China-US cyberwar

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 16:30:12 MDT


Michael Lorrey wrote:
>
> Or hack them. The cracker group PoizonBOx has apparently gone all out to
> attack Chinese websites to shut them down, and now Chinese crackers are
> saying they will counterattack on May 1st (International Labor Day).
> With overt military action becoming increasingly unacceptable to the
> people of both nations, it seems that the cracker youth is responding by
> taking up cyberarms and declaring their own war. Interesting times.

What's happened is that "the Internet is dissolving international borders"
and "transferring power from government to individuals", thus enabling two
populations that hate each other to declare war on each other directly.

I'm a bit nervous about all this. It sounds like the sort of thing where
historians look back and describe it as the first instance of
"[something], scourge of the twenty-first century", or the setup for a
Bruce Sterling novel in which both China and America are reduced to
Third-World countries.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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