In a recent Risks Digest, there was an account of the “Estonian Internet war” by a security expert Gadi Evron. Here is his writeup. And prolific discussion is going on about this in the comments at Techdirt and Slashdot.

We can split the discussion in two parts.

The first part is about what happened in Estonia a year ago and what are the politics and other motives behind it. I wrote about this a year ago myself — see this, this, this and this. I stand by everything I said in the posts and comments, but I don’t have anything new to add today.

Much more interesting and relevant question in light of Gary’s writeup is what is going to become of the Internet in the long run? First off, I agree with those who think that Internet is rapidly becoming part of critical infrastructure. Apart from a few very isolated military applications (with parallel secure networks and strict access control), it is not possible to separate the world into “secure” and “insecure” any longer. Everything is becoming interconnected because it just opens up so many new opportunities and saves costs. And I think of the world’s communciation infrastructure today as just one big cloud with boundaries that keep getting fuzzier between Internet, telephony, private networks and all the other different things that are going on.

I think that this has generally done the world a lot of good. My own life, as well as lives of hundreds of millions of other people, have become more enjoyable directly because of the Internet and everything that it has made possible.

It is also a fertile ground for “the bad guys”. The Internet is suffering from abuse from those that are causing harm due to either commercial (spam etc) or political motives. The Estonian cyberattacks were just one instance of this. Spam in everybody’s inbox is another instance. As the bandwidth continues to increase all over the place, and as we keep getting more smart devices on the Internet such as mobile phones, this is going to open up a whole new range of malware vectors and the problems will continue to get worse.

I think that this is going to inevitably change. The Internet in 20 years will be different policy- and governance-wise from what it is today. I do not yet know how, but it will be different. The differences will be about fixing some of the original Internet’s design shortcomings security-wise (it wasn’t done “wrong”, it was just invented for a whole different purpose than what it’s used for today), and they will involve both technology and policy changes. And there will be something about online identities, too, and many other things.

If there’s something that I can apply here out of my past year’s HCI Master studies, it is that people think of changing things within the framework of what they already know. We assume that the Internet inevitably works in a particular way, because it’s the only way we know. And yet after we will change the Internet, we will look back and go “DUH… how come we could not fix this before? It’s easy and win-win”. The practical necessities of needing to combat malware and generally keeping the world running will justify some big changes of keeping good guys in and bad guys out.

I don’t know if it will take a catastrophe for the world to step towards changing the Internet. (Like some particularly devastating attack against a big company or economy.) Maybe the changes will be more gradual. But in any case, there will be many ways to do the changes. Some of them will be about governments trying to seize power and reduce privacy, and some of them will be about making things more secure while still empowering individual users. I hope it will be the latter.

A related development is that a few weeks ago, Estonia published its national cyberdefense strategy. Alas, it’s in Estonian only for now (good luck reading that) but I listened to a podcast with someone from Ministry of Defense close to the topic and he said that an English version will be forthcoming. I’ll post here when that happens. I’m glad to see that while some materials will remain undisclosed, the strategy itself, given that it is aimed at everyone in the nation, is made public and they attempt to widely disseminate it.

Bletchley Park is in financial trouble. This is sad. I visited it a few years ago. It is a really great museum and site for those interested in history of computing and World War II, as they come together in Bletchley Park. This is a site of major historic innovations and much more important than a lot of current hype. I really hope they can secure some funding. It would be appropriate for some major IT industry player to promote their name through this.

Over the past year, I have had two cases where the airlines screwed up a bit and I had to incur a loss because of them. In both cases, I managed to get back at least a part of my money.

The first one was a year ago, before everybody used e-ticketing. I bought a ticket from Lufthansa two weeks over the Internet before my flight date, hoping that they would be able to ship them to me in this time. Boy was I wrong. I kept calling their customer service who assured me that the tickets would make it. Well, they lied. I finally showed up at the airport where the ticketing counter saw my booking but told me that the only way to make it to my flight would be to re-purchase the tickets right there (ouch! they cost around 1000 EUR ), and then claim the money back from Lufthansa later. Since I was fortunate enough to have this money on my credit card and really had to make the flight, I did just that. (But what are less wealthy people supposed to do, who can’t just throw out money like that?)

So long story short, the original paper tickets arrived when I was already enroute on my trip, which was super anti-helpful. I then contacted their customer support and after a few weeks of back and forth by email, I mailed them the delayed tickets and stubs and indeed got the double purchase refunded, less 100 or 200 € of “processing fee”. Why do I have to pay for them wrecking my nerves is still a mystery to me, but hey, I got at least most of it.

A new site. It’s about time someone made this. Should be pretty credible, as it’s a follow-up to Estonian International Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity.

Throughout the 20th century, communism caused the deaths of many more people than nazism or any other cruel ideology. These crimes must be brought to light and now there’s a site with an international perspective doing just that. Communist crimes have caused grief, pain, suffering and death all across the world, and it’s sad that some people still think that some of these crimes are part of a “glorious past” and somehow justifiable.

Today I had a five-hour Skype conversation with my girlfriend. I don’t want to say “phone call” because to me, it was less about a phone call and more about virtual continuous presence. During a phone call, you are mostly only engaged in that call. But this conversation was to us just one of the things we were doing — we were also both watching this year’s Eurovision song contest on our computers, and I was also cooking my lunch at the same time and she was sort of walking me through a few things there

If you have experience with humor, multicultural teams, or better yet, both, then please help some researchers at Bremen University in Germany by completing this survey. (Via Scott Berkun.)

Here’s a cool Estonian project. Since late last year, volunteers have been going across the country and mapping illegal garbage dumps onto a map on the web. And this weekend, some 45,000 people came out (something like 3% of the whole country… in the US, it would be almost ten million people, think about that) to clean it all up and get rid of the dumps once and for all, and to change the perception that littering is OK. Now it isn’t any more.

Please help my schoolwork by going to this link and completing the survey. It should take about 15-20 minutes, and you have a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift certificate. If you could do it over the next few days, it would be really great. Thanks.

Below is our official invite.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers are conducting a web-based survey about online communication habits. If you complete this survey, you could win one of three $50 Amazon.com gift certificates! Odds of winning depend on the number of entrants, but are guaranteed 1:500 or better. The study takes 15-20 minutes.

To participate in the survey, go to http://tinyurl.com/4gju65

Thank you for your help.