Get the latest tech news

Computer Security Is a Political Struggle


The Cyber Show podcast. Three real hackers, diverse in their world views and politics unite in a passionate, deeply critical quest to understand our technological society.

However, it is not the bordered cyber-war between nation states involving armies of hackers, but more akin to a quiet civil conflict between ordinary people - who use and depend on technology - and the… well to quote Bill Hicks "demons that run amok amongst us". In number theory there's an idea for that, it's called Cantor's Diagonal or otherwise Russell's paradox if you prefer to think of sets, but either way the insight is that "there's always one more…", one more bug, one more escape sequence, and so on, which entreats us to abandon the folly of totalitarianism and chasing "perfect systems". Soviet style conditions of hostile, intrusive and abusive corporate plutocracy… the various ideologies of consumer communism, surveillance capitalism, advertising madmen, blood-thirsty tech visionaries with shark-lasers… meanwhile most of our stuff, like the trains and planes and banks just don't work the way we want.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of computer security

computer security

Photo of political struggle

political struggle

Related news:

News photo

The six dumbest ideas in computer security (2005)