The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt (PDF)

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In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected—a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness. Eric Schmidt is one of Silicon Valley’s great leaders, having taken Google from a small startup to one of the world’s most influential companies. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. With their combined knowledge and experiences, the authors are uniquely positioned to take on some of the toughest questions about our future: Who will be more powerful in the future, the citizen or the state? Will technology make terrorism easier or harder to carry out? What is the relationship between privacy and security, and how much will we have to give up to be part of the new digital age? In this groundbreaking book, Schmidt and Cohen combine observation and insight to outline the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming decades. At once pragmatic and inspirational, this is a forward-thinking account of where our world is headed and what this means for people, states and businesses. With the confidence and clarity of visionaries, Schmidt and Cohen illustrate just how much we have to look forward to—and beware of—as the greatest information and technology revolution in human history continues to evolve. On individual, community and state levels, across every geographical and socioeconomic spectrum, they reveal the dramatic developments—good and bad—that will transform both our everyday lives and our understanding of self and society, as technology advances and our virtual identities become more and more fundamentally real. As Schmidt and Cohen’s nuanced vision of the near future unfolds, an urban professional takes his driverless car to work, attends meetings via hologram and dispenses housekeeping robots by voice; a Congolese fisherwoman uses her smart phone to monitor market demand and coordinate sales (saving on costly refrigeration and preventing overfishing); the potential arises for “virtual statehood” and “Internet asylum” to liberate political dissidents and oppressed minorities, but also for tech-savvy autocracies (and perhaps democracies) to exploit their citizens’ mobile devices for ever more ubiquitous surveillance. Along the way, we meet a cadre of international figures—including Julian Assange—who explain their own visions of our technology-saturated future. Inspiring, provocative and absorbing, The New Digital Age is a brilliant analysis of how our hyper-connected world will soon look, from two of our most prescient and informed public thinkers.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Booklist If prominence correlates with the attention paid to a prognosticator, there will be great interest in the outlook for the Internet, according to Google executive Schmidt. With Cohen, Schmidt addresses incipient trends in an individual’s engagement with the Internet to introduce his main subject, how nation-states and businesses will capitalize or cope with the velocity, connectivity, and mutation of the Internet. In the authors’ analysis, governments and companies face in the virtual world, as they have in the physical world, an intelligence challenge. Referencing Internet incidents galore, they warn of a perpetual “code war” between attackers and defenders and expand upon this type of conflict within authoritarian and democratic states. Citing the Arab Spring as an example, Schmidt and Cohen predict that its online propagation presages an easier initiation of future revolutions, which nevertheless face uncertain outcomes when they encounter, as they eventually must, the material powers of a state. Peering forward to the Internet’s influence on international affairs, this work of futurology combines optimism and pessimism in an informed and levelheaded presentation. –Gilbert Taylor Review “The New Digital Age is a considered work…It shifts the debate about technology, elevating it from mundane arguments about the utility of dating apps to the wider issues of how technology interacts with power.”—The Economist“This is the most important—and fascinating—book yet written about how the digital age will affect our world. With vivid examples and brilliant analysis, it shows how the internet and other communications technologies will empower individuals and transform the way nations and businesses operate. How will different societies make tradeoffs involving privacy, freedom, control, security, and the relationship between the physical and virtual worlds? This realistic but deeply optimistic book provides the guideposts. It’s both profoundly wise and wondrously readable.” -Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs “Every day, technological innovations are giving people around the world new opportunities to shape their own destinies. In this fascinating book, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen draw upon their unique experiences to show us a future of rising incomes, growing participation, and a genuine sense of community—if we make the right choices today.” -Bill Clinton “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced a searching meditation on technology and world order. Even those who disagree with some of their conclusions will learn much from this thought-provoking volume.” -Henry A. Kissinger “This is the book I have been waiting for: a concise and persuasive description of technology’s impact on war, peace, freedom, and diplomacy. The New Digital Age is a guide to the future written by two experts who possess a profound understanding of humanity’s altered prospects in a wireless world. There are insights on every page and surprising conclusions (and questions) in every chapter. For experts and casual readers alike, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced an indispensable book.”-Former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright “Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt have written a brilliant book that should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the huge ramifications of the Age of Google not only for our lifestyles but, more importantly, for our privacy, our democracy and our security. If you already know about the law of photonics, data remanence, Stuxnet, Flame, DDoS attacks and CRASH (the Clean-Slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts) then you can probably skip it. If, like me, this is all news to you, you had better download The New Digital Age today. The ‘technoptimistic’ case will never be more smartly argued.” -Niall Ferguson, author of Civilization: The West and the Rest“The New Digital Age is must-reading for anyone who wants to truly understand the depths of the digital revolution. Combining the skills of a social scientist and a computer scientist, Schmidt and Cohen blend the technical and the human, the scientific and the political, in ways I rarely saw while in government. They challenge the reader’s imagination on almost every page.” -General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA “This is a book that describes a technological revolution in the making. How we navigate it is a challenge for countries, communities and citizens. There are no two people better equipped to explain what it means than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen.” -Tony Blair “Few people in the world are doing more to imagine—and build—the new digital age than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. With this book, they are looking into their crystal ball and inviting the world to peek in.” -Michael R. Bloomberg “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s thoughtful, well-researched work elucidates the staggering impact of technology on our daily lives, as well as what surprising and incredible developments the future may hold. Readers might be left with more questions than answers, but that’s the idea—we are at our best when we ask ‘What’s next?’” -Elon Musk, cofounder of Tesla Motors and PayPal“The New Digital Age offers an intriguing fusion of ideas and insights about how the virtual world is intersecting with the ‘Westphalian order.’ It seeks a balance between the discontinuities of technologists’ ‘revolutions’ and the traditionalism of internationalists’ study of states, power, and behavior. The authors explain that technology is not a panacea, yet the uses of technology can make a world of difference. This book should launch a valuable debate about the practical implications of this new connectivity for citizens and policy makers, societies and governments.” -Robert B. Zoellick, former president of the World Bank Group“We have long needed an incisive study of how the ever-evolving world of technology leaves almost no aspect of life unchanged. We have it in The New Digital Age. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen offer a rigorous approach to decoding what the future holds in a story that is as well written and entertaining as it is important.” -General Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor “At last, a brilliant guide book for the next century—what the future holds for entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, politicians, and ordinary citizens alike. Schmidt and Cohen offer a dazzling glimpse into how the new digital revolution is changing our lives. This book is the most insightful exploration of our future world I’ve ever read, and once I started reading I was simply unable to put it down.” -Sir Richard Branson, founder and chairman, Virgin Group “This brilliant book will make you re-examine your concepts of the digital age, the way the world works, what lies ahead, and what all this means for you, your family and your community. A must read.” —Mohamed El-Erian, chair, President Obama’s Global Development Council“This work of futurology combines optimism and pessimism in an informed and level-headed presentation.”—Booklist“Ambitious [and] fascinating . . . [this] book is filled with tantalizing examples of futuristic goods and services.”—Anna Kuchment, Scientific American “[Schmidt and Cohen] encapsulate a vast sweep of ideas, including personal citizenship online and off, censorship of electronic information as national policy, and even what future revolutions will look like in years to come . . . A thoughtful and well-balanced prognostication of what lies ahead.”—Kirkus Reviews About the Author ERIC SCHMIDT is executive chairman of Google, where he served as chief executive officer from 2001 to 2011. A member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Schmidt also chairs the board of the New America Foundation and is a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. JARED COHEN is director of Google Ideas and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a Rhodes Scholar and the author of several books, including Children of Jihad and One Hundred Days of Silence. He is a member of the Director’s Advisory Board at the National Counterterrorism Center. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Our Future Selves Soon everyone on Earth will be connected. With five billion more people set to join the virtual world, the boom in digital connectivity will bring gains in productivity, health, education, quality of life and myriad other avenues in the physical world—and this will be true for everyone, from the most elite users to those at the base of the economic pyramid. But being “connected” will mean very different things to different people, largely because the problems they have to solve differ so dramatically. What might seem like a small jump forward for some—like a smart phone priced under $20—may be as profound for one group as commuting to work in a driverless car is for another. People will find that being connected virtually makes us feel more equal—with access to the same basic platforms, information and online resources—while significant differences persist in the physical world. Connectivity will not solve income inequality, though it will alleviate some of its more intractable causes, like lack of available education and economic opportunity. So we must recognize and celebrate innovation in its own context. Everyone will benefit from connectivity, but not equally, and how those differences manifest themselves in the daily lives of people is our focus here. – Increased Efficiency Being able to do more in the virtual world will make the mechanics of our physical world more efficient. As digital connectivity reaches the far corners of the globe, new users will employ it to improve a wide range of inefficient markets, systems and behaviors, in both the most and least advanced societies. The resulting gains in efficiency and productivity will be profound, particularly in developing countries where technological isolation and bad policies have stymied growth and progress for years, and people will do more with less. The accessibility of affordable smart devices, including phones and tablets, will be transformative in these countries. Consider the impact of basic mobile phones for a group of Congolese fisherwomen today. Whereas they used to bring their daily catch to the market and watch it slowly spoil as the day progressed, now they keep it on the line, in the river, and wait for calls from customers. Once an order is placed, a fish is brought out of the water and prepared for the buyer. There is no need for an expensive refrigerator, no need for someone to guard it at night, no danger of spoiled fish losing their value (or poisoning customers), and there is no unnecessary overfishing. The size of these women’s market can even expand as other fishermen in surrounding areas coordinate with them over their own phones. As a substitute for a formal market economy (which would take years to develop), that’s not a bad work-around for these women or the community at large. Mobile phones are transforming how people in the developing world access and use information, and adoption rates are soaring. There are already more than 650 million mobile-phone users in Africa, and close to 3 billion across Asia. The majority of these people are using basic-feature phones—voice calls and text messages only—because the cost of data service in their countries is often prohibitively expensive, so that even those who can buy web-enabled phones or smart phones cannot use them affordably. This will change, and when it does, the smart-phone revolution will profoundly benefit these populations. Hundreds of millions of people today are living the lives of their grandparents, in countries where life expectancy is less than sixty years, or even fifty in some places, and there is no guarantee that their political and macroeconomic circumstances will improve dramatically anytime soon. What is new in their lives and their futures is connectivity. Critically, they have the chance to bypass earlier technologies, like dial-up modems, and go directly to high-speed wireless connections, which means the transformations that connectivity brings will occur even more quickly than they did in the developed world. The introduction of mobile phones is far more transformative than most people in modern countries realize. As people come online, they will quite suddenly have access to almost all the world’s information in one place in their own language. This will even be true for an illiterate Maasai cattle herder in the Serengeti, whose native tongue, Maa, is not written—he’ll be able to verbally inquire about the day’s market prices and crowd-source the whereabouts of any nearby predators, receiving a spoken answer from his device in reply. Mobile phones will allow formerly isolated people to connect with others very far away and very different from themselves. On the economic front, they’ll find ways to use the new tools at their disposal to enlarge their businesses, make them more efficient and maximize their profits, as the fisherwomen did much more locally with their basic phones. What connectivity also brings, beyond mobile phones, is the ability to collect and use data. Data itself is a tool, and in places where unreliable statistics about health, education, economics and the population’s needs have stalled growth and development, the chance to gather data effectively is a game-changer. Everyone in society benefits from digital data, as governments can better measure the success of their programs, and media and other nongovernmental organizations can use data to support their work and check facts. For example, Amazon is able to take its data on merchants and, using algorithms, develop customized bank loans to offer them—in some cases when traditional banks have completely shut their doors. Larger markets and better metrics can help create healthier and more productive economies. And the developing world will not be left out of the advances in gadgetry and other high-tech machinery. Even if the prices for sophisticated smart phones and robots to perform household tasks like vacuuming remain high, illicit markets like China’s expansive “shanzhai” network for knock-off consumer electronics will produce and distribute imitations that bridge the gap. And technologies that emerged in first-world contexts will find renewed purpose in developing countries. In “additive manufacturing,” or 3-D printing, machines can actually “print” physical objects by taking three-dimensional data about an object and tracing the contours of its shape, ultra-thin layer by ultra-thin layer, with liquid plastic or other material, until the whole object materializes. Such printers have produced a huge range of objects, including customized mobile phones, machine parts and a full-sized replica motorcycle. These machines will definitely have an impact on the developing world. Communal 3-D printers in poor countries would allow people to make whatever tool or item they require from open-source templates—digital information that is freely available in its edited source—rather than waiting on laborious or iffy delivery routes for higher-priced premade goods. In wealthier countries 3-D printing will be the perfect partner for advanced manufacturing. New materials and products will all be built uniquely to a specification from the Internet and on demand by a machine run by a sophisticated, trained operator. This will not replace the acres of high-volume, lowest-cost manufacturing present in many industries, but it will bring an unprecedented variety to the products used in the developed world. As for life’s small daily tasks, information systems will streamline many of them for people living in those countries, such as integrated clothing machines (washing, drying, folding, pressing and sorting) that keep an inventory of clean clothes and algorithmically suggest outfits based on the user’s daily schedule. Haircuts will finally be automated and machine-precise. And cell phones, tablets and laptops will have wireless recharging capabilities, rendering the need to fiddle with charging cables an obsolete nuisance. Centralizing the many moving parts of one’s life into an easy-to-use, almost intuitive system of information management and decision making will give our interactions with technology an effortless feel. As long as safeguards are in place to protect privacy and prevent data loss, these systems will free us of many small burdens—including errands, to-do lists and assorted “monitoring” tasks—that today add stress and chip away at our mental focus throughout the day. Our own neurological limits, which lead us to forgetfulness and oversights, will be supplemented by information systems designed to support our needs. Two such examples are memory prosthetics—calendar reminders and to-do lists—and social prosthetics, which instantly connect you with your friend who has relevant expertise in whatever task you are facing. By relying on these integrated systems, which will encompass both the professional and the personal sides of our lives, we’ll be able to use our time more effectively each day—whether that means having the time to have a “deep think,” spending more time preparing for an important presentation or guaranteeing that a parent can attend his or her child’s soccer game without distraction. Suggestion engines that offer alternative terms to help a user find what she is looking for will be a particularly useful aid in efficiency by consistently stimulating our thinking processes, ultimately enhancing our creativity, not preempting it. Of course, the world will be filled with gadgets, holograms that allow a virtual version of you to be somewhere else, and endless amounts of content, so there will be plenty of ways to procrastinate, too—but the point is that when you choose to be productive, you can do so with greater capacity. Other advances in the pipeline in areas like robotics, artificial intelligence and voice recognition will introduce efficiency into our lives by providing more seamless forms of engagement with the technology in our daily routines. Fully automated human-like robots with superb AI abilities will probably be out of most people’s price range for some time, but the average American consumer will find it affordable to own a handful of different multipurpose robots fairly soon. The technology in iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner, the progenitor of this field of consumer “home” robots (first introduced in 2002), will only become more sophisticated and multipurpose in time. Future varieties of home robots should be able to handle other household duties, electrical work and even plumbing issues with relative ease. We also can’t discount the impact that superior voice-recognition software will have on our daily lives. Beyond searching for information online and issuing commands to your robots (both of which are possible today), better voice recognition will mean instant transcription of anything you produce: e-mails, notes, speeches, term papers. Most people speak much faster than they type, so this technology will surely save many of us time in our daily affairs—not to mention helping us avoid cases of carpal tunnel syndrome. A shift toward voice-initiated writing may well change our world of written material. Will we learn to speak in paragraphs, or will our writing begin to mirror speech patterns? Everyday use of gesture-recognition technology is also closer than we think. Microsoft’s Kinect, a hands-free sensor device for the Xbox 360 video-game console that captures and integrates a player’s motion, set a world record in 2011 as the fastest selling consumer-electronics device in history, with more than eight million devices sold in the first sixty days on the market. Gestural interfaces will soon move beyond gaming and entertainment into more functional areas; the futuristic information screens displayed so prominently in the film Minority Report—in which Tom Cruise used gesture technology and holographic images to solve crimes on a computer—are just the beginning. In fact, we’ve already moved beyond that—the really interesting work today is building “social robots” that can recognize human gestures and respond to them in kind, such as a toy dog that sits when a child makes a command gesture. And, looking further down the line, we might not need to move physically to manipulate those robots. There have been a series of exciting breakthroughs in thought-controlled motion technology—directing motion by thinking alone—in the past few years. In 2012, a team at a robotics laboratory in Japan demonstrated successfully that a person lying in an fMRI machine (which takes continuous scans of the brain to measure changes in blood flow) could control a robot hundreds of miles away just by imagining moving different parts of his body. The subject could see from the robot’s perspective, thanks to a camera on its head, and when he thought about moving his arm or his legs, the robot would move correspondingly almost instantaneously. The possibilities of thought-controlled motion, not only for “surrogates” like separate robots but also for prosthetic limbs, are particularly exciting in what they portend for mobility-challenged or “locked in” individuals—spinal-cord-injury patients, amputees and others who cannot communicate or move in their current physical state. – More Innovation, More Opportunity That the steady march of globalization will continue apace, even accelerate, as connectivity spreads will come as no surprise. But what might surprise you is how small some of the advances in technology, when paired with increased connection and interdependence across countries, will make your world feel. Instant language translation, virtual-reality interactions and real-time collective editing—most easily understood today as wikis—will reshape how firms and organizations interact with partners, clients and employees in other places. While certain differences will perhaps never be fully overcome—like cultural nuance and time zones—the ability to engage with people in disparate locations, with near-total comprehension and on shared platforms, will make such interactions feel incredibly familiar. Supply chains for corporations and other organizations will become increasingly disaggregated, not just on the production side but also with respect to people. More effective communication across borders and languages will build trust and create opportunities for hardworking and talented individuals around the world. It will not be unusual for a French technology company to operate its sales team from Southeast Asia, while locating its human-resources people in Canada and its engineers in Israel. Bureaucratic obstacles that prevent this level of decentralized operation today, like visa restrictions and regulations around money transfers, will become either irrelevant or be circumvented as digital solutions are discovered. Perhaps a human-rights organization with staff living in a country under heavy diplomatic sanctions will pay its employees in mobile money credits, or in an entirely digital currency. As fewer jobs require a physical presence, talented individuals will have more options available to them. Skilled young adults in Uruguay will find themselves competing for certain types of jobs against their counterparts in Orange County. Of course, just as not all jobs can or will be automated in the future, not every job can be conducted from a distance—but more can than you might think. And for those living on a few dollars per day, there will be endless opportunities to increase their earnings. In fact, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a digital task-distribution platform, offers a present-day example of a company outsourcing small tasks that can be performed for a few cents by anyone with an Internet connection. As the quality of virtual interactions continues to improve, a range of vocations can expand the platform’s client base; you might retain a lawyer from one continent and use a Realtor from another. Globalization’s critics will decry this erosion of local monopolies, but it should be embraced, because this is how our societies will move forward and continue to innovate. Indeed, rising connectivity should help countries discover their competitive advantage—it could be that the world’s best graphic designers come from Botswana, and the world just doesn’t know it yet. This leveling of the playing field for talent extends to the world of ideas, and innovation will increasingly come from the margins, outside traditional bastions of growth, as people begin to make new connections and apply unique perspectives to difficult problems, driving change. New levels of collaboration and cross-pollination across different sectors internationally will ensure that many of the best ideas and solutions will have a chance to rise to the top and be seen, considered, explored, funded, adopted and celebrated. Perhaps an aspiring Russian programmer currently working as a teacher in Novosibirsk will discover a new application of the technology behind the popular mobile game Angry Birds, realizing how its game framework could be used to improve the educational tools he is building to teach physics to local students. He finds similar gaming software that is open source and then he builds on it. As the open-source movement around the world continues to gain speed (for governments and companies it is low cost, and for contributors the benefits are in recognition and economic opportunities to improve and enlarge the support ecosystems), the Russian teacher-programmer will have an enormous cache of technical plans to learn from and use in his own work. In a fully connected world, he is increasingly likely to catch the eyes of the right people, to be offered jobs or fellowships, or to sell his creation to a major multinational company. At a minimum, he can get his foot in the door. Innovation can come from the ground up, but not all local innovation will work on a larger scale, because some entrepreneurs and inventors will be building for different audiences, solving very specific problems. This is true today as well. Consider the twenty-four-year-old Kenyan inventor Anthony Mutua, who unveiled at a 2012 Nairobi science fair an ultrathin crystal chip he developed that can generate electricity when put under pressure. He placed the chip in the sole of a tennis shoe and demonstrated how, just by walking, a person can charge his mobile phone. (It’s a reminder of how bad the problems of reliable and affordable electricity, and to a lesser extent short battery life, are for many people—and how some governments are not rushing to fix the electricity grids—that innovators like Mutua are designing microchips that turn people into portable charging stations.) Mutua’s chip is now set to go into mass production, and if that successfully brings down the cost, he will have invented one of the cleverest designs that no one outside the developing world will ever use, simply because they’ll never need to. Unfortunately, the level of a population’s access to technology is often determined by external factors, and even if power and electricity problems are eventually solved (by the government or by citizens), there is no telling what new roadblocks will prevent certain groups from reaching the same level of connectivity and opportunity as others. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A couple of family members became interested in this book after the authors appeared on the Glenn Beck program. So the book was purchased, and I became the first in the family to read it. I liked the book because it was well-written and thought provoking. The style is not popular, nor is it academic, but rather somewhere inbetween. Moreover, the reading level approaches that of the academic. Perhaps it is inevitable, given the subject matter. But if you are considering the book, do not let this keep you from buying it. Yes, it may take you a little longer than normal to read it, but you will be glad you did.I was apprehensive prior to reading the book. I thought it would be so full of Google geekspeak that it would be beyond my comprehension. To be honest, the book does have a bit of jargon in it; yet that is not the point of the book and should not deter most readers. Nearly all the industry vocabularly may be understood from the context. For those few terms that differ from the norm one may, well, google them. :-)The book is divided into broad chapters by what might be termed policy concerns. Then the chapters are divided into narrower sub-concerns. This lends the reading to take place in medium-sized sections, with time to briefly put down the book and think between.If you want to know what the leaders of Google (and for that matter, Facebook, Yahoo, and others) believe about the direction of our world and the ways technology will impact those directions, this is the book for you. Perhaps, like nearly all futurist books, not all of their predictions will happen exactly as prognosticated; yet the possibilities will inspire the reader.

⭐Let’s consider a few recent examples to better illustrate the universe of cyber warfare. Perhaps the most famous is the Stuxnet worm, which was discovered in 2010 and was considered teh most sophisticated piece of malware ever revealed, until a virus know as Flame, discovered in 2012, claimed that title. Designed to affect a particular type of industrial control system that ran on Windows oeprating system, Stuxnet was discovered to have infiltrated the monitoring systems of Iran’s Natanz nuclear-enrichment facility, causing centrifuges to abruptly speed up or slow down to the point of self-destruction while simultaneously disabling the alarm systems. Because the Iranian systems were not linked to the Internet, the worm must have been uploaded directly, perhaps unwittingly introduced by a Natanz employee on a USB flash drive. The vulernabilities in the Windows systems were subsequently patched up, but not until after causing some damage to the Iranian nuclear effort, as the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, admitted.Initial efforts to locate the creators of the worm were inconclusive, though most believed that is target and the level of sophistication pointed to a state-backed effort. Among other reasons, security analysts unpacking the worm (their efforts made possible because Stuxnet had escaped “into the wild” — that is, beyond the Natanz plant) noticed specific references to dates and bliblical stories in code that woudl be highly symbolic to Israelis. (Others argued that the indicators were far too obvious, and thus false flags.) The resources involved also suggested government production: Experts thought the worm was written by as many as 30 people over several months. And it used an unprecedented number of “zero-day” exploits, malicious computer attacks while exposing vulnerabilities in computer programs that were unknown to the program’s creator (in this case, the Windows OS) before the day of the attack, thus leaving zero days to prepare for it. The descovery of one zero-day exploit is considered a rare event– and exploited information can be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market — so security analysts were stunned to discover that an early variant of Stuxnet took advantage of FIVE.Sure enough, it was revealed in June 2012 that not one but two governments were behind the deployment of the Stuxnet worm. Unnamed Obama administration officials confirmed to the New York Times journalist David E. Sanger that Stuxnet was a joint U.S. and Israeli project design to stall and disrupt the suspected Iranian nuclear-weapons program.In the book The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Livesby Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen | Apr 23, 2013For example, when the CENTCOM (US Central Command)Twitter account was compromised for 40 minutes by the Islamic State in January 2015, the motive was not monetary; it was political. The objective was to create discomfort and a sense of insecurity by openly demonstrating a security gap and sending out political messages through it.In the book Cybersecurity for Beginners by Raef Meeuwisse Second Edition published in March 2017According to Norton Anti-virus website, the previous mentioned Flame doesn’t make the list of the 8 most amazing viruses ever. Norton’s website listed1) CryptoLocker. Released in September 2013, CryptoLocker spread through email attachments and encrypted the user’s files so that they couldn’t access them.The hackers then sent a decryption key in return for a sum of money, usually somewhere from a few hundred pounds up to a couple of grand.2) ILOVEYOU. 2000. The malware was a worm that was downloaded by clicking on an attachment called ‘LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs’.ILOVEYOU overwrote system files and personal files and spread itself over and over and over again. ILOVEYOU hit headlines around the world and still people clicked on the text—maybe to test if it really was as bad as it was supposed to be. Poking the bear with a stick, to use a metaphor.ILOVEYOU was so effective it actually held the Guinness World Record as the most ‘virulent’ virus of all time. A viral virus, by all accounts. Two young Filipino programmers, Reonel Ramones and Onel de Guzman, were named as the perps but because there were no laws against writing malware, their case was dropped and they went free.3) MyDoom 2004. MyDoom is considered to be the most damaging virus ever released—and with a name like MyDoom would you expect anything less?MyDoom, like ILOVEYOU, is a record-holder and was the fastest-spreading email-based worm ever. MyDoom was an odd one, as it hit tech companies like SCO, Microsoft, and Google with a Distributed Denial of Service attack.25% of infected hosts of the .A version of the virus allegedly hit the SCO website with a boatload of traffic in an attempt to crash its servers.In 2004, roughly somewhere between 16-25% of all emails had been infected by MyDoom.4)Storm Worm. 2006. Storm Worm was a particularly vicious virus that made the rounds in 2006 with a subject line of ‘230 dead as storm batters Europe’. Intrigued, people would open the email and click on a link to the news story and that’s when the problems started.Storm Worm was a Trojan horse that infected computers, sometimes turning them into zombies or bots to continue the spread of the virus and to send a huge amount of spam mail.5) Sasser & Netsky. 2004. Sasser spread through infected computers by scanning random IP addresses and instructing them to download the virus. Netsky was the more familiar email-based worm. Netsky was actually the more viral virus, and caused a huge amount of problems in 2004.6) Anna Kournikova. 2001. Not sure why this one is on the list. The description says it didn’t cause much damage, was created as a joke the author turned himself over to the police. Jan De Wit, a 20-year-old Dutch man, wrote the virus as ‘a joke’. The subject was “Here you have, ;0)” with an attached file called AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs. Anna was pretty harmless and didn’t do much actual damage, though.7) Slammer. 2003. Slammer is the kind of virus that makes it into films, as only a few minutes after infecting its first victim, it was doubling itself every few seconds. 15 minutes in and Slammer had infected half of the servers that essentially ran the internet.The Bank of America’s ATM service crashed, 911 services went down, and flights had to be cancelled because of online errors. Slammer, quite aptly, caused a huge panic as it had effectively managed to crash the internet in 15 quick minutes.As described in a wired magazine article: An inside view of the worm that crashed the Internet in 15 minutes. “Gah!” Owen Maresh almost choked when the Priority 1 alert popped up on his panel of screens just after midnight on Saturday, January 25. Sitting inside Akamai’s Network Operations Control Center, the command room for 15,000 high-speed servers stationed around the globe, he had a God’s-eye view of the Internet, monitoring its health in real time. His job was to watch for trouble spots and keep Akamai’s servers – and the sites of its clients like Ticketmaster and MSNBC – open for business. This was big trouble.The tiny worm hit its first victim at 12:30 am Eastern standard time. The machine – a server running Microsoft SQL – instantly started spewing millions of Slammer clones, targeting computers at random. By 12:33 am, the number of slave servers in Slammer’s replicant army was doubling every 8.5 seconds.8) Stuxnet, described above by Cohen in the New Digital Age.

⭐If you have any of the scores of books written about the impact of the internet on society and politics, you can discard them now. This is the book you should pay attention to, read and study, and watch to see if the predictions come true. Not because the authors are any better suited to discuss this issue than the others. Far from it. Other authors are equally able and qualified to make their comments and observations. No, it is because the authors of this book are officers of Goggle. This fact alone should confer an air of authority of their comments and observations. In their corporate capacities Schmidt and Cohen literally own, manage, and direct the means of production. The “production” in this case is the content which is allowed to be broadcast over the internet. They are uniquely in the best position to make the predictions stated in their book happen. Viewed from this aspect, it is difficult to distinguish whether they are making neutral predictions of what the new digital age will look like, or they are telling their readers, via the contents of this book, what they plan to do. Overall, however, this book is a “keeper.”So why the three stars? Because these observations are tainted by the authors’ own biases, some overt and benign but others hidden and pernicious.The observations Schmidt and Cohen offer in this book oscillating between sober narratives of contemporaneous State restrictions on internet freedom, rosy assessments of the future digital world, and chilling, disingenuous portrait of a digital dystopia.Some of their “predictions” are with us now, for example, driverless cars are on the road now. Some of their observations about the contemporary world are downright brilliant. The observation which stands out is the dichotomy of the real, physical world and the digital, virtual world. This takes many forms. For example, on an individual level we can put out our virtual self on Facebook or MySpace, which often does or does not coincide with the individual personality. On a global level this dichotomy operates the same way. Schmidt and Cohen take the example of US – China relations. The image for public consumption is two countries which more or less cooperate and have similar economic interests. In the virtual world these two countries, as virtually every other country in this world, are engaged in a virulent, vicious state of cyber warfare.The rosy assessments abound. The first chapter deals with the authors’ predictions of the future. A few are outlandish, sounding like a trailer for the Jetsons, such as the authors’ prediction that within twenty years everyone in this world will be wired with mobile communications, from the Tribesman in Africa to the Lapplander in Finland. Is this a prediction or wishful thinking?It is hard to tell, but if it does happen, Schmidt and Cohen are in the best position to make it happen, or, to be more accurate, have the business, economic motivation to make it happen.At the same time, the authors are also senior fellows to conservative think tanks such as the New America Foundation, the Center of Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Council of Foreign Relations. While for the most part the authors’ observations and predictions appear neutral and attempt at being objective, whatever they say in this book is peppered with the same conservative bias possessed by these groups. This is best seen in their discussions about Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Schmidt and Cohen are positively antagonistic to what they call “free-information activists” or net neutrality. The authors question the authority and the judgment of Wikileaks, and indeed of all Whistle blowing sites, in disclosing documents which are kept secret by the government and not intended for general release. Specifically they question their determination on what should and should not be redacted and to what effect the release of documentation will have to political relations between nations. This is hardly a new or innovative argument; it is as old as the Alien and Sedition Act and the debate which ensued after the release of the Pentagon Papers. Those in control of the means of production such as Schmidt and Cohen will always have an interest in monopolizing the content of the internet and controlling the debate and flow of information.Their conservative bias is also displayed in their discussions about privacy. They quite rightly state in several portions of their book that there will be a constant struggle between the forces protecting net privacy and governmental forces which will attempt to infringe and control that privacy. But while paying lip service in support of privacy rights, they observe that in times of war or crisis the repressive forces of governmental control will “always prevail.”Disingenuous statements such as these are rare in this book, but disturbing nonetheless. Are these the people we are putting our futures in? The book is essential reading if only because it gives a rare look into the minds and thoughts of the corporate powers-that-be, what they think of the world, and what they think of us mere mortals.

⭐Written through the eyes of two people who have become obscenely wealthy exploiting the power of the internet. It talks about how the internet has spread power to the people – and obviously it has brought information, products and entertainment to our doorstep. However, it fails to mention the wealth inequality, stalling of social mobility and winner take all monopolies like Google, Amazon, Uber etc who exploit workers – the internet has enabled this and the tech elites now have unbelievable power and are eroding democracy – think Facebook’s data being used to win elections. Furthermore, as an example of self interest, the book pushes hard on the national security threats the internet brings and lo and behold the billionaire author and his sidekick has just invested heavily in internet defence and been pushing for a position in Bidens transition government – talk about an abuse of power and conflict of interest. This is the true issue of the digital age; the ability of a very few people to get obscenely wealthy beyond anything we have seen in recent history and start to exert control on the media and government. Bezos owns the Washington Post. But of course, all of this is sidestepped in this book which typically plays down the future role of government in favour of power to the people whilst playing down big tech power. Rather than diminish it, we should be building up the Governments role to regulate the dark side of this technology and put in place a level playing field for tax and internet platform monopolies. Btw, Eric Schmidt is the same who appeared in front of the UK parliament and said Google creates jobs and pays taxes through the employees deductions. This is the mentality of the man. He fails to recognise there is only so much advertising money to go around and therefore Google destroys jobs in the older ad industries. The final insult is to suggest the power of entrepreneurship the internet creates. But like Walmart moving into a town and shutting the local stores, tech goliaths who control the internet now hoover up successful startups and threats like a Dydon on steroids. That is the dystopian presdnt and future this book fails to get to grips with.

⭐Written by two people who seem to consider only the impact of computers on the world, this is interesting but it needs a does of reality. How will the world provide the resources to build mobile phones for everyone, to service them, provide electricity everywhere – and deal with issues like food, water, and climate change. Somewhat blinkered to say the least

⭐very good coverage

⭐Informative, well written, endorsements by influential people even though I don’t like to be influenced by reviews.I liked this book, schmidt and Cohen have written a book covering a wide range of topics. Read it and educate yourself.

⭐This book is so so so brilliant – Only God knows why I hadn’t read it earlier. Have even ordered copies for friends! An excellent book.

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