Wireless risks first:
“Wireless risks continue!
There are so many ways to attack a client system via wireless vulnerabilities, as you can see just by looking at Karma, a set of tools for assessing the security of wireless clients, and karmetasploit, a tool that acts as a wireless access point and responds to all probe requests from wireless clients.
I believe that many organizations are about five years behind the curve when grappling with Wi-Fi threat vectors”….
“ ..vendors implement new protocols and authentication schemes like TKIP, LEAP and PEAP in different ways. We need to fully research the protocols used by our vendors before implementing them in our organizations.”
But John Strand also predicts that new interest for hackers will be directed to the Operating Systems:
“While operating system attacks have not reached the effectiveness and prominence they had from 2003-2005, malicious hackers will most likely discover operating system vulnerabilities again. There has been a tremendous amount of research over the past few years in browser-based attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (XSRF) and clickjacking. But what if these techniques were used in conjunction with an operating system vulnerability?”
Finally John Strand points to a possible blind spot in the convergence taking place between Web servers and Browsers.
Ponemon Survey Also the Ponemon Institution conducted a study – 2008 security Mega Trends Survey – where they concluded the following predictions for 2009:
“Cybercrime and outsourcing were named the top security concerns for 2009. In addition to uncovering a changing view of how IT organizations are becoming less siloed and more collaborative, key findings from the Security Mega Trends Survey include:
Outsourcing IT is a Major Concern
Data Breaches and Cybercrime
Workforce Mobility Contributes to Data Loss
Web 2.0, P2P, Virtualization and Cloud Computing are Growing in Prevalence “
So the overall picture from all experts – with some variations – points to the same areas or issues. Or is it just that everybody is picking everybody’s brain that this seems so very identical? I will almost be willing to bet that CyberCriminals are more innovative than the sum of all the experts, and that some – until now unseen – types of threat will occur in 2009. With the growing number of computers in everything maybe a new type of crime will be focused on this ‘internet of things’ phenomenon?
The easiest thing of course is to project threats in the areas where you have some remedies and tools to cope with the known – and to sell!.
What we have to fear most is probably not what we know but those areas where we are not even aware of not knowing anything.
(picture: Franklin D. Roosevelt at London Summit 1933)
