O Ciberguerra deixa de ter atualização de conteúdos a partir de 25 de Fevereiro de 2013. As temáticas são retomadas no Caderno de notas de José Pedro Teixeira Fernandes. 

‘A revolução digital atingiu as universidades‘ (e está a transformar o ensino superior), por Thomas L. Friedman

LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity.

Last May I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them. When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking 38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities. Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses from 33 universities, including eight international ones.

Anant Agarwal, the former director of M.I.T.’s artificial intelligence lab, is now president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that M.I.T. and Harvard are jointly building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000 students from around the world have taken edX’s first course: an M.I.T. intro class on circuits. “That is greater than the total number of M.I.T. alumni in its 150-year history,” he said [...]

Ver o artigo de Thomas L. Friedman no NYT

Leituras: ‘Cyberpolitics in International Relations‘ de Nazli Choucri

Cyberspace is widely acknowledged as a fundamental fact of daily life in today’s world. Until recently, its political impact was thought to be a matter of low politics--background conditions and routine processes and decisions. Now, however, experts have begun to recognize its effect on high politics--national security, core institutions, and critical decision processes. In this book, Nazli Choucri investigates the implications of this new cyberpolitical reality for international relations theory, policy, and practice.

The ubiquity, fluidity, and anonymity of cyberspace have already challenged such concepts as leverage and influence, national security and diplomacy, and borders and boundaries in the traditionally state-centric arena of international relations. Choucri grapples with fundamental questions of how we can take explicit account of cyberspace in the analysis of world politics and how we can integrate the traditional international system with its cyber venues.
After establishing the theoretical and empirical terrain, Choucri examines modes of cyber conflict and cyber cooperation in international relations; the potential for the gradual convergence of cyberspace and sustainability, in both substantive and policy terms; and the emergent synergy of cyberspace and international efforts toward sustainable development. Choucri’s discussion is theoretically driven and empirically grounded, drawing on recent data and analyzing the dynamics of cyberpolitics at individual, state, international, and global levels.

Feliz Ano Novo!

Leituras: ‘Utopia Liberdade e Soberania no Ciberespaço‘ in N&D e ‘O Direito Internacional Humanitário e a Emergência da Ciberguerra‘ in RDI

‘O Nevoeiro da Ciberguerra‘ por Brandon Valeriano e Ryan Maness

In mid-2010, thousands of centrifuges, enriching uranium at Iranian nuclear research facilities, spun out of control. The instruments were mysteriously reprogrammed to operate faster than normal, pushing them to the breaking point. Iranian computer systems, however, inexplicably reported that the centrifuges were operating normally. This incident, it was later revealed, was the work of the infamous Stuxnet computer worm, presumed to be the creation of the United States and Israel, and one of the most sophisticated cyberweapons to date. The infiltration was initially thought to have set back Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program three to five years, although current estimates are in the range of two years to a few months.

Stuxnet was followed by the Flame virus: a new form of malware that infiltrated several networks in Iran and across the Middle East earlier this year. Flame copied text, recorded audio, and deleted files on the computers into which it hacked. Israel and the United States are again the suspected culprits but deny responsibility.

These two attacks generated substantial buzz in the media and among policymakers around the world. Their dramatic nature led some experts to argue that cyberwarfare will fundamentally change the future of international relations, forcing states to rethink their foreign policy. In a speech to the New York business community on October 11, 2012, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed fear that a cyber version of Pearl Harbor might take the United States by surprise in the near future. He warned that the U.S. government, in addition to national power grids, transportation systems, and financial markets, are all at risk and that cyberdefense should be at the top of the list of priorities for President Barack Obama’s second term.

The Stuxnet and Flame attacks, however, are not the danger signs that some have made them out to be. First of all, the viruses needed to be physically injected into Iranian networks, likely by U.S. or Israeli operatives, suggesting that the tactic still requires traditional intelligence and military operation methods. Second, Stuxnet derailed Iran’s nuclear program for only a short period, if at all. And Flame did nothing to slow Iran’s nuclear progression directly, because it seems to have been only a data-collection operation.

Some cyberattacks over the past decade have briefly affected state strategic plans, but none has resulted in death or lasting damage. For example, the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by Russia shut down networks and government websites and disrupted commerce for a few days, but things swiftly went back to normal. The majority of cyberattacks worldwide have been minor: easily corrected annoyances such as website defacements or basic data theft -- basically the least a state can do when challenged diplomatically. [...]

Ver artigo na Foreign Affairs

Leituras: ‘Ciberguerra‘ de Richard Clarke e Robert Knake

Um dos livros pioneiros na divulgação da ameaça da Ciberguerra (na perspetiva dos EUA), surge, agora, em 2ª edição. Um  dos autores - Richard Clarke -,  efectuou no seu site uma breve apresentação em vídeo sobre a Ciberguerra. Este explica, também, o que esta poderá acarretar para o normal funcionamento de uma economia e sociedade, nos cenários mais problemáticos. O vídeo  pode ser visto aqui.