WeekEnd Feature: Mirror, mirror, on the wall…

by Ian Thompson, CCSP Staff Editor
February 21, 2004

Futurology. It's a real word. It's the science of thinking where trends will lead us. People have been doing this kind of thing for ages, without realising that they could reclassify themselves as futurists. It's more commonly known as 'taking an educated guess'. So what has this to do with security?

The brave new world.
Anyone who's seen TV shows like the BBC's Tomorrow's World will no doubt be wondering what happened to the brave new world that had been predicted for us by now. We would all be living in eco-friendly homes, running on renewable energy. The types of gadgets in them would be so easy to use that the household cat or dog could cope with them. In fact, the house would be smarter than these non-human subordinate captives (okay, maybe the cats would object to that - after all, dogs have owners, cats have staff). We would have personal communicators linked to a global network and travel by hypersonic sub-orbital craft from London to Sydney in less than three hours. Our environment would adapt around us, adjusting automatically to new situations to keep things 'just-so' and to our liking. Household objects would take on a life of their own.


Back to life, back to reality.
Some how, the predictions always fall foul of one or more things that go under the general banner of 'too expensive'. Except that, sadly, any form of air transport can now exceed Concorde's speed, not just the fanciful 6,000mph scramjet -powered aircraft that may have shrunk the world still further. Still, that's progress for you. Or rather, it isn't, because unlike just about every other futurist's dream, the sad end to the Concorde story, carted along on barges, is an example of a giant step back. At least in other fields of endeavour, things have gone forward, even if the predictions have been off the mark. There have been newer, improved versions of objects to replace things, but passenger-carrying SSTs are, for now, a dead end.

And it's not just the 'survival of the fittest' evolutionary argument. In the case of Concorde, the plane would have undoubtedly benefited form the competition promised by the US SST project that so nearly made it. Okay, so $400 million was a bit expensive for a plywood concept, but when the Boeing SST was scrapped, and the Russian Tu-144 sadly crashed, supersonic travel in general became a non-event as far as future development was concerned. Concorde stopped evolving with the last one of the tiny number built.


Security matters.
Okay, bringing this rose-tinted view of things back on a gentle arc to more security-related issues…
What are you reading at the moment? (This is, after all, a gentle return…) Personally, I'm trundling my way through several books. One was written in 1997, but tries to deal with life in the 21st century.

It is unimpeachable in its accuracy. It is, of course, 'The Dilbert Future', in which Scott Adams explores the various ways in which the future could pad out. Dilbert is, as most of you know, an unerringly accurate strip in the many observations it makes.

The problem faced by most futurists is that they don't really know what technology will develop in the future. They are there to predict trends, not specifics. In this respect, The Dilbert Future is quite accurate, talking about things like high-speed Internet connections being readily available at home (despite only knowing about ISDN, not cable or ADSL). Therefore, this futurology thing mustn't be that difficult - it really depends on the futurist's track record and qualifications in the area of study.

The fact that Scott Adams can make 'predictions' that seem plausible after seven years have passed, or that Dilbert scores so many hits with us either means that a) Mr Adams is perhaps the best futurist of them all and secretly hides this fact, or b) human life is so predictable. Given that Dilbert is basically satire, we can perhaps rule out a). So, by logical deduction, we are all pattern-following, herd animals with all the individuality of sheep. Even our future is predictable enough that a satirical sideswipe at the whole futurology game can, in the most part, be an accurate forecast.


How to build a bomb using basic tools and ingredients.
Gradually, the comet-like path of this article comes round…

One of the predictions made in The Dilbert Future is the ease at which weapons of mass destruction could be assembled, using ready knowledge and simple parts. The point of reference, in the mid-nineties, was that most of the population wasn't good enough at covering its tracks to avoid some kind of custodial punishment. The only person smart enough would be Marilyn vos Savant, with the rest of the world incarcerated for some crime or other that they were just not smart enough to avoid being detected. This, Adams suggests, would be a chain of events that would start with an increase in terrorism.

Is it clear insight that means we are seeing this increase? Not in the comical way that is suggested in my choice of reference in this topic, where anyone disgruntled enough would simply order the parts for their choice of WMD from a catalogue or magazine and then hold the world to ransom. But we are seeing more stories where people have accessed the almost infinite resources of the Internet to create a car bomb from nitrate-based fertiliser, using a trigger built from parts of a cheap radio-controlled toy, for example.

And what of all those 'exploit toolkits' that are allowing umpteen variants of a particular piece of malware to spring up within a few short weeks of the security issue being discovered? Within the last month, not only have we had MyDoom.A and .B, but have seen the rise of the 'second wave' variants, such as DoomJuice, that make use of the back door into a PC opened by MyDoom. All this stuff is available to anyone with a link to the Internet, plus a few skills in script editing.

I am oversimplifying that last point (but not by much) - the thing is, would we consider it to be less of a terrorist threat than a low-tech 'dirty' bomb when so much of our society depends on the flow of electronic information? Part of any modern battle strategy these days involves electronic measures and countermeasures. This in itself is not new - the vital role of electronic surveillance, plus ECM equipment (the electronic countermeasure pods that adorn various wings or tail fins) has been with us since WW-II.


What has all this 'futurist' stuff to do with security, then?
I'm glad you asked.

Here's where the summary comes. If futurists paint pictures with broad strokes, and if someone like Scott Adams can 'accurately predict', through satirical observations, the rise in global terrorism and the scourge of WMD across the globe, threatening us all, maybe there's a point to be made.

Our behaviour is very pattern-based. We are predictable beings. We do follow the trends in hi-tech gadgetry, food and fashion, (even us teachers - we have a life away from the classroom, you know).

We are so predictable that an amazingly high proportion of those who receive emails alleging to be from our banks, or Microsoft, or some group in Nigeria offering us a share in government gold reserves if only we'd agree to let them use our accounts to launder the money through (though they call it something slightly different), actually open them, run the attachments, visit the spoofed website or whatever, that there is one thing certain in any vision of the future. There will always be new ways to take advantage of new technology. Whatever the benefits, there will be a downside that will have been unseen. For all the apparent skill of the futurists - and remember, they are basically just gambling on eventualities (but using money from the businesses paying for their opinions) - there will always be gasps of surprise, sometimes even shock, at the 'bad things' for which the new stuff can be used.

For example, we have the vast resources of the Internet - good; kids building guns from drainpipes fueled by hair spray using downloaded plans - bad. Digital photography, convenient and flexible, reducing paper and chemical waste - good; the rise in child pornography - bad. Cheap, simple communication by email - good; a rising tide of spam that may mean we start paying for each message sent - bad. You get the idea.


What goes around, comes around.
So why all the reminiscing over Concorde at the beginning? It is remarkable that this so-called white elephant of an aircraft is still the most advanced civil aircraft ever built - nothing outside of military aviation has surpassed it. The pilots lucky enough to have taken the controls delight in the fact that it is so involving, so smooth. The power is awesome - supercruise as standard, just like the new (30 years younger) JSF and Eurofighter - and the shape is pure beauty. The engineers just hold up their hands and say 'physics dictated it', but there is nothing to match it - and even if the void is filled, I doubt there ever will be. From what I've seen of the Boeing SST, there were uglier ways of building something to do the same job (the Tu-144 being basically a copy of the original Anglo-French drawings with a few corners and neat canard winglets added - being made more ugly by fiddling with the details like the location of the engines).

As for personal communications across a global network, I've had a tri-band GSM mobile phone that's kept me in touch by email and other means (like voice - it is a phone, after all) for the past five years. Okay, so it's now a different model, with colour screen and camera, but the core functions and world coverage are the same. We're now being told that online control of household items is possible - there are already 'web-enabled' models of washing machines out there that will download new wash programmes for new types of fabrics…

The futurists may well have got those far-fetched ideas right after all - time will be the judge of that…



by Ian Thompson ComputerCops Staff Editor



Ian Thompson is a Network Manager of a 500-PC, 9-server, 1700-user school network and is an ICT teacher at a UK high school near the city of Leeds. He has written articles for the Hutchinson Encyclopedia, plus many resources in support of teaching ICT in the UK schools' National Curriculum.


Copyright © Ian Thompson All Rights Reserved 2004