InformationWeek's article "Schwartz on Security: China's Internet Hijacking Demands Response" sounds like a call to arms. It's not. Schwartz points out that there's no proof the so-called "hijacking" incident, in which a change to Internet traffic routing resulted in a temporary (and erroneous) redirection of traffic through Chinese servers, was an intentional act by China. It could just as easily have been a blunder of the kind that has been committed many times before by systems and network administrators all over the world.
Or it could have been a deliberate diversion of traffic. We may never know.
That's one big problem with throwing around the term "warfare" in connection with the Internet: human error can look just like hostile activity. Like I said before, it would be a better use of our time and energy to fix what we know is broken (or rather, fragile) first -- in this case, the very routing and name resolution infrastructures that underlie the Internet.
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