The next world war will be in digital space.  Or so we’re told.   A meeting of cyberspace security chiefs took place in London last week,  and some of the issues were interesting.

For example,  if a hacker uses your servers,  do you have to investigate?   I would have thought the answer was a fairly obvious “yes”.   But its not.

Because most attacks pass through multiple territories.  So then go after the source.  Find where the hacker began the attack and get that country to make the arrest.

But the issue is seriously weighted towards the hacker.   For one, government’s don’t control the net, private companies do.

Yet this has shown up another fallacy – that the internet is this funky free space where everyone is able to move without fear or favour.

Except we have Apple refusing to consider supplying Financial Times with data of who uses the FT news app on iTunes…

That’s because we all know that while content is king,  data is god.   And Apple is doing what Facebook is doing what Google is doing.  It’s collecting information about you and storing this somewhere.  It may not be a government,  but in some ways, its worse.  There are no laws yet about what Apple and co can do with this.    Sure there are the privacy laws.  But what happens if Apple is hacked and all your information (that you didn’t know was stored there) is stolen and used?

Does Apple pay you? Does the government of the country in which Apple is registered pay you?  Here comes your Insurance premium on digital Data – as an individual.

A few words in your curly.  If you hadn’t figured  this out yet,  traders poke fun  at traditional financial coverage.

They will take in the normal  TV/Radio/Web/Print publications,  then turn to machines with quick moving analysis in real time.    Many use traditional media to relax or to assess  just how SLOW corporate cogs can be.  Eg,  don’t invest in X because the MD is a slow-witted dolt and can’t think on his or her feet   And is evasive on C-Span,  or lied point blank before a Federal hearing – or SummitTV.   But for real power,  they use live information.

Like Twitter.

Twitter

Lies,  you hiss, they use  Bloomberg,   a Reuters feed,  they have live stats from the  markets and run                                  auto-trading tools  and algorithms that work in milliseconds.

Precisely.

The common news update is an anachronistic curiosity, to be used as intelligence when there’s no insider trading or inserts inside publications explaining how to spend money on yachts.

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