b20c:c011:5:b109::/64

[openbook booknumber=”ISBN:978-1586488741″ templatenumber=”1″]

Generally an OK book which gave me a lot to think about.  The author did seem to ramble on for quite a while on most topics and at times I kind of lost the thread of the point he was trying to make.  Luckily his writing style and the content were interesting and amusing enough to keep me engaged anyway.  In general I found myself agreeing with most everything he writes.  It is true that with most new technologies, the proponents of that technology see it as the solution to all of our problems.  This has been a recurring theme for each revolutionary technology… the telegraph, electricity, radio, TV, etc.  Also you do see a lot of “slacktivism” within social media which I really never noticed before but now it seems to pop out everywhere.  Just liking a cause on Facebook will not further that cause, you really need to do something about it, e.g. donate money or time, contact your senator, etc.

As the author himself notes in the epilogue, many people feel that he comes off as antagonistic and not offering any real solutions. I think, however, that the final chapter about cyber-realism does offer some answers to how policy makers can better address issues of the day, namely by addressing understanding the underlying problem, developing policies to solve those problems and then seeing how the Internet can fit in to support that policy.  Within IT many development projects have problems for exactly the same reason and this is why Enterprise Architecture is so important.  It is important to understand the business processes and data model of an enterprise before you can design an application to solve inefficiencies within an organization.  Just throwing technology at a problem, implementing SAP for example, will not solve underlying inefficiencies within an organization unless that technology is targeted at some real, underlying issue.  From a IT security standpoint the same is true.  You do not start a security program by implementing random technologies, rather you begin a security program by performing a risk assessment to determine which critical assets are most vulnerable and then target solutions to eliminate or reduce those vulnerabilities.

Some notable quotes out of the book:

“Refusing to acknowledge that the Web can actually strengthen rather than undermine authoritarian regimes is irresponsible and ultimately results in bad policy.”  It is naive to assume that authoritarian regimes do not know how to use social media to spread propaganda, identify dissidents, etc.  Just by making the web and web 2.0 tools available invites the regimes themselves to participate and use that media to further their own agendas.

“While all free societies are alike, each unfree society is unfree in its own way.” (acutally he was quoting Tolstoy)