09:05, Thursday 28 Jul., 2005 Link

Cisco, ISS file suit against rogue researcher [background at boing boing], the researcher who resigned in order to talk about this unfixed exploit that means you take over Cisco routers and run arbitrary code on them: When you attack a host machine, you gain control of that machine--when you control a router, you gain control of the network.

This line: What politicians are talking about when they talk about the Digital Pearl Harbor is a network worm.

A network worm! A worm spreading in the interstitial spaces of the internet, the transparent stuff between us we never think about. This is what the idea of mustard gas must have been like, the first time. Or - earlier - why people didn't really think of atmospheric pollution before it happened. There's just stuff right?, computers and objects and dirt and physical stuff, and there's distance that keeps them all apart. But when the distance becomes stuff, becomes actives, becomes opaque, when the liminal spaces become spaces, and it all leaks together. Before air warfare, who looked up? You could fight on a map. Before network worms, well, here we are. And after?