User:LA2/Information Warfare and the Red W
< User:LA2
- Written by user:LA2 on August 19–26, 2005, except for the parts coloured light-blue and dated.(added 2010)
Information Warfare and the "Red W"
editWhen people on the foundation-l mailing list were insisting on drawing parallels between the Wikimedia Foundation and the International Red Cross, I wrote this semi-humoristic, semi-serious reply (August 2005):
- The International Red Cross was established in 1863 followed in 1864 by the first Geneva Convention that recognized the red cross symbol in warfare. This happened at the same time as warfare got mechanized, in the decades immediately after the innovations of steam railroads (Stephenson's Rocket, 1829), steam propeller ships (USS Monitor, 1862) and machine guns (Gatling gun, 1861).
- Supposedly, a "Red W" (Wikinews: neutral reporting) can be adopted as soon as we have a fully developed information war. The current wars (against terrorism, and in Afghanistan and Iraq) are not of this kind, because of the overwhelming information supremacy of the winning (western) side, which makes the information aspect of the current conflicts look more like a minor colonial uprising. For the nearest decade, it seems unlikely that the Arab world, Africa or communist China would be able to catch up with the western information supremacy. It seems more likely that the first real information wars will be fought within the current area of supremacy.
- If we just add 150 years, the Gatling Blog will be invented in 2011, the "Red W" could be adopted in 2013, at the height of the U.S. civil information war, followed in 2021 by the Franco-Prussian information war, and World Information War I would be scheduled to take place in 2064-2068.
It should be clear that I draw the parallel to its extreme. But such analogies can still provide inspiration when we want to imagine what things, such as wikis, that are developing now could become in the future. They probably thought in 1855 that they had pretty good rifles, but did they foresee the machine gun? The ugliness of mechanized warfare prompted for new international law with special exceptions for human relief, such as the red cross symbol. We don't know yet what the particular ugliness of information warfare will be, or which exceptions to our regular powerplay it will allow. Perhaps free software and free information will be part of it.
Let's see how far the 150 year analogy between mechanical engineering and computer networks can go:
| Mechanical engineering | Year | Year+150 | Computer networks |
| Early work | |||
| Birth of James Watt | 1736 | 1886 | |
| 1740 | 1890 | Birth of Vannevar Bush | |
| 1750 | 1900 | Birth of Howard Aiken | |
| 1753 | 1903 | Birth of John von Neumann | |
| 1762 | 1912 | Birth of Alan Turing | |
| Watt patents a condenser chamber for the steam engine | 1769 | 1919 | |
| 1775 | 1925 | Birth of Douglas Engelbart | |
| 1776 | 1926 | Birth of Paul Baran | |
| Birth of George Stephenson | 1781 | 1931 | |
| Watt invents double-acting engine | 1782 | 1932 | |
| 1787 | 1937 | Birth of Ted Nelson | |
| Watt adapts centrifugal governor for steam engines | 1788 | 1938 | Birth of Bob Kahn |
| 1793 | 1943 | Birth of Vint Cerf | |
| 1789–1795 | 1939–1945 | First computers developed during World War II | |
| 1795 | 1945 | Vannevar Bush publishes As We May Think | |
| Birth of the key players | |||
| 1800 | 1950 | Birth of Steve Wozniak | |
| Birth of John Ericsson | 1803 | 1953 | |
| 1805 | 1955 | Birth of Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates | |
| Birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel | 1806 | 1956 | |
| 1810 | 1960 | Ted Nelson founds Project Xanadu | |
| 1812 | 1962 | Paul Baran creates packet-switching theory | |
| 1814 | 1964 | Birth of Jeff Bezos | |
| 1816 | 1966 | Birth of Jimmy Wales | |
| 1815 | 1965 | First e-mail systems on mainframes | |
| Birth of Richard Jordan Gatling | 1818 | 1968 | Douglas Engelbart holds The Mother of All Demos |
| 1819 | 1969 | First ARPANET connection. Birth of Linus Torvalds | |
| 1820 | 1970 | "World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." --Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business(added 2017) | |
| 1821 | 1971 | Birth of Marc Andreessen and Julian Assange.(added 2010) Intel 4004 is the first microprocessor (added 2007) | |
| Technological breakthroughs | |||
| Carnot presents the theory behind steam engines (added 2007) | 1824 | 1974 | |
| 1826 | 1976 | Apple I home computer introduced | |
| Stephenson's Rocket wins at Rainhill Trials | 1829 | 1979 | Beginning of the Usenet |
| 1830 | 1980 | Birth of Shawn Fanning | |
| 1831 | 1981 | IBM PC introduced | |
| Great Western Railroad company founded in Bristol | 1833 | 1983 | Internet switches to Cerf's TCP/IP (from NCP). Birth of Edward Snowden (added 2013) |
| Clapeyron contributes to theory behind steam engines (added 2007) | 1834 | 1984 | Cisco Systems is founded. Apple Macintosh is introduced |
| 1836 | 1986 | NSFNet academic Internet backbone | |
| Brunel's SS Great Western is launched, crossing the Atlantic in 15 days | 1838 | 1988 | IRC designed by Jarkko Oikarinen |
| 1839 | 1989 | Berlin Wall falls | |
| Great Western Railroad London-Bristol opens | 1841 | 1991 | World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee |
| With John Ericsson's propeller, SS Princeton wins speed competition. Brunel's SS Great Britain is launched | 1843 | 1993 | Mosaic, the first graphic web browser, is introduced |
| 1845 | 1995 | Amazon.com is launched | |
| 1846 | 1996 | ICQ is introduced Hotmail (later Outlook.com) is launched (added 2013) | |
| 1849 | 1999 | Shawn Fanning launches Napster | |
| 1850 | 2000 | Dot-com stock market crash | |
| 1851 | 2001 | Wikipedia is launched. Kazaa is launched (2013) | |
| 1853 | 2003 | Skype and The Pirate Bay are launched(added 2013) | |
| 1854 | 2004 | Facebook is launched. Google Book Search is announced, including a ten year plan to digitize 15 million books (added 2007) Gmail, Flickr, and OpenStreetMap are launched (added 2013) | |
| 1855 | 2005 | In February, Google Maps is launched, using new technologies popularized as Web 2.0 (added 2013) | |
| 1856 | 2006 | WikiLeaks is launched. (added 2010) Twitter is launched. The Pirate Party is founded in Sweden and later spreads to other countries (added 2013) Spotify is founded (launched widely in 2010–2011), co-owned by record companies, reducing the need for piracy.(added 2023) | |
| 1857 | 2007 | Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe, article in Wired magazine issue 15.09, describing the botnet attack on Estonia in April 2007 (added 2007) On June 29, Apple introduces the first iPhone, defining the "smart phone". Older cellphones (with buttons) come to be called "feature phones". In November, Google introduces the Android operating system, used in smart phones from many competing brands (added 2013) | |
| Brunel's SS Great Eastern is launched | 1858 | 2008 | |
| 1860 | 2010 | WikiLeaks gets mainstream media attention with Collateral Murder (April), Afghan War Diary (July), Iraq War Logs (October), Cablegate (November) (added 2010) Pinterest is launched (added 2013) The Arab Spring starts in Tunisia in December 2010, using social networks and cellphones as part of a popular uprising, lasting through 2011–2012.(added 2021) | |
| Things get ugly | |||
| Patent for Gatling gun | 1861 | 2011 | |
| American Civil War, the first mechanized war | 1861–1865 | 2011–2015 | |
| USS Monitor | 1862 | 2012 | An important step in the deep learning revolution was an October 2012 improvement in ImageNet classification.(added 2022) GPUs are heavily used for deep learning. Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally says in a 2023 presentation that performance has doubled annually, increasing 1000-fold over the decade 2013–2023.(added 2023) |
| International Red Cross is founded | 1863 | 2013 | On June 6, Britain's The Guardian starts to disclose information about NSA's PRISM, X-Keyscore and other programs for mass surveillance (see e.g. NSA warrantless surveillance), leaked by Edward Snowden, who hides in Hong Kong and later escapes to Moscow (added 2013) |
| The first Geneva Convention | 1864 | 2014 | On February 27, immediately following the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi (February 7–23) and the 2014 Ukrainian revolution (where president Viktor Yanukovych fled the capital Kiev on February 21), Russia invades Crimea, a part of Ukraine, accompanied by an information war, including the blocking of several independent news websites on March 13. In September, NATO commander Philip M. Breedlove called it “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare”.[1] In November, a report[2] by Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss suggests the creation of an organization to monitor disinformation.(added 2014) |
| 1865 | 2015 | Apple Watch is launched.(added 2023) | |
| 1866 | 2016 | At a Russian conference on February 4–5, Kremlin adviser Andrey Krutskikh compared Russia's current cyber abilities to its development of the nuclear bomb in 1949, and saying “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”(added 2017) After the referendum on June 23, where citizens of the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union, The Guardian in an article calls this "the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics". In December, U.S. president Barack Obama expells 35 Russian diplomats after alleged interference in the presidential election won by Donald Trump.(added 2016) | |
| 1867 | 2017 | Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales calls for online transparency to fight against fake news.(added 2017) WannaCry attack in May.(added 2018) On June 27, Danish shipping company Maersk and others are hit by the NotPetya attack.(added 2018) Beginning in the autumn, Russian GPS jamming is discovered in northern Norway, near the Kola peninsula.(added 2019) Transformers in machine learning are introduced.(added 2022) | |
| 1868 | 2018 | An article in Wired summarizes Facebook's role in the events of 2016-2017 (Trump election and Brexit referendum).(added 2018) | |
| 1869 | 2019 | Elon Musk's SpaceX launches the first satellites in Starlink, in 2023 having 5000 satellites.(added 2023) | |
| Franco-Prussian War | 1870–1871 | 2020–2021 | |
| 1870 | 2020 | An outbreak of a new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. People die; borders are closed; events and meetings are banned or cancelled; hotels, airlines, industries and schools close; stockmarkets fall sharply; emergency hospitals are set up amid shortages of medical supplies.(added 2020) 2020–2023 global chip shortage(added 2024) | |
| 1872 | 2022 | On February 24, Russia invades Ukraine. After 8 years of supporting "separatists" in Luhansk and Donetsk in the eastern corner of Ukraine and a fruitless information war, a traditional rocket-and-tank war is launched, attempting to dominate the whole country and take its capital Kyiv. Western sanctions aim to make this costly for Russia. Russian authorites ban words like "war" and "invasion".(added 2022) Elon Musk activates Starlink over Ukraine.(added 2023) Russia's inferiority in information technology and logistics, enhanced by a shortage of western spare parts due to sanctions, soon forces it to reduce the war to southern and eastern Ukraine, while Ukraine enjoys material and moral support from all western countries. On November 30, OpenAI releases ChatGPT, the first publicly accessible large language model. This draws public attention to the rapid progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning in the recent decade, called the the deep learning revolution.(added 2023) | |
| Stock market crashes in Vienna and New York start the Long Depression | 1873 | 2023 | |
| 1874 | 2024 | On September 17, Pagers explode, used by Hezbollah in Lebanon, in an advanced supply-chain attack, apparently planned by Israel.(added 2024) | |
| The steam era is over | |||
| Wright brothers invent aeroplane | 1903 | 2053 | |
| Ford Model T introduced | 1908 | 2058 | |
| World War I, fully mechanized global war | 1914–1918 | 2064–2068 | |
References
edit- ↑ SACEUR: Allies must prepare for Russia ‘hybrid war’, Stars and Stripes, 4 September 2014.
- ↑ Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, The Menace of Unreality (PDF, 44 pages), Institute of Modern Russia.
Summary and announcement on November 22, 2014.
See also an earlier article in The Atlantic on September 9, 2014.