I always liked the word cyberspace. Growing up in the 1970´s and 1980´s I was completely bred on TV-shows like Star Trek, Space:1999 and V and movies like Star Wars and Alien. For a solid part of my youth I wanted to grow up and become an astronaut. Somewhere down the road I changed my mind. Growing up and becoming a teenager was sobering. I began to fully understand the fiction in the science fiction. And being a true teenager the lack of cool clothes and interesting people with pointy ears in space travel didn´t impress me much. The gear was way to clunky and the shuttles not really filled with the galactic travellers I had been promised on TV. And now this year when nearly 8000 people working on the space shuttles in the US lost their jobs I was proven lucky to have left my moon aspirations behind. Space travel did not turn out to be the career of the future.
But haven chosen a non-astronaut line of work I still feel very excited about things named space, virtual and cyber. So happily enough I today have the opportunity to work with this ‘closer to earth’ kind of science and technology. At UK Trade and Investment as a whole, an integral part of our work is information technology of different kinds. This is very much in evidence in our organisation and support of major events such as TechWorld, which I’m attending this week
Regarding our work at UKTI Sweden, there are two main reasons for our technological focus. The most important one is because information technology these days is really a part of most things. We do not see IT as a certain sub-sector but rather a cross-sector that effects all different kind of activities. Healthcare, construction, production industry – they all contain a heavy element of information technology. Another reason for us to focus on this area is the maturity of this market in the UK and Sweden. Both countries have a very developed IT industry and we see an immediate fit between the companies in Sweden and the Tech-market in the UK and vice versa with plenty of opportunities for collaboration, investment and trade.
But were there are opportunities there are also people trying to take unfair advantages of the new developments. Security, both for wired and wireless technology, are big challenges for the future. When we are starting to integrate information technology solutions into everything, we do put ourselves in a risky situation if we’re not adequately secured. We open our businesses and other activities to hackers, viruses, bots or other actions with malicious intent.
So it is not only the information technology that is big business in the future. The security around it is going to take a lot of hard work and there are certainly lots of business opportunities in this area as IT keeps maturing. So some of our heroes in cyberspace in the future are going to be companies providing security services. Even without pointy ears and blue spandex sweaters – these are the people I will be following with great attention.
Because we need a secure IT infrastructure as well as safe applications and solutions so information technology and cyberspace can continue being an integral part of our future. And to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars “In my experience, there´s no such thing as luck.” In this case it is true – we should focus on being safe rather than sorry.
Tags: cyber security, ITC, star wars, TechWorld, UKTI
Cyberspace originally comes from (if my memory still functions) from S.F. author, William Gibson, in his early works (and only decent ones), “Burning Chrome” — “Mona Lisa Overdrive” , etc.
As long as countries like the USA, Japan and Euro countries continue offshoring technology and tech jobs to China, it is highly doubtful as to future IT security.
An interesting aside: Julian Assange was either the first, or one of the earliest hackers to code a public domain port scanner — a most outstanding program for ensuring network security.
Unfortunately, there are those in Sweden and the USA who wish to persecute him and Bradley Manning….
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If you want to be safe, use any Unix like operating system, like GNU/Linux or BSD. With them you don’t need to install antivirus or firewalls becasue they don’t have open backdoors like Windows system has. Also Linux and BSD are for free.
The tools for security are already there and for free.
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Sebastian
I am coming to the conclusion there is no such thing a cyber security on the internet. If some technically capable entity, either a person or an organization wishes to target me I am toast. My actual security is simply that I am just one of billions of people that are of little interest to those who could do me in.
And even then it gets weird. I have an AOL email account. Routinely I receive emails from my aol self at other email sites, with cc to various unknown individuals. My AOL account does not show any of these as outgoing mail from my account. It does, however, show many other outgoing emails returned as undeliverable.
Until it costs me some money I will simply ignore these things. And the places where it MIGHT cost me some money put millions of dollars into security systems that will protect THEM from someone hacking me. I consider it a ‘cost’ of convenience.
PS. If you have a car with OnStar or some such, the marketeers will know every place your car has ever gone. It is all marketing of course. The Feds probably have access to it if even one link is wireless, or if they get a warrant. Further, it seems clear that Sweden, for instance, does not even have this limitation.
Apparently “The Swedish State” can simply stop people on the road and search their cars. So. Even if the US requires ‘probable cause” for searches, Sweden does not. Accordingly, I can not think of a world where signals intelligence by fiber optic is not easily acquired by just about anyone.
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